by Michael Snyder

Ever since the end of the Great Recession, Americans have been piling up debt at a staggering pace, and now that debt bubble is starting to implode.  There isn't really a precedent for this, and so we can't look back at past events in order to project what will happen next.  But it should be obvious to all of us that things will soon start getting really bad in this country.

It was only a matter of time before bankruptcies began to soar, and according to CBS News that is precisely what is happening…

The end of federal pandemic aid is putting many Americans and businesses under mounting financial pressure, leading to a spike in bankruptcies.

Total bankruptcy filings in January shot up 19% in January to 31,087, up 19% from a year ago, according to data from Epiq, a legal research firm. The number of Americans who filed for bankruptcy across Chapters 7, 11 and 13 shot up 20% in January from a year ago.

I am particularly concerned about the number of large companies that are now being forced into bankruptcy.  According to Zero Hedge, large companies are filing for bankruptcy at the fastest pace that we have seen since the days of the Great Recession…

The spike in defaults was not a fluke, and according to Bloomberg data, one month later – as of the end of February – no less than 39 large companies had filed for bankruptcy in the US so far this year, as February’s pace matches that of January; the YTD total represents the fastest pace of companies filing for bankruptcy since the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2009.