[Crypto-Bankruptcy Series] Crypto Volatility and The Pine Gate Problem
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Reform, Chapter 11, Collateral Stripping, Crypto-Bankruptcy Series, Cryptocurrency, Valuation | 0

By Anthony Casey (University of Chicago), Brook Gotberg (Brigham Young University), and Joshua Macey (University of Chicago)

Anthony Casey
Brook Gotberg
Joshua Macey

Note: This post is the ninth post in a series of posts on bankruptcies of cryptocurrency companies and the emerging issues they pose. Previous posts in the series include:

1. The FTX Bankruptcy: First Week Motions, Jurisdictional Squabbling, and Other Unusual Developments, by Megan McDermott

2. Quantifying Cryptocurrency Claims in Bankruptcy: Does the Dollar Still Reign Supreme?, by Ingrid Bagby, Michele Maman, Anthony Greene, and Marc Veilleux

3. The Public and the Private of the FTX Bankruptcy, by Diane Lourdes Dick and Christopher K. Odinet

4. Staking, Yield Farming, Liquidity Mining, Crypto Lending – What are the Customer’s Risks?, by Matthias Lehmann et al. (University of Vienna)

5. The Treatment of Cryptocurrency Assets in Bankruptcy, by Steven O. Weise, Wai L. Choy, and Vincent Indelicato

6. FTX Bankruptcy – A Failure of Centralized Governance in the Name of Decentralized Cryptocurrencies, by Vivian Fang

7. Roundup: Celsius Network LLC, by Jessica Graham

8. The Implications of CeFi and DeFi in Bankruptcy: A Hot Take on Celsius, by Kelvin FK Low and Timothy Chan

This series is being managed by the Bankruptcy Roundtable and Xiao Ma, SJD at Harvard Law School, xma [at] sjd [dot] law [dot] harvard [dot] edu.

Check the HLS Bankruptcy Roundtable periodically for additional contributing posts by academics and practitioners from institutions across the country.

***

When a crypto exchange such as FTX files for bankruptcy, crypto assets will often be treated as property of the estate and not as property of the individual or business that deposited coins with the exchange. Scholars have focused on the financial stability and consumer protection issues that arise as a result of this treatment.

In our opinion, there is an additional reason to treat crypto depositors as owners, not as creditors, of crypto assets, and to exempt holders of crypto assets from ordinary bankruptcy procedures such as the automatic stay. With some exceptions such as stablecoins, crypto assets are highly volatile. Claims against a crypto exchange, including claims submitted by customers who traded crypto assets on the exchange, are valued at the filing date. The failure of a crypto exchange is likely to occur when the crypto asset’s value has declined significantly. The fact that claims are valued at the filing date could lead to strategic bankruptcy petitions that redistribute value away from junior claimants. And even if crypto exchanges do not file with this purpose in mind, bankruptcy, by creating an artificial moment of reckoning, is likely to redistribute value from customers of a crypto exchange to the exchange’s other creditors or managers.

This is an extreme version of a familiar problem, which is that bankruptcy, by forcing a moment of reckoning, causes claimants who have invested in volatile assets to lose the option value of those investments. Imagine a company that has an asset that could appreciate significantly in the future but currently holds little value. If the firm files for bankruptcy, creditor claims are based on the value of the asset at the time the firm files for bankruptcy. If there is reason to think that the asset’s value will increase in the future, a bankruptcy filing allows the debtor to pay the relatively little and then benefit when the asset’s value goes up. That, in our opinion, offers another reason to think that customers of crypto exchanges should not be treated as unsecured creditors.

Click here to read the full article.

[Texas Two-Step and the Future of Mass Tort Bankruptcy Series] A Qualified Defense of Divisional Mergers
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Reform, Chapter 11, Corporate Governance, Mass Torts, Texas Two-Step and the Future of Mass Tort Bankruptcy Series | 0

By Anthony Casey and Joshua Macey (University of Chicago Law School)

Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on the Texas Two Step, the bankruptcy of LTL Management, and the future of mass tort bankruptcies.  Check the HLS Bankruptcy Roundtable throughout the summer for additional contributing posts by academics from institutions across the country.

