Top 12 Largest Bankruptcies in US History

What are the largest bankruptcies in US history? While running a company, the word “bankruptcy” is probably one of the scariest that might be heard in the office. However, there are cases when the bankruptcy of a company might affect not only the company and it’s employees, but can damage the entire economy of a country. Since the United States represent one of the strongest and largest economies in the world, the bankruptcy of some companies that took place at different periods in its modern history, brought serious problems, and some of them even had an impact on the global economy.

With this in mind, at Insider Monkey, we would like to present a list of 10 some of the biggest bankruptcies in the U.S. history. We took companies in order of their values as at the time before they filed for Chapter 11. The list comprises some of the largest corporations in the world, many of which didn’t manage to recover from the downfall.

The 12th place on our list of the largest bankruptcies is held by Texaco Inc which before filing for bankruptcy had $35 billion in assets. Texaco filed for bankruptcy in 1987 after a court decision according to which the company owned $10.5 billion to Pennzoil. Later, the oil retailer Texaco managed to pay Pennzoi $3 billion, and later managed to get out of the bankruptcy. In 2001, Texaco merged into Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX).

The 11th on our list is PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), which also managed to climb out of bankruptcy, after filing for Chapter 11 in 2001. The largest utilities company in California, engaged in providing natural gas and electricity, had in assets $36 billion, before the filing. Due to natural causes, but also some changes of the regulation, the company filed for bankruptcy, which costed both PG&E and the state over $40 billion. PG&E emerged from bankruptcy in 2004.

Read on to see what other companies made our list and what value in assets had these companies before filing for bankruptcy.