My experience as a project and structured finance lender was that fewer than 10% of projects were sufficiently well developed for proper consideration when they were first brought to the bank’s attention. I usually needed only about ten minutes to review and send the deal back to the project developer for substantial additional work, which in many cases was tantamount to rejection. This often left me frustrated as most project teams were earnest, hard-working, and well-intentioned.
Read MoreA little over a decade ago, I was asked to deliver a luncheon speech to describe how financial restructurings work and how to avoid them.
At that time, I was a managing director at the US Export-Import Bank and was dealing with the fallout from the Asian financial crisis, along with dozens of public agencies and private lenders. As a veteran of a dozen or so debt workouts following the boom and bust of international coal and oil and gas investments in the 1980s, I had a somewhat unique perspective.
The perspective I presented then and in which I still believe surprised everyone: the stages of a financial restructuring mirror the five stages of death and dying, as presented by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her seminal work On Death and Dying.
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