Earlier posts in this series can be found here (by Jin Lee and Amelia Ricketts), here (by Jonathan C. Lipson), and here (by Jared A. Ellias).

***

Anthony Casey
Joshua Macey

One of the most important contexts in which Chapter 11 proceedings can facilitate the preservation of value is the resolution of financial distress related to mass tort claims. Over the last forty years, Chapter 11 has been invoked to facilitate settlement in dozens of large mass tort cases. Without Chapter 11, these value-preserving settlements would have never been possible.

Mass tort cases involve complex claims of multiple—often tens of thousands of—claimants looking to recover value from a business enterprise. The core provisions of Chapter 11, which are designed to coordinate behavior among claimants, address precisely these types of multilateral-claims situations. These provisions allow the quick, efficient, and fair resolution of claims and preserve value for the claimants and the other stakeholders of the business.

Providing a mechanism for the resolution of these mass tort cases is a quintessential function of bankruptcy law. Without bankruptcy resolution, the uncertainty of future liability in mass tort cases can prevent a debtor from productively carrying on its business and undertaking projects or asset sales that could create value and facilitate a cooperative resolution.

How do divisional mergers fit with this purpose? A divisional merger is a state-law transaction where a business entity divides itself into two new entities. It is attractive in some cases because it is simple and requires fewer steps than other methods for creating entity partitions. But the substantive outcome is no different. Any laws penalizing and prohibiting divisional mergers would therefore have little substantive effect. Rather they would simply channel transactions from one form of entity partitioning to another.

The important question, therefore, is whether a divisional merger—or any other form of entity creation—is being used to facilitate a socially valuable outcome consistent with the purpose of Chapter 11. When used appropriately, a divisional merger preceding a bankruptcy filing can facilitate a socially valuable resolution of mass tort claims, isolating (but not limiting) the mass tort liability for resolution independent of the other operations of the business.

To see why this is true, consider a large otherwise solvent business enterprise facing tens of thousands of potential tort lawsuits. One option would be for the entire enterprise to enter bankruptcy. But there are major costs to an enterprise-wide proceeding. The tools of Chapter 11 are blunt. The automatic stay applies across all creditors even those unrelated to the mass torts. Similarly, the filing triggers all sorts of enterprise-wide rules and restrictions. All creditors—including those with no connection to the mass tort litigation—must file their claims and can demand to be involved in the proceedings and in plan confirmation. The enterprise-wide filing brings extra parties and extra claims into the process and creates opportunities for those parties to take strategic litigation positions that can delay or prevent resolution.

The divisional merger structure reduces these enterprise-related complications. In the right situation, this structure can simplify the process and focus the proceedings on the specific mass tort resolution that is necessary for the preservation of value.

The proper way to address divisional mergers, in our view, is not to prohibit them altogether, but rather to make sure that they do not leave tort victims worse off. The transaction should therefore provide a source of adequate funding to resolve the tort liabilities. Consistent with this principle, recent cases that have utilized the divisional merger structure prior to a Chapter 11 petition have provided funding agreements that ensure that claimants have access to the same or more value in pursuing their claims against the business.

The bankruptcy proceedings that follow the merger should also provide meaningful disclosure and discovery about the merger, the funding agreement, and the underlying tort claims to allow a fair valuation of liability and a reasonable estimate of the number of claimants. Fortunately, bankruptcy judges are willing and able to provide these procedural safeguards.

The alternative of prohibiting divisional mergers will likely leave claimants worse off. Drawn out proceedings transfer value from tort claimants to bankruptcy professionals. It might also lead to unfair outcomes where some tort claimants receive large recoveries and others receive nothing at all. In turn, potential claimants will race to the courthouse chasing early judgments that leave the firm without funds to pay later claimants.

The purpose of Chapter 11 is not to reduce liability, but rather to reduce complexity and cost. And a well-designed divisional merger promotes that purpose while providing a fair and efficient system for resolving group claims.

