Texas two-step

plural Texas two-steps

1. businessA two-step bankruptcy strategy under US bankruptcy law in which a solvent parent company spins-off liabilities into a new company, and then has that new company declare bankruptcy.

   1 more example

   This is called the “Texas two-step.” In its extreme form it sounds like very bad cheating: You can’t really put all the liabilities and none of the money in the box; that is just a way to defraud victims, and surely they’d find a way to do something about it. But a milder form of the Texas Two-Step is that you put the liabilities in the box, put the box in bankruptcy, but have the parent company guarantee its product liabilities.

   Levin, Matt (1 February 2023), “Johnson & Johnson’s Bankruptcy Didn’t Work”, in Money Stuff, Bloomberg