'Ground-hugging interest rates for more than a decade kept the inefficient and the incompetent in business.'
Authored by Doug French: The character Mike Campbell in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises was asked about his money troubles and responded with a vivid description embracing self-contradiction: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’”

Ground-hugging interest rates for more than a decade kept the inefficient and the incompetent in business.
Now, the jig is up, with a Mother’s Day weekend corporate massacre that saw the bankruptcies of seven corporations, each with liabilities of nine figures or more—in four cases, with more than a billion dollars in liabilities each.
This cluster of large bankruptcies happening in less than forty-eight hours is the most since 2008. Libby Cherry writes for Bloomberg (reprinted on Time):
“Firms across every sector are struggling with higher interest costs—making it more challenging to refinance loans and bonds—while corporate executives are drawing more scrutiny from investors and creditors.”


