Corporate financing: Too big to survive?

If you are going to borrow large amounts of money, you are going to need a lot of people to lend it to you. So the jumbo deals of the recent boom have left behind companies with creditor groups that run into the hundreds: for example, UK petrochemicals company Ineos, which has just agreed new debt terms, had to negotiate with its 230 lenders to get there. But large creditor groups are not new – for example the lender group to UK building firm Beazer in the early 1990s included 98 banks (some of which even went out of business as that restructuring dragged on).