Information only. Not investment advice. All figures are latest available as of November 2025 and subject to revision by original sources.
1. Where We Actually Are: The Numbers
1.1 Corporate bankruptcies are back to post-GFC territory
On the corporate side (S&P’s universe of “large” filers), the post-COVID quiet period is over.
S&P Global Market Intelligence data (public firms with ≥ $2m assets/liabilities, or private with ≥ $10m) show:
- 2020: 638 tracked U.S. corporate bankruptcies (COVID shock year)
- 2021: 405
- 2022: 373
- 2023: 634
- 2024:
- S&P Jan-2025 piece: 694 corporate bankruptcies in 2024, the highest since 2010
- Another S&P-based summary (via Newsweek) cites 688, reflecting small definitional differences
- Either way: 2024 > 2023 and > 2020
- 2025 YTD:
- By end-June 2025: 371 filings, the highest H1 total since 2010
- By end-July 2025: 446 filings, most for Jan–Jul since 2010
- By end-October 2025: 655 filings, vs 687 for all of 2024; pace implies a 15-year high if the trend continues
So your earlier statement “on track for highest since 2010” is not hand-wavy. It’s exactly what S&P and the press are saying.
1.2 Large & “mega” bankruptcies
Cornerstone’s Trends in Large Corporate Bankruptcy and Financial Distress – Midyear 2025 gives the best picture for big debtors (assets ≥ $100m):
In the 12 months from 2H 2024 to 1H 2025:
- 117 large companies (assets ≥ $100m) filed Chapter 7 or 11
- Up from 113 in the prior 12 months
- About 44% above the 2005–2024 annual average of 81
- Of these, 32 were “mega-bankruptcies” (assets ≥ $1bn)
- Up from 24 in the prior 12 months
- Above the long-run average of 23
So yes, not only more bankruptcies, but fatter ones by asset size.
1.3 Sector breakdown
From S&P / Reuters as of October 2025:
- Industrials: 98 filings (largest share by sector)
- Consumer Discretionary: 80 filings
- Other stress clusters show up in: retail, transportation, auto suppliers, healthcare services, and pockets of tech/EV.
Notably mentioned mega-cases include:
- First Brands Group (auto parts) with >$10bn in liabilities
- Tricolor (subprime auto lender), whose liquidation forced JPMorgan to write off about $170m of exposure
So the earlier text about “industrials + discretionary leading” and “large failures, not just mom-and-pop” checks out and is now pinned by actual counts.
2. System-wide Bankruptcy Activity (All Debtors, Not Just Corporates)
The U.S. Courts data show the broader wave: consumers + businesses, all chapters.
2.1 Total filings are climbing, but still below GFC levels
U.S. Courts judiciary stats:
- 12 months ending Dec 31, 2024
- Total bankruptcies: up 14.2% vs previous year
- 12 months ending Mar 31, 2025
- Total filings: 529,080 vs 467,774 a year earlier
- +13.1% overall
- Business filings: up 14.7%, from 20,316 to 23,309
- Non-business: up 13.0%, from 447,458 to 505,771
- 12 months ending Jun 30, 2025
- Total filings: 542,529, vs 486,613 (+11.5%)
- Business filings: +4.5%, from 22,060 to 23,043
- Non-business: +11.8%, from 464,553 to 519,486
Your earlier line “business filings rose ~14.7%” is spot on; I’ve pinned the exact base numbers above.
Important nuance: filings are up double-digits, but remain well below the peak volumes seen after the 2007–08 crisis. So this is a serious upswing, not yet a full-blown 2009-style deluge.
3. Why This Wave Is Happening: Drivers with Actual Magnitudes
3.1 Higher-for-longer rates & default risk
The “cost of capital” story isn’t just vibes.
- Moody’s estimates that the average 12-month default risk for U.S. public companies reached 9.2% at end-2024, the highest since the global financial crisis, and is projected to stay elevated into 2025.
- Fitch Ratings keeps its 2025 U.S. corporate default forecasts at:
- 5.5–6.0% for leveraged loans
- 4.0–4.5% for high-yield bonds
- Deutsche Bank projects junk-rated U.S. default rates rising again by 2026 (near 4.8%, with stress cases up to ~5.5%), citing higher-for-longer funding costs, tighter lending, and weaker growth.
So your original framing “elevated rates + leveraged balance sheets = slow-motion culling of zombies” is structurally correct. We now have default risk numbers to quantify the pressure.
3.2 Inflation, tariffs, and input-cost shock
Corporate declarations and court filings repeatedly cite:
- Inflation in freight, wages, energy and materials
- Tariffs and trade policy uncertainty, especially under the revived tariff agenda
Axios and others explicitly link the new tariff rounds to a chain: higher costs → price hikes → demand destruction → layoffs & bankruptcies.
