Good day and welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Friday, April 7. In today's newsletter, prices of bonds backed by commercial mortgages point to headwinds from office vacancies and rising interest rates. A New Jersey judge showed a willingness to halt Bausch Health's planned spinoff of its vision-care business in response to a creditor lawsuit. And companies that used the SPAC boom to go public are writing down billions of dollars in goodwill now that it has faded.

Investors retreat from commercial mortgage bonds. Bonds backed by commercial mortgages, a small corner of the U.S. bond market, have taken a beating owing to fears that owners of business parks, high-rises and other office properties could default on loans that were made before Covid-19 upended how Americans work.

That stress only deepened recently after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, which raised concerns that regional banks might scale back their risk-taking and become more reluctant to make commercial real-estate loans—making it harder for property owners to refinance existing debt.

Below, a look at the extra yield that investors demand to hold commercial mortgage-backed securities over U.S. Treasuries.

The Bausch investors pressing the lawsuit have alleged that divesting the eye-care division, Bausch + Lomb Corp., would deplete the company of valuable assets and leave it unable to pay a potential multibillion securities-fraud judgment in separate litigation.

The decision said that injunctive relief for the shareholders would depend on the outcome of their pending securities lawsuits in federal court and that enjoining the distribution of the company’s shares in the vision-care unit “could be appropriate because it would preserve the status quo.”

SPAC boom's end means goodwill write-downs. Companies that went public through mergers with special-purpose acquisition companies in recent years booked billions of dollars in goodwill write-downs in 2022, reflecting in part a reckoning of the heady premiums paid to secure deals during the SPAC boom, our colleague at the CFO Journal reports.

The Fed's latest increase came down to the wire. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues faced their closest call on interest rates in years. It wasn’t until the clock was ticking down two days before their scheduled decision last month that senior leaders settled on a plan to lift them by a quarter percentage point.

That was down to the wire in Fed time. Pushing ahead with the rate increase demonstrated the Fed’s desire to avoid falling behind in its fight against inflation, while giving the central bank more flexibility to forgo an increase at its next meeting if it sees evidence that tighter bank-lending conditions are slowing the economy.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has alleged that more than 2,200 investors put at least $410 million into the firm’s nine funds from November 2017 through February 2022 and that StraightPath made “Ponzi scheme-like payments” to cover transactions and distributions from the nine funds.

Saudi Arabia, Gulf states want better returns for bailing out Egypt. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries have warned Egypt that any financial bailout would depend on Cairo devaluing its currency and appointing new officials to run its economy, according to Egyptian and Gulf officials, raising the bar for its embattled neighbor after providing years of easy assistance.

The economy of the Arab world’s most populous country is in dire straits after the Covid-19 pandemic hit its tourism sector and the war in Ukraine pushed up global food and commodity prices. Inflation has soared to over 40% and Egypt’s currency is one of the worst performers globally this year, pushing millions more into poverty.

• Movie fans have been trickling back to the cinema after the pandemic upheaval, but the financial pain has intensified for some of the largest theater-industry players, including Cineworld Group and AMC Entertainment.
• Private-equity investors looking to stand out as they enter the crowded—and potentially lucrative—playing field of sports are buying into less popular segments such as rugby, where pricing pressure is lower, but risks loom large.
• America is aging, but many companies don’t want to hire older people. Some employers may subtly communicate through their wording in online help-wanted ads that older workers ought not apply. But including this demographic is important for maintaining a healthy labor market.
• Healthcare has been a bright spot in a slowing exit environment for private-equity firms. In one of the more recent examples, global private-equity firm Warburg Pincus stands to score a lucrative return with the sale of gene therapy technology provider Polyplus, the latest in a string of healthcare exits the firm has produced over the past year.

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