💥Bankruptcy Flex?💥
Mediations galore, Bird flies into BK, Dish Network, Spirit Airlines & More.
We’re more than halfway through the first month of ‘24 and hot damn it’s been a snooze fest — in terms of new case activity, at least. We’re looking left, we’re looking right, and we see a whole lot of nada, folks.
In the *checks notes* THREE “notable” cases that have filed — Eye Care Leaders Portfolio Holdings LLC (see below), Audacy Inc., and Humanigen Inc. (in reverse chronological order) — there ain’t a whole lot to get excited about. At least the latter is getting some additional professionals off the bench: the office of the United States Trustee appointed a two-member (lol) official committee of unsecured creditors (“UCC”) comprised of Chime Biologics (Wuhan) Co. LTD and Eversana Life Sciences LLC and they chose Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP (Gianfranco Finizio, Danielle Barav-Johnson) and Womble Bond Dickinson US LLP (Matthew Ward, Donald Detweiler) as legal counsel. Huge win, guys!*
Which is not to say that there isn’t some macro drama unfolding before our very eyes. It seems the market may have gotten ahead of itself with predictions of dramatic Fed funds rate cuts as soon as March ‘24. Seems a bunch of folks are now doing this:
Or, in graph form:
Look close enough and you’ll see that the probability was in the 90s just about, like, a week or two ago. What happened? The economy is holding up: this week we saw soaring consumer sentiment, strong retail sales, and falling initial jobless claims. Consequently, lots of Fed folk mouthed off this week about how caution is warranted blah blah blah and suddenly a lot of companies that had been hoping for near-term rate cuts may have to wait a bit longer.
Still, there is some carryover drama from ‘23 and some out-of-court drama in ‘24. And with that said, we turn to this week’s winners and losers…
👍Winners of the Week👍
1. Core Scientific ($CORZQ). The crypto-mining firm filed its chapter 11 bankruptcy cases back in late December ‘22 and rode a wild crypto wave all the way through to ‘24.