Bankruptcy, Bailout, or Bust: Early Corporate Responses to the Business and Financial Challenges of COVID-19
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance | 0

By Diane Lourdes Dick (Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law)

Diane Lourdes Dick

Over the last year, publicly traded companies have provided thoughtful commentary in their public company disclosures regarding the financial decisions they have made in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Meanwhile, public and private companies have filed for bankruptcy protection, providing detailed narrative accounts of the events leading up to the filing and the various steps they have taken to stem losses and maintain the company as a going concern.

In a recent article, I use public disclosures and declarations of this sort to take a closer look at the firm-level decision-making process in response to the sudden liquidity crisis caused by the pandemic. Specifically, I analyze the recapitalization and restructuring decisions made by twelve large and mid-sized companies in the cruise, airline, health care, and consumer sectors in the spring and summer of 2020. Although the case studies are mere snapshots in time, they help to shed further light on the key factors that have influenced firm-level bankruptcy, bailout, and other recapitalization decisions.

The case studies reveal that, outside of bankruptcy, corporate managers of the profiled companies have followed a remarkably similar decision pathway. First, firms slashed costs and reduced employee headcount. Of course, many of these cuts are the natural consequence of voluntarily or involuntarily scaling back operations; in other cases, firms likely chose to make reductions of this sort because there are typically few if any legal impediments to doing so. But whether voluntary or involuntary, the choice to scale back operations generally means allocating economic burdens to employees, vendors, suppliers, and, in the case of firms that provide an essential service, the broader communities they serve.

A firm’s subsequent choices appear to be constrained by its overall financial condition and its new or existing legal commitments. For instance, companies with substantial open lines of credit were able to draw down available funds to shore up cash. Meanwhile, those with stronger balance sheets were able to obtain new debt and equity financing from the capital markets. Virtually all of the profiled companies that were eligible to receive governmental bailouts accepted the assistance—in both grant and loan form—with little apparent concern for the conditions and restrictions attached to such funds. Participation in bailout programs, in turn, constrained the firm’s choices regarding how to allocate economic burdens. For instance, the restrictions and limitations in the CARES Act were designed to delay or prevent companies from allocating economic burdens to employees and, in the case of airlines and health care facilities providing essential services, their broader communities.

The case studies suggest that to the extent these other liquidity options are available, corporate managers may view bankruptcy primarily as a legal or strategic tool rather than as a true financial restructuring option. Perhaps because of certain underlying assumptions about bankruptcy, no company seems to have weighed participation in a governmental bailout—with or without strings attached—against the option of filing for bankruptcy. Rather, these alternatives—like all of the major decisions firms make in response to a sudden liquidity crisis—appear to have been independently examined at very different points in the lifecycle of the distressed firm.

The full article is available here.

Too Big and Unable to Fail
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

By Stephen J. Lubben (Seton Hall University School of Law) and Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. (George Washington University Law School)

Financial regulation after the Dodd-Frank Act has produced a host of new regulatory tools for resolving failures of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). The explicit goal of this new “resolution” regime is to enable SIFIs to go bankrupt without a government bailout, just like other businesses. In our paper, forthcoming in the Florida Law Review, however, we express significant doubts about the new regime’s ability to work as advertised.

The “single point of entry” (SPOE) strategy, which focuses all resolution efforts on a SIFI’s parent holding company, addresses a very stylized, even hypothetical sort of failure. We believe that it is unlikely to work during a global crisis that involves multiple failing SIFIs operating thousands of subsidiaries across dozens of national boundaries.

The Federal Reserve’s “total loss absorbing capacity” (TLAC) proposal is closely tied to SPOE. It would require SIFI holding companies to issue large amounts of debt securities that can be “bailed in” (converted into equity) in a resolution proceeding to make the holding company solvent again. In our view, TLAC debt will also create a new, more opaque way to impose the costs of SIFIs’ financial distress on ordinary citizens, because retail investors in brokerage accounts, mutual funds, and pension funds are likely to be the largest TLAC debtholders.

We propose several strategies for forcing SIFIs and their Wall Street creditors to internalize at least some of the costs of the enormous risks they create. Among other things, mutual funds and pension funds that invest in TLAC debt should disclose the bail-in risks to investors and should include in their offering materials “black box” warnings similar to those already used in selling junk bonds to investors. In addition, each SIFI should describe its resolution plan on a web page that also contains a straightforward discussion of the risks TLAC debtholders are taking on—risks that creditors and counterparties of operating subsidiaries are unwilling to assume. Only with such disclosures can the hazards of TLAC debt be appropriately priced by the market.

The full paper can be found here.

 

Establishing “Credible Losers” at Systemically Important Bank Holding Companies
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

By John Crawford, UC Hastings College of Law

Systemically important bank holding companies (“SIBs”) have always had an abundance of creditors that can legally absorb losses in the event of failure. The SIB bailouts of 2008, however, were driven by regulators’ unwillingness to allow losses to fall on these creditors. The Fed has recently proposed a rule requiring SIBs to issue large quantities of “loss-absorbing” long-term debt (“LTD”) out of their parent holding companies. If, however, regulators were averse to haircuts for SIB creditors before, how will creating a new class of debt help? I attempt to answer this question here. First, regulators fear the consequences of loss or delay for SIBs’ short-term creditors. These consequences include, inter alia, the risk of “contagion by simile,” as short-term creditors of other SIBs “run” to avoid a similar fate. This risk does not extend to long-term debt per se. The challenge of imposing losses on long-term debt while protecting short-term debt goes beyond mere repayment priority, however, as involuntary haircuts typically require a bankruptcy or resolution process that creates the risk of uncertainty or delay for all claims—potentially triggering the very contagion dynamics regulators wish to avoid. I nevertheless argue that the combination of a “single point of entry” resolution strategy for SIBs and a set of proposed “clean holding company” requirements plausibly solves the problem for LTD, so that it can absorb losses without creating these risks. In short, LTD may be the “credible loser” that SIBs previously lacked.

 

The full article may be found here.