Net-short Creditor Activism is an Urban Legend
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Derivatives | 0

By Vincent S.J. Buccola (University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School), Jameson K. Mah (Cyrus Capital Partners), Tai Yi Zhang (University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School)

Vincent S.J. Buccola
Jameson K. Mah

Bankruptcy scholars have worried about the potential for credit derivatives to frustrate sensible out-of-court reorganizations since such derivatives became widespread in the 2000s. The basic problem they saw was that derivative contracting could complicate dealmaking by disguising investors’ true interests vis-à-vis a distressed company. Most perniciously, derivatives could lead creditors to oppose value-maximizing restructuring plans that offer fair treatment—not just for the familiar purpose of furthering a holdout strategy, but with the very aim of opposing the general welfare. In particular, a creditor with a large derivative position betting against its debtor could actively use its rights as creditor to drive the debtor into a messy and value-destroying default.

Many debt-market observers are sure that a recent episode pitting the hedge fund Aurelius against Windstream was a case in point. That episode has only increased attention on the subject, and issuers are experimenting with contractual devices that purport to muffle the influence of net-short activists at the expense, presumably, of secondary-market liquidity.

Our recent article argues that commotion over net-short creditor activism is misplaced—indeed that such activism is implausible. The nub of our skepticism lies in the incentives and capacities of investors other than a hypothetical net-short activist to foil the activist’s plans. The objective of net-short tactics, according to the story’s logic, is to cause a liquidity crisis that will reduce a targeted company’s value and prompt default. This objective implies, however, as a matter of arithmetic, that others can make money supplying offsetting liquidity.

Our article explores some of the channels through which this responsive liquidity is most likely to flow. We conclude that in the ordinary case one should expect parties other than the would-be saboteur to undermine its plans. If we are right, then it is a puzzle why a sophisticated potential activist would think it could succeed. A net-short activist bets not just on debt prices falling, as all short investors do. It bets rather on its own ability to cause the prices to fall. But in placing such a bet, the activist must know it is daring rival investors to profit by punishing it. The whole approach seems misguided. Which brings us to Windstream. Why did Aurelius think it could prevail at sabotage? As the article explains, we don’t believe it did and don’t believe it tried. We can’t say for sure, because lack access to the fund’s books and records. But so do the many other commentators who have opined on the story.

To us, then, one of the most intriguing features net-short activism is its rhetorical appeal. We suggest that the appeal lies in a kind of mythological function—that net-short sabotage has, in particular, the cautionary form of a good urban legend.

The article is available here.

Bankruptcy’s Cathedral: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Distress
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Reform, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Jurisprudence, Legislation | 0

By Vincent S.J. Buccola (University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School)

What good can a corporate bankruptcy regime do in the modern economy? The question bears asking because the environment in which distressed companies find themselves is so markedly different from the environment of just twenty years ago—to say nothing of the days of the equity receiverships, of sections 77 and 77B, of Chapters X and XI. The most important changes are well known: increased depth and liquidity of financial markets and, especially, increased capacity of financial contracting to say ex ante how distress will be resolved ex post. Recent efforts to take stock of contemporary bankruptcy practice, most notably the ABI’s Chapter 11 reform project, grapple implicitly with the significance of a changing environment. But by leaving the matter implicit, they underscore a lacuna about what the law’s marginal contribution to the economic order might be.

In a forthcoming article, Bankruptcy’s Cathedral, I hazard a general answer and elaborate its implications for a few prominent uses of bankruptcy in today’s practice.

The characteristic function of bankruptcy law, I say, is to recharacterize the mode in which an investor’s relationship to a distressed firm is governed. In particular, bankruptcy frequently toggles the protection of an investor’s economic interests from a property rule, in the Calabresi and Melamed sense, to a liability rule. It swaps out the investor’s unilateral right upon default to withdraw her investment, when such a right would ordinarily prevail, in favor of a judicially mediated procedure designed to give her the official value of her right. The automatic stay furnishes an example. It extinguishes a secured creditor’s power to repossess and sell collateral, and supplies instead a right only to what the bankruptcy judge determines to be “adequate protection” of its interest in the collateral.

This toggling function can be useful, Property rules are often more efficient during a company’s financial health than during distress. A state-contingent meta rule that switches between the two thus might be optimal. But what about financial contracting? Why can’t investors stipulate state-contingent meta rules if indeed they can maximize surplus by doing so? The short answer is that in some cases contract is sufficient, but in other cases legal or practical impediments are insuperable. The marginal contribution of bankruptcy law, then, is to supply toggling rules where investors cannot practically do so on their own.

One implication of my approach is to index the justifiable scope of bankruptcy to contingent facts about the efficacy of financial contracting. In environments where it is difficult for investors to specify state-contingent toggling rules, whether because of legal prohibition or practical impossibility, the compass for bankruptcy law is wider. As contract becomes more efficacious, bankruptcy’s brief grows correspondingly shorter.

This normative schema can be used to assess one-by-one the many actual interventions of bankruptcy laws. I scrutinize three uses of bankruptcy that are important in today’s practice: to confirm prepackaged plans, to effect going-concern sales, and to take advantage of the automatic stay. I find plausible justifications for a legal institution to bind holdout creditors and to extinguish in rem claims against a debtor’s assets. The automatic stay, on the other hand, is harder to justify. (The curious must read within to find out why.) More generally, though, my approach shows how one can weigh the contributions of a bankruptcy regime against its redundant or even counterproductive in light of contracting innovations.

The complete article is available for download here.

The Janus Faces of Reorganization Law
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Cramdown and Priority | 0

By Vincent S. J. Buccola (University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School – Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department).

In Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corporation, 137 S. Ct. 973 (2017), the Supreme Court held that bankruptcy courts lack authority to implement structured dismissals that sidestep the absolute priority rule. The bankruptcy judge’s power to resolve cases by dismissal, a power the Bankruptcy Code grants explicitly, is implicitly limited by the norm of waterfall distribution—or so in any case the majority reasoned. The Court’s decision rested on an interpretive default rule. Because distributional priorities are so important to bankruptcy, the Code will be understood to bar departures absent a clear statement. At the same time, however, the Jevic majority went out of its way to distinguish (and seemingly bless) what it called “interim distributions” such as critical vendor orders, notwithstanding their capacity to undermine priorities and their dubious textual basis.

This article argues that this seeming inconsistency in Jevic is no misstep, but that there might be some sense to the conflicting interpretive approaches after all. Two distinctive paradigms now color interpretation of the Bankruptcy Code. One paradigm governs during the early stages of a case and is oriented toward the importance of debtor and judicial discretion to use estate assets for the general welfare. The other paradigm governs a bankruptcy’s conclusion and is oriented toward the sanctity of creditors’ bargained-for distributional entitlements. In combination, they produce what appears to be policy incoherence. But, at least in a world of robust senior creditor influence, a rule under which judicial discretion diminishes over the course of a case—discretion giving way to entitlements—may in fact tend to maximize creditor recoveries.

The full article is available here.