Good day and welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Wednesday, February 26. In today's briefing, the legalized marijuana industry's hard times are catching up to its private lenders. And in Europe, Altice France reached one of the largest-ever liability management transactions.

Cannabis buzz is wearing off for industry’s private lenders. The investment that flowed into the cannabis industry as dozens of states legalized the drug in recent years has slowed to a trickle, pressuring some private lenders that have become the primary source of its financing.

U.S. cannabis cultivators and operators are facing an approaching wall of debt maturities at a time of slowing growth and little movement by the federal government in reclassifying cannabis as a less-dangerous drug. As private-equity and venture-capital firms retreat, pot cultivators and retailers have turned to debt financing, which accounted for an estimated 92% of the roughly $1.2 billion in capital raised last year.

• Last year, U.S. private-equity deals in the sector totaled $260 million, compared with $1.3 billion for all of 2018, deal tracker PitchBook said. Venture-capital deals were $410 million, compared with roughly $3.06 billion in 2019.

Altice France cedes stake to lenders in $25 billion debt deal. Altice France, the European telecom giant led by billionaire Patrick Drahi, has struck a global debt deal with investors holding more than $25 billion in bonds and loans, one of the largest of a new breed of restructuring transactions, people familiar with the matter said.

The deal, which includes most of Altice’s creditors, could be the largest liability-management exercise for a European business to date. Altice is among the first major borrowers in Europe to enter into such a transaction, in which companies negotiate directly for complex out-of-court debt-swapping arrangements to reduce leverage and push out maturities.

Liability management has become popular in the U.S. as an alternative to bankruptcy but is only beginning to take hold in Europe.

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