As the US economy slowly buckles under the strain of soaring interest rates, corporate bankruptcies will pile up. Few on Wall Street doubt this. The real question they have is which sorts of companies and industries will succumb first.
A good place to start looking: firms that went public via SPAC, that anything-goes world of speculative investing that’s come to represent the unbridled financial mania the pandemic wrought and the bust that followed. Bedrock AI, an investment research company that scours regulatory documents, pored through filings issued by hundreds of de-SPACs -- which are SPACs, or blank-check firms, that found companies to merge with -- and determined that more than 40% of them flagged questions about their own viability as going concerns, signaling a risk they could go out of business. (A few of them have since filed for bankruptcy.)
