Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I learned incidentally last week, while working my day job, that the fast-food chain Checkers did a debt restructuring quite recently. They gave up a lot of equity to some of their creditors in return for a big write-down on the debts. In other words, they and their creditors worked out much the same deal for themselves that a bankruptcy court might have, with a lot more time and expense and higgling, had they gone the chapter 11 route.  New owners are in control now at the board level, but they seem content to leave the same management group in charge.  To reformulate that: management made a nice deal for itself, saving its position in the face of a debt burden that looked ruinous.  Not the most exciting news ever, but one always likes to hear of the financial troubles of corporations that are household names.  Wait .. Checkers isn't a household name in your household? Well, it is mostly a southern thing. Checkers is very big in Georgia, Florida, and east Tex...

 Virgin Orbit has filed for chapter 11 protection. This is a company that was spun off from Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. VG had already, before the spin-off, developed the LauncherOne rocket, for delivering payloads of up to 300 kilograms to low earth order. The spin-off was designed to market that.  On December 30, 2021, VO became a publicly traded company, on NASDAQ, with the ticker symbol VORB.  So ... is it important that it is it now in chapter 11? Possibly. VG was the chief competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX in the private-satellite-launch business. Personally, if Branson cannot do that job any longer I would like to see new entrants. Or a re-organized company, under new management and freed of accumulated debt, getting a fresh start at it. And the latter is what chapter 11, if it works properly, might bring about.