The word 'bankruptcy' comes from banes rotta, Italian for broken bench. The custom was that when a medieval trader failed to pay his creditors, his trading bench was broken. Since bankruptcy was taken off the street and put into the statute book, it has become rather more complicated. Bankruptcy is as necessary for capitalism as profit together they make up the stick and carrot which persuade businessmen to work. In Europe the accountants and lawyers who make a living from overseeing bankrupt companies expect the coming year to provide a bumper crop in America bankruptcy courses are among the most popular at business schools. Only in Japan are experts talking about a possible decline in bankruptcies. Analyzing companies involves much the same task worldwide: look at the accounts and you will get some idea of how much or how little money a firm makes. Bankruptcy laws, however, vary enormously from country to country, mainly because each starts from different historical perspectives. Yet they all tackle the same issues—and the most fundamental is how friendly the law should be to the debtor. Countries whose bankruptcy laws are based on the British model view bankruptcy primarily as a way to recover creditors' money. Typically, the courts replace the bankrupt firm's management with a liquidator or a receiver whose mission is to pay back creditors as quickly as possible. England's first bankruptcy law was an 'act against such persons as do make bankrupt'. For centuries British bankrupts went to debtors' prison. Continental countries also took the creditors' side. In contrast, one of America's attractions to immigrants was its very lack of a debtors' prison. Bankruptcy is still viewed in America as a side-effect of entrepreneurship. Managers of a bankrupt firm are often allowed to stay on. Cynics reckon that some well-know businessmen have made a career ont of taking companies into and out of bankruptcy. The aim of American bankruptcy law is rehabilitation: to reorganize the company so that it can continue to trade, rather than .to see that the creditors are paid off. Thus, while an ailing American company can opt for liquidation by filing under the chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code, it can also file under chapter 11 to seek protection from its creditors. Once a firm has gone into chapter 11 its management has to produce a reorganization plan: the creditors are arranged into committees to vote on it. These can become scrums where the various creditors' relative seniority varies according to their lawyers' eloquence. Fans of the American system argue that it gives companies a chance to recover. Critics say that American law favors the same managers who bankrupted the firm, that it encourages lawyers to prolong bankruptcy protection, that it favors big bankers over smaller trade creditors, and that shareholders, the last to be paid in liquidation, gain at the expense of debt-holders. In Paragraph One, 'Since bankruptcy was taken off the streets and put into the statute book' means______.