Notable (Loan Defaults, Oncor, Staples, Takata Corp)

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Loan Deficiencies. Some interesting numbers here.

Oncor. Warren Buffett to the rescue? Perhaps, perhaps not. It seems there may be competition for the asset. It looks like Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP stand to make good fees on the transaction if it goes through.

Staples. Details on Sycamore Partners' proposed LBO financing here.

Takata Corp. More professionals with a seat at the table.

Notable (Goldman Sachs, Puerto Rico, Lazy Media & More)

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  • Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Better late than never, we guess. The firm has announced the acquisition/growth of its oil and gas team down in Houston. 
  • Goldman Sachs. Somehow its poor quarterly performance - largely due to poor distressed desk trades - is Morgan Stanley's fault. 
  • Lazy Media. Perhaps the folks at Fortune should call us because their research skills are soft. The other day Fortune reported on Quantum Partners' purchase of Violin Memory out of bankruptcy. Of note, QP is a fund tied to billionaire George Soros. The article - not particularly informative in any way whatsoever - doubled-down on its uselessness by noting that "terms of the deal were not disclosed," which, for those of us who know better, reeks of journalistic laziness. Why? Well, of course the terms needed approval by the bankruptcy court and so they were 100% publicly available. $25.6mm (including the DIP/exit facility rollup). Just saying.
  • Puerto Rico. Apparently it has been a distressed investing quagmire. 
  • Owl Creek Asset Management is shutting down its Asia fund, voluntarily (cough cough) chopping 10% of AUM off. An interesting move considering a general view that there'll be a lot of opportunity there...
  • Varde Partners, a $12b US-based buyout and distressed investing firm, is turning its attention to Asia.

What the Pros Say (2/26/17)

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  • 2016 Ranked. Jones Day LLP, the most prolific distributor of bankruptcy-related content, released this highly unscientific ranking of top-10 publicly traded bankruptcy filings. Go big or go home, Jones Day: if you're going to put out a top 10, don't pull the old "if we rank our own deal second, nobody will notice the blatant self-promotion" trick. Go #1 and own it (arguably deserved here, anyway).
  • Cross-border. Jay Goffman and Christine Okike of Skadden discuss Hanjin Shipping and Chapter 15.
  • Out of Court Restructuring Alternatives. Bankruptcy professionals are really racheting up their tech skills a notch: here, Sam Newman of Gibson Dunn, Jim Baer of CMBG Advisors Inc., Michael Ozawa of Enterprise Management Advisors LLC, Kim Withrow of Bibby Financial Services and Neil Morganbesser and Alex Kasdan of DelMorgan & Co. discuss, by webinar, options like ABCs which our friends in the VC space love to use to keep their failures secret. Shhhhhh.
  • Retail. Greenhill & Co.'s Christopher Grubb opines about the state of retail in this Bloomberg video clip. Choice quote about coming retail bankruptcies: "I think there will be 30 or 40 of meaningful scale."