Despite the long experience in the U.S. with restructuring companies in bankruptcy, there remains a persistent tendency for companies to emerge from Chapter 11 with too much debt and too little profitability. In this article, the author uses a variant of his well-known "Z-Score" bankruptcy...

Ten years ago the author of this article wrote a piece for this journal reviewing the history of the "junk" bond market from its start in the mid-1970s through the collapse of the leveraged restructuring movement at the end of the 1980s. In the summer of 1990, the high yield market was at a...