Creative Destruction in Small Business Bankruptcy

Two distantly related items caught my eye this morning, as both reinforce the need for "creative destruction" as a response to all-too-common small business failure.

The first was a NYT piece on the travails of a female entrepreneur in China. It tells a heart-wrenching story of a system in which the state brutally represses honest but unfortunate debtors, including via the infamous blacklist that prevents defaulters from using air and train travel (effectively curtailing re-entry into business, even if financial and economic factors might otherwise allow this). This is a story about what it looks like when there is no bankruptcy backstop, no reset button to start fresh and undertake a new venture with the hard lessons of failure firmly in mind.

The other item explores the transition from such an unforgiving system--in Spain--after the introduction of a discharge for (most) small business debt. The linked Bank of Spain working paper offers further evidence of the salutary effects of small business bankruptcy that discharges individual entrepreneurs and encourages them to restart. The reform fostered the "creative destruction" of these entrepreneurs' ventures, with the failed firms exiting the market (rather than lingering as productivity-depressing zombies), which "leads to technological change and higher productivity growth" as "the introduction of the fresh start policy promoted firm creation among Spanish micro-firms, especially in companies with a high share of intangible assets, which are likely to be involved in innovation activities, and in sectors with high productivity." Nicely linking the two contrasting accounts from China and Spain, the Bank of Spain paper concludes, "This finding also suggests that a starkly pro-creditor personal bankruptcy law with no real fresh start, like the Spanish one before 2015, may be an important barrier to entry for small businesses." Indeed.

It still surprises me that lawmakers around the world continue to resist this long-established truth for small business, powerfully undermining the most important driver of economic development worldwide. Worse yet, the mere introduction of a personal bankruptcy law with a debt discharge is not enough--the system actors have to actually support a fresh-start policy rather than actively undermining it, which turns out to have been the disappointing result of the first two years of such a system in Shenzhen, China. One hopes that national legislatures, like small entrepreneurs, can learn from failure and move forward with proper personal bankruptcy laws when given a fresh opportunity to do so.

Nondebtor Releases and the Future of Mass Torts

Certain members of the bankruptcy academy and bar seem to have their knickers in a twist over the Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari to review the nonconsensual nondebtor releases in Purdue. Conventional wisdom is that SCOTUS is going to find that there's no statutory authority whatsoever for nonconsensual nondebtor releases outside of the asbestos context (expressio unius and Congress doesn't hide elephants in mouseholes....).

Let's be clear: nonconsensual nondebtor releases are not necessary to resolve mass tort cases.

Unhappy Campers and Their Credit Cards

This story about the failure of a company that ships duffel bags to/from sleep-away camps has an interesting payment systems meets bankruptcy angle that got me particularly excited given that I'm teaching payment systems this fall:

Parents are disputing the Camp Trucking fees with their credit card companies, but so far there haven’t been any resolutions. “We told them they’ll probably become creditors in a liquidation and get 20 cents on the dollar in five years,” said Mr. Aboudara [a camp network director].

Credit cards offer better purchase protection than any other payment medium, but it's not absolute, and this situation seems to fall into one of TILA's crevasses. 

Treasury in the Red... with Yellow

Freight company Yellow is on the verge of bankruptcy. It's not a company whose financial distress would normally stand out but for the fact that it received $700M in national security loans from the US Treasury in 2020, and, oh man, are taxpayers going to take it on the chin. 

The Treasury financing was one of a eleven of national security loans made as part of the CARES Act, and it accounted for 95% of the total dollar amount of those loans.  These weren't PPP loans, but were supposed to play a sort of analogous role, ensuring that companies critical to national security would be able to keep operating. There are really two loans from Treasury to Yellow:  a Tranche A loans and a Trache B loan. 

The Tranche A loan is for $300M and is secured by a junior lien on Yellow's accounts receivable, cash, and various other squishy stuff. Tranche B is for $400M and is secured by the vehicle fleet it financed—something like 1,100 tractors, 1,600 trailers, and 140 containers.  Both loans are cross-collateralized with each other, meaning that the collateral for Tranche A supports Tranche B and vice-versa. The Tranche A and Tranche B loans sit behind approximately $1B of pre-existing debt in the form of (1) a revolver that's secured by the accounts receivable and cash and (2) a term loan (Apollo) secured by Yellow's terminals and rolling stock (other than those financed by Tranche B). Treasury also took an approximately 30% equity stake in Yellow.

There's no way to sugar coat this:  Treasury's screwed on the Yellow loans.