> all the way to bankruptcy and usually reappearing a day later with a new name and a clean sheet. "Phoenix" bankruptcies are a real problem among small busine

> all the way to bankruptcy and usually reappearing a day later with a new name and a clean sheet. "Phoenix" bankruptcies are a real problem among small businesses. It defrauds their creditors, and sometimes the public (taxman) as well. All the way up to things like Rangers (Sevco) football club. The excellent book on the history of fraud, Lying for Money, has a chapter on this. It concludes that almost every middle class person could probably get away with a fake business bankruptcy at least once, because it's difficult to tell from the outside versus a real (extremely common) small business failure.