 

Bankruptcy Shopping: Domestic Venue Races and Global Forum Wars
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, International and Comparative, Legislation | 0

By Anthony J. Casey (Professor, The University of Chicago Law School) and Joshua Macey (Assistant Professor, The University of Chicago Law School)

Anthony J. Casey
Joshua Macey

The United States Bankruptcy Code gives debtors wide discretion to reorganize in the venue of their choice. These lenient venue selection rules long have allowed bankruptcy courts in the District of Delaware and the Southern District of New York to dominate the market for large Chapter 11 cases, though recently the Southern District of Texas has also begun to attract a large number of cases.

This state of affairs has produced a vigorous debate. Critics of liberal venue rules charge that bankruptcy districts are engaged in a “race to the bottom” as judges compete for blockbuster cases. Others counter that competition for cases improves efficiency and predictability as judges develop expertise in overseeing large Chapter 11 cases.

This Article cautions that developments in foreign jurisdictions may limit the effectiveness of these venue reform proposals. In recent years, foreign jurisdictions have emerged as convenient forums for distressed debtors. For instance, in many cases, the English scheme of arrangement now represents a viable alternative to the American bankruptcy system, and over the past decade, a number of companies have chosen to use an English scheme of arrangement to restructure their debt instead of chapter 11, with the first United States-headquartered business doing so in 2019. Other jurisdictions have also sought to entice foreign debtors, with insolvency specialists speculating that Singapore, in particular, could become a restructuring hub.

Because American bankruptcy courts freely recognize foreign insolvency proceedings, firms that are directed to file in less favored districts may instead choose to reorganize in a foreign jurisdiction. In this environment, attempts to limit venue selection within the United States will have the opposite of their intended effect, replacing domestic venue shopping with even worse global forum shopping. By ignoring the availability of global forums, current venue reform proposals could, perversely, drive opportunistic debtors and creditors to restructure in foreign jurisdictions.

To address this, we argue that, rather than limit domestic venue choice, lawmakers should: (1) support the development of ex ante commitment to mechanisms for choosing venue and forum; and (2) whenever possible, resolve inconsistencies in substantive law across venues and forums. These are general principles of reform, and the implementation will depend on context. For example, commitment mechanisms look different for venue than they do for forum. But, if designed properly, these measures can reduce the costs of venue and forum shopping without giving up the benefits that come from allowing some choice of venue and forum.

It is worth noting that the merits of our proposal are independent of one’s view on the current state of venue shopping. If venue shopping is a real problem, the principles we introduce address that problem. If venue shopping is not a problem, the principles do no harm and even expand the choice set for debtors. Similarly, while the principles address the problem of global forum shopping, the benefits with regard to venue shopping exist with or without global forums. The same cannot be said of the status quo or the reforms currently being considered.

The article can be found here.

Bankruptcy’s Endowment Effect
by | posted in: Cramdown and Priority | 0

By Anthony J. Casey (University of Chicago Law School)

The notion of endowments and entitlements has a powerful effect on corporate bankruptcy policy. Scholars and lawyers generally assume a creditor endowed with a right outside the bankruptcy system must receive the equivalent of that right when its debtor is within the bankruptcy system. Proponents of this idea often assert that the result is required by the foundational theory of bankruptcy.

In a forthcoming essay, “Bankruptcy’s Endowment Effect,” I demonstrate that this is false. The idea of sacred creditor endowments is an untenable position that misunderstands the fundamental principles of bankruptcy. Corporate bankruptcy is, at its core, a system that alters nonbankruptcy endowments according to a hypothetical bargain that all creditors of a firm would have entered if bargaining were costless. The entire point of that hypothetical bargain is to suspend and alter some nonbankruptcy endowments to maximize the value of the bankruptcy estate and the firm as a whole. Indeed, if every stakeholder retained all of its nonbankruptcy endowments, the Bankruptcy Code would have no provisions at all.

Of course, altering nonbankruptcy endowments can impose costs. Foremost among those costs is the risk of opportunistic behavior that is costly for the estate as a whole. Bankruptcy policy will, therefore, be designed to maximize estate value while minimizing opportunistic bankruptcy behavior. Thus, the guiding principle for optimal bankruptcy design should be not the preservation of nonbankruptcy rights but rather the minimization of opportunistic behavior that reduces the net value of a firm.

