In this illuminating work, Ronald J. Mann offers readers a comprehensive study of bankruptcy cases in the Supreme Court of the United States. He provides detailed case studies based on the Justices' private papers on the most closely divided cases, statistical analysis of variation among the Justices in their votes for and against effective bankruptcy relief, and new information about the appearance in opinions of citations taken from party and amici briefs. By focusing on cases that have neither a clear answer under the statute nor important policy constraints, the book unveils the decision-making process of the Justices themselves - what they do when they are left to their own devices. It should be read by anyone interested not only in the jurisprudence of bankruptcy, but also in the inner workings of the Supreme Court.

The recent crises underscore the need for modern, sophisticated systems to govern the resolution of business distress, in order to maximize value in the distressed estate and to protect economic institutions. This work analyses how legal systems around the world respond to the general default of business debtors. Inspired by the approach enshrined in the World Bank's Principles for Effective Insolvency and Creditor Rights Systems, it emphasizes the close inter-relationship among various elements of an insolvency regime, examining them not so much as sets of discrete rules as system-wide attempts to reconcile competing policy goals. It posits that any insolvency law pursues the goals of transparency, predictability, and efficiency, while at the same time seeking to address issues of fairness and social justice. Within this framework, the authors examine the principal international approaches to pre-distress debt collection and security enforcement; liquidation and reorganization of distressed businesses; out-of-court workouts; the institutions entrusted with the conduct of such proceedings, including courts, official administrators, and private trustees; the position of the employees of distressed businesses; and cross-border insolvency. Without being prescriptive, the authors set out the costs and benefits of settling the myriad policy questions in these domains one way or another. This book would be of interest to legal and international policy-makers, academics and advanced students, courts and practitioners dealing with domestic and cross-border insolvency, and anyone seeking to understand or reform insolvency systems.

Reprint. Originally published in New York: F.A. Stokes, c1914. xv, 223 p. The book was based on the revelations of the House of Representatives' Pujo Committee about the predatory practices of J. P. Morgan and other big bankers. "Other People's Money" influenced both Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom agenda and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It also offers valuable lessons for today.

The book deals with the problems generated by those cases of insolvency (either of an individual or of a company) where the presence of contacts with more than one system of law brings into operation the principles and methods of private international law (also known as conflict of laws). Part I of the book is mainly devoted to an examination of the body of rules and practice that has evolved in England during the course of the past two-and-a-half centuries, and surveys the current state of the law derived from a blend of statutory and case authorities. Contrasting approaches under a selection of foreign systems - principally Australia, Canada, France and the USA - are examined by way of comparison. There are up to date accounts of the circumstances under which insolvency proceedings can be opened in respect of debtors which are not primarily based in England, and of the grounds on which English courts will recognise foreign insolvency proceedings and give assistance to the foreign representative of the debtor's estate.;Part II of the book explores the progress towards the creation of international arrangements to co-ordinate and rationalise the conduct of insolvency proceedings which have cross-border features, particularly where the debtor is capable of being subjected to concurrent proceedings in two or more jurisdictions. Central to the developments described in detail in this Part are the EC Regulation on Insolvency Proceedings, in force throughout the UK since May 2002, and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency, which is due for enactment in the UK.

""They're still trying to hide the weenie," thought Sherron Watkins as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company's creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. "Don't assume that there is a smoking gun."
Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode...
Power Failure" is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be "The World's Leading Company," and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America.
Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, "Power Failure" shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company's meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay's and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron's money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush's election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron's praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company's leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron's fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums.
Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider's perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron's "outside face," who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron's high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron's mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron's international division, who was Skilling's sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron's deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron's finance department into a "profit center," creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron's "profits," while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets
An unprecedented chronicle of Enron's shocking collapse, "Power Failure" should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades - "Barbarians at the Gate" and "Liar's Poker" - as one of the cautionary tales of our times.

"From the Hardcover edition."

