The issue of insolvency shows how different attitudes to business in the US can be to those in Europe. In America, going bust can carry no stigma at all – people can even get plaudits for having tried their hand at entrepreneurship. In Europe, bankruptcy has traditionally been associated with failure, shame and punishment.

But the US is winning the argument and the rest of the world is starting to copy its approach. Broadly speaking, territories can be divided into two types on the subject of insolvency – those that favour the debtor and those that favour the creditors. The US has been a great exponent of favouring the debtor and US law is much more about trying to reach a resolution and letting the debtor go forward again.

As globalisation has created international bankruptcies, insolvency courts in different countries have had to deal with each other more often and have begun to see the advantages in making their systems more compatible – and they are tending to chose the US approach. In Sweden, for example, one of the biggest company restructurings in 2006 ended up not with the death of the business, but with it doubling size (after acquiring another) and with the original owners keeping 25% of the shares.

In the past decade, several countries have revamped their insolvency laws, including Germany, Belgium, England, Spain and France. There have been important international developments such as the creation of a model law on international co-operation designed by the United Nations (UN).

Individual countries are encouraged by the UN to work the provisions of this model law into their own systems. If they follow the ideas enshrined in the UN document, they make it easier for judges in different bankruptcy courts to communicate with each other, to cut the costs if there are parallel bankruptcy proceedings going on and, ultimately, to save the company and restructure it. The countries taking this path include Japan, Mexico, South Africa, the US and the UK.

Judges are becoming architects of company restructurings. They are getting exposure to very complicated situations when dealing with massive failures such as Enron in the US, Parmalat in Italy, and Eurotunnel, which is being dealt with in France’s Commercial Court in Paris.

In most countries, the number of corporate bankruptcies goes up and down like a yo-yo – dependent on a range of factors, including the level of interest rates, the pace of change in industry sectors and government policy. In the UK, for instance, numbers often go up or down 20% from one year to the next. Certain sectors are particularly prone to failure, such as the construction industry. Plus, there are fears that new tougher laws on pensions could see some companies go under because they cannot meet their future pension liabilities to employees.

Many issues still have to be discussed at length in international insolvency discussion forums. There will be a lot of resistance if some countries make it too easy for firms to go bankrupt, and to recreate themselves in another form, without their directors suffering much of a penalty. The insolvency world is, perhaps surprisingly, peopled by larger-than-life, rather flamboyant characters – and many of them will spend the next few years going to international conferences to discuss this type of question.