Markets

The 20 Biggest Bankruptcies in U.S. History

Published

5 years ago

June 25, 2019

Jeff Desjardins

Doing business means taking calculated risks.

Regardless of whether you are opening a lemonade stand or you’re a leading executive at a Fortune 500 company, risk is an inevitable part of the game.

Taking bigger risks can generate proportional rewards – and sometimes, such as for the companies you’ll read about below, the risk-taking backfired to queue up some of the biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history.

Going For Broke

Today’s infographic comes to us from TitleMax, and it highlights the 20 biggest bankruptcies in the country’s history.

Companies below are sorted by total assets at the time of bankruptcy.

The 20 Biggest Bankruptcies in U.S. History

There are times when companies are forced to push in all of their chips to make a game-changing bet. Sometimes this pans out, and sometimes the plan fails miserably.

In other situations, companies were actually unaware they were “all-in”. Instead, the potentially destructive nature of the risk was not even on the radar, only to be later triggered through a global crisis or unanticipated “Black Swan” events.

The Biggest Bankruptcies in the U.S.

Here are the 20 biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history, and what triggered them:

Rank	Company	Year	Assets at Bankruptcy	Downfall
#1	Lehman Brothers	2008	$691 billion	2008 financial crisis
#2	Washington Mutual	2008	$328 billion	2008 financial crisis
#3	Worldcom Inc.	2002	$104 billion	Accounting scandal
#4	GM	2009	$82 billion	Massive debt
#5	CIT Group	2009	$71 billion	Credit crunch
#6	Pacific Gas & Electric	2019	$71 billion	Wildfires
#7	Enron	2001	$66 billion	Fraud
#8	Conseco	2002	$61 billion	Failed acquisition strategy
#9	MF Global	2011	$41 billion	European sovereign bonds
#10	Chrysler	2009	$39 billion	Massive debt
#11	Thornburg Mortgage	2009	$37 billion	Declining mortgage values
#12	Pacific Gas & Electric	2001	$36 billion	Drought
#13	Texaco	1987	$35 billion	Contract dispute
#14	FCOA	1988	$34 billion	Savings and loan crisis
#15	Refco	2005	$33 billion	Accounting fraud
#16	IndyMac Bancorp	2008	$33 billion	Mortgage market collapse
#17	Global Crossing	2002	$30 billion	Plummeting world economy
#18	Bank of New England	1991	$30 billion	Bad loans
#19	General Growth Properties	2009	$30 billion	Failed acquisition strategy
#20	Lyondell Chemical	2009	$27 billion	Decline in demand

The data set on the biggest bankruptcies is organized by assets at time of bankruptcy. Therefore, they are not in inflation-adjusted terms, meaning the list skews towards more recent events.

This makes the impact of the 2008 financial crisis particularly easy to spot.

The events and consequences relating to the crisis (loan defaults, illiquidity, and declining asset values) were enough to take down banks like Lehman Brothers and WaMu. The after effects – including a slumping global economy – led to a second wave of bankruptcies for companies such as GM and Chrysler.

In total, nine of the 20 biggest bankruptcies on the list occurred in the 2008-2009 span.

A Dubious Distinction

You may also notice that one company was on the list twice, and this was not an accident.

Pacific Gas & Electric, a California company that is the nation’s largest utility provider, has the dubious distinction of going bankrupt twice in the last 20 years. The first time, in 2001, resulted from a drought that limited hydro electricity generation, forcing the company to import electricity from outside sources at exorbitant prices.

The more recent instance happened earlier this year. Facing tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from raging wildfires in California, the utility filed for Chapter 11 protection yet another time.