In recent years, a number of company bankruptcies in Europe - particularly in the Netherlands - have exposed serious gaps in the securing by law of reparations due to employees. As matters stand, employees - who were dependent upon the bankruptcy not only for their income but also for their employment and social security - have little to expect in terms of payment of arrears of pay, protection against dismissal, continued employment in the event of a business transfer, or participation rights. This work opens this far-reaching and hugely important issue by comparing employee rights in bankruptcy among four major European trading partners - the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Germany. It is to be hoped that, armed with the substantive and procedural details that are fully laid out in these pages, company lawyers and bankruptcy lawyers throughout Europe will be enabled to bring the rights of employees in bankruptcy into a light at least as clear as that focused on other creditors. The contributors examine not only the individual fairness issue - the unequal position of the employee as weaker party in the labour market - but also the central policy issue: does an improvement of the position of employees in a bankruptcy give rise to less willingness on the part of lenders to keep the flow of money open, or greater control by lenders over the way in which borrowers run their businesses with, as a result, slower economic growth and hence a lower level of employment? The study was commissioned by the Stichting Ondersteuningsfonds Oud-Werknemers DAF (Benevolent Fund Foundation for Former DAF Employees) in Eindhoven and carried out by researchers of the Faculty of Law of theKatholieke Universitcit Brabant in Tilburg. Its provisional findings, presented at the conference on "Employee Rights in Bankruptcy" held in Tilburg on 8 December 1999, were considered and discussed from a variety of viewpoints by representatives of such relevant parties as trade unions and employers' organizations, receivers in bankruptcy, banks, public authorities, politicians and legal experts. The end result is this report, which is sure to contribute to a better understanding of the difficult issue of employee rights in bankruptcy and to stimulate discussion of remedies that are indispensable to the maintenance of a responsible society.

A careful analysis of the fundamentals of bankruptcy law.

In today's vulnerable and volatile business climate, corporate bankruptcy and Chapter 11 reorganization is a common occurrence at U.S. corporations of all sizes, in all sectors. As a result, the market for distressed firms' debt and equity securities continues to capture the interest and imagination of the investment community. "Bankruptcy & Distressed Restructurings: Analytical Issues and Investment Opportunities" compiles the insights of more than 30 experts from both the practitioner and academic communities on a multitude of subjects including bankruptcy and liquidation costs, the determinants of successful Chapter 11 proceedings, competitor behavior related to distress, and investment opportunities in distressed and defaulted securities--must reading for anyone involved in corporate finance, financial markets, economics, or law.

An exploration of the strange world of bankruptcy -- the types of individuals and companies that become bankrupts, and the people who make their living from them, including auctioneers, lawyers, accountants, and collection men. This book takes you behind the scenes to where the deals are made, showing the gimmicks used and the fees collected. Find out the danger signals that give advance notice of a bankruptcy in the making, and learn how to cut through public relations semantics to determine whether a company really is in distress.

Americans now depend more heavily upon credit than any other society on Earth, or any other time in history. Borrowing has become a way of life for millions of families, and it is hard to imagine a time when charge accounts did not exist. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that, because a wallet filled with plastic instead of cash is a relatively new phenomenon, Americans have not been borrowers and lenders since the colonization of the New World. Author Peter J. Coleman proves otherwise. In one Form or another -- notes of hand, book credit, commercial paper, mortgages, land contracts -- settlers borrowed to pay their passage from Europe, to buy and clear land, to build and operate mills, to purchase slaves, and to gamble and drink. Debtors' prison awaited those who could not pay their debts, and a pauper's grave received the unfortunate who lacked the private means to feed and clothe himself in prison. While the debtors' prisons described in this book no longer exist, the author maintains that our credit-oriented society has yet to devise cheap, efficient, equitable, and humane methods of enforcing contracts for debt.

The inside account of how Frank Lorenzo took over a sputtering Airlines and flew it into the ground. With access to the major players -- the guarded Lorenzo and his inner circle, former Eastern Airlines president Frank Borman, Peter Ueberroth, and union boss Charlie Bryan -- author Aaron Bernstein explains how Lorenzo brought a corporate raider's mentality to running a business, and how its failure marked a watershed in the 1980s "Age of Greed".

As a comprehensive empirical study on the bankruptcy re-organisations of listed companies in China, this book examines the re-organisation of fifty-three listed companies entering bankruptcy between 2007 and 2018. It features raw data from thousands of public announcements of listed companies, helping to present a precise panorama of bankruptcy law in China. The author discusses the nature, extent and appropriateness of government intervention in bankruptcies of listed companies. It also examines the effects of bankruptcy institutions established by the bankruptcy laws to constrain government intervention. The findings suggest that such laws have been inadequate to prevent government intervention. In fact, the biggest obstacle to the smooth implementation of China's reorganisation system is government intervention, one distinct characteristic of the socialist market economy. The book will have broader relevance in terms of informing the debate concerning the government's continuing intervention in economic activity in China.