In essence, when a large company goes into bankruptcy, its prior owners almost always cease to own the company any longer. People have made this same point about MCI (of course, many of those people work at competitors who wanted to see MCI disolved), as though bankruptcy operation were a reward. It was anything but. The CEO wound up going to jail, and anyone who owned a piece of the company would up with ZERO. Thousands of people lost their jobs, as has happened at other airlines, and will almost certainly occur at NW and DL. (Ask yourself - is it 'unfair' that they haven't all lost their jobs?) In general, the parties who lent money to a company generally have claim on what's left. The system's willingness to allow bankruptcy financings and continued operations is essentially an effort to allow creditors to maximize their recovery from a 'loan' that's gone bad.

Now, if creditors hang onto old management, and all of the same people stay involved in a company, it may look to the outside world as though nothing's changed. But the shift of ownership is critical. Without the potential for bankruptcy operation, our debt markets would operate very, very differently, and would arguably be MUCH less sanguine about lending money to business. That's particularly the case in circumstances under which lenders believe that a liquidition would produce significantly lower recovery. An extension of that point is the observation that US capital markets have developed so much over the past many years that they're considered in many ways to be a competitive, strategic advantage of the US economy.