With that principle in hand, we can resolve many difficult questions of bankruptcy policy. In the essay, I focus on applying the principle to the debate over what interest rate a senior creditor should get in a chapter 11 cramdown. In particular, I analyze the dispute in In re MPM Silicones, LLC (“Momentive”), where the bankruptcy court mistakenly reached its final decision by importing a creditor-endowment framework from consumer bankruptcy law (where the framework might make more sense). I show that an optimal rule for corporate bankruptcy supports a cramdown interest rate based on the prevailing market rates for similar loans, which reduces the risk of opportunistic behavior by both debtor and creditor.

Beyond Options
by | posted in: Cramdown and Priority | 0

By Anthony J. Casey (University of Chicago Law School) and Edward R. Morrison (Columbia Law School)

Scholars and policymakers now debate reforms that would prevent a bankruptcy filing from being a moment that forces valuation of the firm, crystallization of claims against it, and elimination of junior stakeholders’ interest in future appreciation in firm value. These reforms have many names, ranging from Relative Priority to Redemption Option Value. Much of the debate centers on the extent to which reform would protect the non-bankruptcy options of junior stakeholders or harm the non-bankruptcy options of senior lenders. In a new paper, “Beyond Options,” we argue that this focus on options is misplaced. Protecting options is neither necessary nor sufficient for advancing the goal of a well-functioning bankruptcy system. What is needed is a regime that cashes out the rights of junior stakeholders with minimal judicial involvement. To illustrate, we propose an “automatic bankruptcy procedure” that gives senior creditors an option to restructure the firm’s debt or sell its assets at any time after a contractual default. Under this procedure, restructuring occurs in bankruptcy, but sales do not. Sales are either subject to warrants (which give junior stakeholders a claim on future appreciation) or are subject to judicial appraisal (which forces senior lenders to compensate junior stakeholders if the sale price was too low). Our proposal can be seen as an effort to design a formalized restructuring procedure that borrows from traditional state law governing corporate-control transactions. We show that this procedure minimizes core problems of current law—fire sales that harm junior stakeholders, delay that harms senior lenders, and the uncertainties generated by judicial valuation, which are exploited by all parties.

The full paper is available here.

Bankruptcy on the Side
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction | 0

By Kenneth Ayotte (University of California – Berkeley School of Law), Anthony J. Casey (University of Chicago Law School), David A. Skeel, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania Law School)

 

Side agreements—such as intercreditor and “bad boy” agreements—are increasingly at the center of major bankruptcy disputes. Litigation around these disputes can be costly and the results of that litigation can dramatically alter the landscape within which the stakeholders bargain over reorganization.

These agreements commonly include a promise by one party to remain silent by waiving some procedural right they would otherwise have under the Bankruptcy Code. Those waivers are invoked at crucial points in the reorganization process, including the approval of debtor-in-possession financing and plan confirmation.

In our new paper, Bankruptcy on the Side, we show that while side agreements have beneficial potential, the parties entering them often impose negative externalities on outsiders. A promise not to extend new financing, for example, can affect the debtor’s reorganization prospects. Similarly, a promise not to object to a reorganization plan can rob the court of information that might benefit the other classes of creditors.

The paper presents a simple model to derive a proposal that is consistent with the intent of the parties to the side agreement but also limits negative externalities. The core of the proposal is that where there is a nontrivial potential for value-destroying externalities, the court should limit a nonbreaching party’s remedy to its expectation damages. On the other hand, if the agreement is unlikely to cause externalities, a court should enforce the agreement according to its terms. Our proposal is different and superior to the approach taken by most courts, which invokes a narrow interpretative standard to invalidate side agreements. We focus instead on enforcing the provisions under normal interpretative doctrines while limiting the use of special remedies like specific performance and stipulated damages.

The insights of our paper also provide a new answer to thorny questions involved in choosing which courts should resolve disputes over intercreditor agreements, and in deciding whether forum selection clauses should be enforced. Specifically, the bankruptcy courts have no specialized expertise for cases where the plaintiff seeks expectation damages. In those cases, the court should defer to default venue rules and forum selection clauses. Where specific performance or stipulated damages are at issue, by contrast, our model suggests that the dispute should be resolved exclusively in bankruptcy proceedings.

