Bankruptcy

Business Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filings Up 50 Percent

By Meaghan Olson

Business bankruptcy filings are increasing at an even faster pace than the record-setting personal bankruptcy numbers from 2009.

Last year, Chapter 11 business bankruptcy filings increased 50 percent from 2008, according to a Business Week report.

In all, more than 15,000 business decided to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Of these filings, some reorganized an remained in business, some were sold, and others sold their assets and closed shop completely.

But some businesses filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which results in a liquidation of assets. Combined Chapter 7 and 11 filings resulted in a 38 percent increase in business filings for 2009.

The total comes to 89,402 businesses filing bankruptcy in 2009, reports the Wall Street Journal. That's almost 25,000 more business than needed help the previous year.

And, despite some signals that the economy is getting, business bankruptcy filings continued to pick up steam as the year went on. Business filings in December rose 3 percent compared with November, and were 13 percent higher than the same month for the previous year.

Among those business filing bankruptcy were 207 publicly traded companies.  That's the third-highest total since 1980. And these companies also include some of the biggest and richest in the country, holding around $600 million in assets at the time of their bankruptcy filing.

That number is the second most of all time, just behind 2008's monstrous year which included the massive Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

During the first decade of the 2000s, more than 400,000 businesses will have filed for bankruptcy protection, according to numbers from the American Bankruptcy Institute.

Full post as published by The Bankruptcy Blog on January 07, 2010 (boomark / email).