Retail/home-goods cases like At Home’s Chapter 11 (tariffs + rising rates + falling discretionary demand) are basically textbook examples of this combo.
3.3 Slowing growth & squeezed margins
By 2024–2025:
- Real growth has cooled while unit labour costs and financing costs stayed high, compressing margins.
- Sectors with low pricing power (commodity-like products, crowded retail, lower-tier services) can’t fully pass costs on to customers. They bleed cash until maturities or covenants catch up.
Cornerstone’s review of “drivers of mega distress” lists inflation, higher interest rates and public policy uncertainty as the top cited factors for mega bankruptcies filed over the past year.
3.4 Legacy leverage & private equity
Cheap money 2010-2021 = lots of covenant-lite debt + sponsor-backed leverage.
S&P shows:
- 2024 PE / VC-backed bankruptcies:
- 110 U.S. companies backed by private equity or venture capital filed, up more than 15% from 2023
- This is the highest annual total on record in their data set
So the “zombie / PE-heavy tail” is not theoretical. It’s literally printing in the stats.
4. Anatomy of the Wave: 2022–2025 Timeline
4.1 Phase 1: 2022 – the turn in the credit cycle
- Fed starts the aggressive hiking cycle.
- Corporate bankruptcies still relatively low at 373, but that’s the bottom of the curve.
- Distress begins to show in frontier names: some growth-tech, early-stage EV, and over-levered small caps.
4.2 Phase 2: 2023 – the quiet snap higher
- Corporate bankruptcies jump back to ~634.
- This rise happens before inflation is declared “defeated,” as higher rates start hitting refinancings and marginal credits.
- Investors mostly treat it as “post-COVID normalization.”
4.3 Phase 3: 2024 – historic surge
- S&P: 694 corporate bankruptcies in 2024, largest single-year total since 2010.
- Some coverage rounds this to 688, but all agree: it’s the highest in 14–15 years.
- High-profile cases: Fisker, various EV and healthcare restructurings, stressed retailers.
- U.S. Courts report total bankruptcies (all chapters) increased 14.2% in the year to Dec 31, 2024.
4.4 Phase 4: 2025 – acceleration in large & mega cases
By mid- and late-2025:
- S&P records 63 corporate bankruptcies in June and 71 in July, with H1 2025 (371 cases) and Jan–Jul 2025 (446 cases) both the most active since 2010.
- Newsweek summarises: with 446 large bankruptcies in the first seven months, 2025 is on pace to beat 2024’s full-year total (688).
- By October, S&P data collated by Reuters shows 655 filings year-to-date, almost matching 2024’s 687 and on track for a 15-year high.
- Large company perspective: 117 big bankruptcies in the latest 12-month window, 44% above long-term norms; 32 mega cases vs 23 long-run average.
In other words, the “wave” is not forecast; it’s here. The only open question is whether it crests or turns into something nastier.
5. Sector & Structure: Who’s Actually Drowning?
5.1 Sector clusters
From S&P + Reuters as of Oct 2025:
- Industrials (98 filings)
- Auto parts, transport, industrial components, capital goods
- Vulnerable to input costs, global trade/tariff shocks, and cyclical demand
- Consumer Discretionary (80 filings)
- Retail chains, home-goods, leisure, auto retailers
- Hit by real-income squeeze + high financing costs for both firms and consumers
- Healthcare & services (from restructuring reviews)
- Nursing homes, regional healthcare chains, and service platforms struggling with wage inflation and reimbursement limits
- EV / “new tech industrial” complex
- Multiple EV makers and adjacent firms already gone to court by 2024; capital-intensive, low-margin, subsidy-dependent models don’t survive higher rates easily.
5.2 Business model risk factors
From reviews of large cases (Cornerstone, WSJ, S&P):
Patterns among failed firms:
- High leverage, often sponsor-driven
- Floating-rate or near-term debt maturities
- Low pricing power, high fixed costs
- Disruption exposure (e-commerce vs physical retail, tech substitution, consumer behaviour shifts)
- Tariff / trade sensitivity (import-heavy goods, supply-chain complexity)
Functionally, it’s the worst possible combination: structurally fragile model + rate shock + cost shock + weaker demand.
6. Macro & Market Implications (With Numbers)
6.1 Credit spreads & junk risk
High-yield spreads have been through several mini-cycles:
- Independent coverage notes HY spreads swinging from the mid-400bp area to low-300s in 2025 as trade war headlines faded, but default forecasts remain elevated.
- The high-yield market is around $2 trillion in size, with pension funds, insurers, and asset managers heavily exposed.
The key for you: spread levels are not pricing a systemic blow-up, but default expectations are clearly rising in bank research and rating-agency forecasts.
6.2 Rates & term structure
Post-Moody’s U.S. sovereign downgrade in May 2025, long-term yields briefly spiked above 5% again, with the 10-year hovering around 4.5%.
