Drowning In Debt?

Native American gaming was once thought of as an industry almost impervious to the gyrations of the broader domestic economy. In fact, it steadily tallied strong results in the years preceding the economic downturn and soaked up its share of the readily available financing that flooded the domestic gaming space as a whole during this period. Between 1995 and 2008, tribal gaming revenues grew almost fivefold from $5.46 billion to $26.7 billion. However, as the domestic economy retrenched in 2008, many tribal casinos saw their previously meteoric growth taper off and began to reel under the strain of outsized leverage incurred in anticipation of ever-increasing earnings.

This change in fortunes led to a number of restructurings that presented tribes and creditors alike with difficult, often novel questions about how to restructure debt in an industry subject to legal and regulatory requirements unlike those in place in the broader domestic gaming space. A real measure