 

The New Corporate Web: Tailored Entity Partitions and Creditors’ Selective Enforcement
by | posted in: Cramdown and Priority | 0

By Anthony J. Casey, University of Chicago Law School

Casey, Anthony_0 (1)Firms often separate assets into distinct entities that have their own legal identity but are commonly owned and together form a large corporate group. While the law-and-economics literature has viewed these legal partitions as either all or nothing, firms have developed sophisticated legal mechanisms to create precisely tailored partitions. The result is a complex corporate web of interconnected legal affiliates.

For example, an asset that is placed in one legal entity may serve as collateral guaranteeing the debts of another legal entity within the corporate group. The assets of the two entities are separate for some purposes but integrated for others. Conventional theories of corporate groups cannot explain the tailored partitions in this corporate web. This article develops a new theory of selective enforcement to fill that gap.

When a debtor defaults on a loan, that default may signal a failure across the entire firm or it may signal a project-specific failure. Tailored partitions provide monitoring creditors with a valuable option to choose between project-specific and firm-wide enforcement depending on the information signal provided. Thus, firm-wide risks and failures can be addressed globally while the effects of project-specific risks and failures can be locally contained when necessary.

These concepts of selective enforcement and tailored partitions reveal important implications for theory and practice. They provide a cohesive justification for the web of entity partitioning and cross liabilities that characterize much of corporate structure today and inform the analysis of holding-company equity guarantees, fraudulent transfers, and ipso facto clauses.

The full version of this article is available here.

The Article III Problem in Bankruptcy
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction | 0

By Anthony J. Casey and Aziz Z. Huq, University of Chicago Law School

Casey, Anthony_0Huq Aziz 2009-06-18

The Supreme Court has struggled for the last three decades in defining the permissible scope of bankruptcy courts’ power. This question poses difficult federalism and separations-of-powers problems under Article III of the Constitution. Divided opinions in Northern Pipeline Construction v. Marathon Pipe Line, and more recently, in Stern v. Marshall, have produced confusion and litigation for practitioners and lower courts. This is true in large part because the Court’s Article III decisions lack any foundational account of why bankruptcy judges implicate a constitutional problem. As the Court prepares to confront the issue once again later this term, Aziz Huq and I provide such an account in a new article. This account more concretely identifies the precise stakes in this debate. We argue that a tractable, economically sophisticated constraint on delegations to the bankruptcy courts can be derived from what should be an obvious source: the well-tested creditors’ bargain theory of bankruptcy. Working from this account of bankruptcy’s necessary domain minimizes Article III and federalism harms while also enabling bankruptcy’s core operations to continue unhindered. To illustrate its utility, we then apply our framework to a range of common bankruptcy disputes, demonstrating that many of the Court’s existing jurisprudence is sound in result, if not in reasoning.

The article is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review, and is available here.

Bankruptcy Step Zero
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction | 0

Authors: Douglas G. Baird and Anthony J. Casey

In RadLAX Gateway Hotel, LLC v Amalgamated Bank, the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation focuses on an emerging theme of its bankruptcy jurisprudence: the proper domain of the bankruptcy judge. While one might expect the Court to approach that question of domain as it has for administrative agencies, that is not the approach taken. This article explores the Court’s approach to bankruptcy’s domain. In doing so, we connect three principal strands of the Court’s bankruptcy jurisprudence. The first strand, embodied in Butner v United States, centers on the idea that the bankruptcy forum must vindicate nonbankruptcy rights. The second, most recently addressed in Stern v Marshall, focuses on the limits of bankruptcy judges in deciding and issuing final judgment on the issues before them. Bankruptcy judges must limit themselves to deciding issues central to the administration of the bankruptcy process. RadLAX is the continuation of a third strand that makes it plain that the Court reads ambiguous provisions of the Bankruptcy Code to narrow the range of decisions over which the bankruptcy judge may exercise her discretion — at least when the exercise of that discretion might impact nonbankruptcy rights. The resulting bankruptcy jurisprudence is in stark contrast with the Court’s approach in administrative law. This paper attempts to make sense of this state of affairs and connect it with the realities of bankruptcy practice today.

The article is available here on SSRN.