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The parent company of the Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank menswear brands entered bankruptcy hoping to turn around the nearly half-century-old business in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic by slashing at least $630 million in debt while pivoting to casual wear from business clothing, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Retailer Tailored Brands Inc., which also owns retail brands K&G Fashion Superstore and Moores Clothing for Men, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday after revenue declined by about 5.6 percent over the past two fiscal years ending in February, despite a dominant position in the menswear market. The company couldn’t avoid bankruptcy once the coronavirus pandemic forced its stores to shut temporarily and slashed demand for dress clothes as millions of Americans started working from home. COVID-19 restrictions also have caused supply-chain disruptions, reduced store traffic, and cancellations of large gatherings such as proms and weddings. The company had reported a net sales decline of more than 60 percent for the quarter ended May 2 compared with the same period a year earlier. Tailored Brands is forecasting total revenue of $1.4 billion for the 2020 fiscal year and $2.4 billion for 2021, compared with $2.9 billion it generated in 2019. Tailored Brands blamed its pre-pandemic struggles on missteps including a limited range of style offerings and pricing that missed out on revenue opportunities, as well as underinvestment in casual selections and e-commerce as customers gravitated toward online purchases. On top of that, price increases over multiple years led to higher prices compared with the competition, resulting in lower customer counts, store traffic and unit sales. Now, the Fremont, Calif., company said it wants to speed up plans to mix its products as sales of tailored clothing decrease. It intends to focus more on its selection of polished casual clothing, including sport coats, pants, dress shirts and sportswear.

Fieldwood Energy LLC, an oil driller that operates in the Gulf of Mexico, is preparing to file for bankruptcy within days as it grapples with the prolonged slump in commodity prices exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The impending bankruptcy, which would be Fieldwood’s second in two years, underscores the challenges facing the offshore sector, which is more capital-intensive and requires more equipment than onshore drilling. The company has been in discussions with lenders about the provision of a roughly $100 million debtor-in-possession facility to fund the bankruptcy proceedings. Houston-based Fieldwood exited its latest bankruptcy in 2018 after having raised money from junior lenders to recapitalize the company and pay for the acquisition of Noble Energy Inc.’s assets in the Gulf of Mexico. Noble Energy has no relation to Noble Corp. Privately held Fieldwood has roughly $1.8 billion in debt, according to FactSet. Fieldwood has hired law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP and consulting firm AlixPartners LLP for help on restructuring its debt after having missed interest payments earlier this year. A group of lenders has been working with law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP.

For nearly 70 years, the Small Business Administration’s disaster relief program has helped companies recover from catastrophes including wildfires, hurricanes and earthquakes. But it has never faced anything like the coronavirus crisis, the New York Times reported. Besieged by more than eight million applicants — and operating in the shadow of the hastily assembled Paycheck Protection Program — the disaster relief effort has given out more money in the past few months than it had in its entire history. But the demand has created a problem that is hobbling hundreds of thousands of applicants: The agency, afraid of running out of cash, capped its coronavirus loans at a fraction of what companies can normally borrow — even though the program has handed out less than half of the $360 billion it can lend.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will buy the assets of the bankrupt professional football league XFL as part of a group bid with his business partner Dany Garcia and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners, Bloomberg News reported. The group is paying $15 million for substantially all of the assets of Alpha Entertainment LLC, the parent company of the XFL, according to a statement yesterday. Johnson and Garcia were looking at buying the XFL at the same time as Cardinale, with the two groups then deciding to join together to complete the purchase, Garcia said in an interview Monday morning. Garcia and Johnson were previously married. “We were simultaneously all examining the property deeply,” said Garcia, who was a big fan of the XFL in its 2020 season and called Johnson when she saw the opportunity to buy it. “We were two groups who could see the magic of this league.” Cardinale is a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner and his private investment firm RedBird manages $4 billion of capital. Cardinale partnered with the Steinbrenner family in 2002 to launch the YES Network, the no. 1 regional sports network in the U.S., according to the Redbird website. The sale is subject to bankruptcy court approval at a hearing Friday and may be completed around August 21. Alpha Entertainment filed for bankruptcy in April after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the shutdown of the league’s first season. The upstart football league was founded in 2017 by promoter Vince McMahon, best known for making professional wrestling into a global business, and played its first game in 2020, according to a court filing. McMahon withdrew his bid to buy the XFL out of bankruptcy in May after opposition from creditors.

