Drilling Deep: Change in bankruptcy law may save some trucking companies

Image: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

Plenty of trucking companies are going bankrupt. We know that. But what if a change in the bankruptcy law last year could keep a lot of them alive?

On this week’s Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston brings in attorney Matt Ferris from the firm of Haynes & Boone to talk about a changed provision in federal bankruptcy law that could keep a lot of smaller companies alive when liquidation might otherwise have been the only course of action.

Larger companies utilize Chapter 11 to reorganize and continue on; as Ferris notes, it’s been tougher for smaller companies to do that. But those changes in the law will open the door a little wider to staying solvent rather than disappearing.

John will also talk about just how much diesel is in inventory in this country. The volume is close to unprecedented.

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John Kingston

John has an almost 50-year career as a journalist, most of them covering commodities and markets. The largest part of his career was spent at Platts, now part of S&P Global Energy. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment. He was awarded the 2020 Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah International Energy Award for Lifetime Achievement for the Advancement of International Energy Journalism.