Combine that with:
- Fed funds rate stuck in restrictive territory
- Real yields well above 2020-2021 levels
You get a sustained drag on refinancing: companies cannot roll their 3–4% legacy debt at anything remotely similar. The math alone creates distress, even if operations are “fine.”
6.3 Real economy: filings vs jobs & capex
We don’t yet have a clean “X bankruptcies = Y unemployment” mapping, but we do know:
- Total filings (all chapters) are now above 540k per year, up ~11–14% over prior periods.
- Business bankruptcies are rising faster than population or labour growth.
- Large corporate failures imply:
- closure/downsizing of factories and stores
- cancelled or delayed capital projects
- supply-chain breakage (suppliers not paid, ripple effects to SMEs)
From a macro-signal perspective: rising large corporate and business filings are early indicators of a broader slowdown, even when headline GDP still looks “fine.”
7. How to Trade / Frame This as a Macro Engine Input
I’ll keep this in your tactical-sheet language. Think of the bankruptcy wave as a macro factor with three channels:
- Credit channel
- Real-economy channel
- Policy reaction function
7.1 Credit channel
Key data to feed into Ztrader dashboards:
- Monthly S&P corporate filings (count + sector breakdown)
- Large/mega filings from Cornerstone (assets ≥ $100m / ≥ $1bn)
- HY & loan default forecasts (Fitch, Moody’s, DB)
- Credit spreads on HY and loans (time series)
- Private-equity-backed filings as a proxy for sponsor stress
Trading implications:
- Structural bias to underweight US HY credit or hedge via CDS indices while this regime persists.
- In equities, de-weight levered cyclicals in the most bankruptcy-intensive sectors (industrials, small-cap retail, EV/alt-auto, lower-tier healthcare).
- Look for distressed-debt opportunities when mega cases trade below estimated recovery, if you want to build a Z-style “vulture pod.”
7.2 Real-economy channel
Combine:
- Business filings (US Courts)
- Sector economic data (industrial production, retail sales, freight indices)
- Credit standards surveys and lending volumes
With this, you can build an internal “Corporate Stress Index”:
- Weighted combination of:
- growth in business filings (YoY %)
- large corporate filings normalized by sector market cap
- HY spread level
- change in bank credit standards (Fed SLOOS)
- Use it as a leading indicator for industrial production / capex and a scenario input for FX (USD as “credit crunch” hedge vs risk currencies & EM).
7.3 Policy reaction function
As distress climbs:
- Higher default & bankruptcy rates tighten financial conditions beyond what policy rates alone would imply.
- If unemployment starts to reflect large bankruptcies, Fed’s reaction function shifts:
- Market begins to price earlier or deeper cuts
- In the downside scenario, you get a “credit accident → rapid easing” loop
So the path of bankruptcies is not just micro; it’s a probabilistic input into your Fed path and therefore into:
- Long-end yields
- Dollar direction
- Gold & duration trades
8. Corrected vs Original: What Changed?
Your original draft was already surprisingly tight for something written without live data. Here’s what has now been verified and sharpened:
- 2024 totals
- Now pinned to 694 corporate bankruptcies (S&P definition) vs the rough “687” you had in mind.
- 2025 pace
- Confirmed: 371 filings H1, 446 by end-July, 655 by end-October → genuinely highest pace since 2010.
- Large & mega cases
- Now backed by Cornerstone’s 117 large / 32 mega numbers and 44% above historical average.
- Business vs non-business
- Your “business filings up ~14.7%” is confirmed and anchored in explicit counts (20,316 → 23,309).
- PE-backed bankruptcies
- New extension: 110 PE/VC-backed US companies failed in 2024, a record.
- Default risk metrics
- Extension: Moody’s 9.2% average default risk, Fitch 5.5–6.0% loan default forecast, DB 2026 default path.
So the structure of your original macro narrative holds. Now it’s armoured with concrete numbers instead of “trust me bro.”
9. Condensed Macro Takeaways
If you want the “executive summary” version for a GS-style single page:
- U.S. corporate bankruptcies are at the highest level since the post-GFC period, with S&P-tracked filings reaching 694 in 2024 and on track to exceed that in 2025.
- Large company failures (assets ≥ $100m) are 44% above long-run norms, and mega-bankruptcies (≥ $1bn) are also above historical averages.
- Business bankruptcy filings overall are rising double-digits year-on-year, but still below GFC peaks, implying we’re in an early/medium stage of the cycle.
- Core drivers: higher-for-longer rates, inflation & tariffs, legacy leverage (often PE-backed), and business model disruption.
- For macro & credit strategy, the bankruptcy wave is now a first-class input, not a side note: it affects credit spreads, Fed reaction probabilities, capex and labour, and thus your curve, FX and risk-asset views.
So yes, your alarm bell about a structural corporate wash-out is not “doomposting.” It’s where the data is moving.