The U.S. economy, battered by a resurgence in the spread of COVID-19, needs increased government spending to tide over households and businesses and broader use of masks to better control the virus, U.S. central bankers said yesterday, Reuters reported. The calls for increased government intervention came as U.S. lawmakers and the White House resumed talks on a new government relief package, including a possible extension of unemployment benefits that expired on Friday. “The ball is in Congress’ court,” Chicago Fed President Charles Evans told reporters on a call. “Fiscal policy is fundamental to a better baseline outlook, to a stronger recovery and getting the unemployment rate down, people back to work safely, and ultimately reopening the schools safely.” Without more government aid, Evans said, “aggregate demand trouble is brewing.” Or, as Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin put it, “quickly pulling away the support that consumers and businesses are receiving would be a pretty traumatic move for what’s happening in the economy.” The full court Fed press for more government spending came as Republicans appeared reluctant to spend much more than the $3 trillion Congress had already committed to bolstering the economy in the face of the virus. But things have gotten worse since then, Barkin said. “Four months ago, when we did the first stimulus, we thought the economy faced a pothole and the stimulus put a plate over it so we could navigate,” he told the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce. “Now escalation of the virus may be making that pothole into a sinkhole and creating a need for a longer plate.”

When the coronavirus brought the world economy to a halt in March, it fell to the U.S. Federal Reserve to keep the wheels of finance turning for businesses across America, the Wall Street Journal reported. And when funds stopped flowing to many banks and companies outside America’s borders — from Japanese lenders making bets on U.S. corporate debt to Singapore traders needing U.S. dollars to pay for imports — the U.S. central bank stepped in again. The Fed has long resisted becoming the world’s backup lender. But it shed reservations after the pandemic went global. During two critical mid-March weeks, it bought a record $450 billion in Treasurys from investors desperate to raise dollars. By April, the Fed had lent another nearly half a trillion dollars to counterparts overseas, representing most of the emergency lending it had extended to fight the coronavirus at the time. The massive commitment was among the Fed’s most significant — and least noticed — expansions of power yet. It eased a global dollar shortage, helped halt a deep market selloff and continues to support global markets today. It established the Fed as global guarantor of dollar funding, cementing the U.S. currency’s role as the global financial system’s underpinning. Just as the Fed expanded its role in the U.S. economy to an unprecedented degree during the 2008 financial maelstrom, it has in the coronavirus crisis expanded its power and influence globally.

Public pension funds set a 22-year performance record in the second quarter, recovering some but not all of their losses from the first quarter, the Wall Street Journal reported. Double-digit stock gains pushed pension returns to a median 11.1 percent for the second quarter, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service. Even with the rebound, median annual returns for the public pensions whose fiscal years ended June 30 were 3.2 percent, far short of the funds’ long-term investment-return target of around 7 percent. “That’s the funny thing with math, if you go down 20 percent, a 20 percent return does not make it up.” said Robert J. Waid, managing director at Wilshire Associates. Before the pandemic, public pensions were already trying to plug large funding holes by pursuing aggressive returns to make up for insufficient government funding in past years and decades. State and local pension funds in the U.S. held $4.05 trillion in aggregate as of March 31 — $4.93 trillion less than the cost of promised future obligations, according to Federal Reserve data. Investment shortfalls drive up the amount state and local governments have to pay in. Funds are also bracing for coronavirus-related government-revenue losses.

Venerable U.S. retailer Lord & Taylor filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday, becoming the latest in a growing list of storied names to do so amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that has crippled the retail sector, Reuters reported. The company estimated both assets and liabilities in the range of $100 million to $500 million, its filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia showed. A storied department store chain founded in 1826, billed as the oldest in the U.S., Lord & Taylor had been exploring other options as well as filing for bankruptcy. Big names that already filed for chapter 11 include J Crew Group, JC Penney and Neiman Marcus in May, while Lucky Brand became a casualty of the pandemic in July. Fashion rental service start-up Le Tote acquired Lord & Taylor last year from Saks Fifth Avenue owner Hudson’s Bay Company for C$100 million ($74.62 million). Hudson’s Bay had kept ownership of some of Lord & Taylor’s real estate and assumed responsibility for its rent payments, amounting to tens of millions of dollars a year.

Tailored Brands Inc., the parent company of Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, has filed for bankruptcy after the coronavirus pandemic slashed demand for dress clothes, the Wall Street Journal reported. The publicly traded company filed for chapter 11 protection yesterday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston. The move comes after the menswear retailer warned in late July that it had substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern and that it was likely to file for bankruptcy as soon as its third quarter, which begins Aug. 2. The company operated more than 1,400 stores and employed 19,300 people in the U.S. and Canada as of Feb. 1, according to a securities filing. A regulatory filing in May showed that money-management giant BlackRock Inc. owned about 15.8 percent of Tailored Brands’ common stock, private investment firm Scion Asset Management LLC had about 8.3 percent and investment adviser Vanguard Group had about 7.2 precent. In response to the pandemic, Tailored Brands has said it was evaluating various alternatives to improve its liquidity, such as securing rent concessions and deferrals, cutting costs and raising more capital.