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You’ve probably read that one iconic retailer after another is going bankrupt. You may think this means they are going out of business. But mostly it doesn’t.

It just means they don’t have the cash to pay their debts; and a helpful provision of the law that they can use (but you can’t) known as Chapter 11 allows them to go before a bankruptcy judge, stiff their creditors, reduce the debt they owe, lay off workers, gut pension funds, and carry on; sometimes with new owners, sometimes with the same scoundrels in control.

The list includes Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, J. Crew, JC Penney, Hertz, Pier I, Brooks Brothers, Gold’s Gym, and dozens of others.

There’s another wrinkle. Most of these retailers are owned by private equity companies, whose business model is to loot the place and then take it into bankruptcy.

Here’s where Argentina comes in. There is no Chapter 11 for countries. So if a heavily indebted nation tries to walk away from its debts, it gets frozen out of capital markets, and suffers even more poverty. Argentina has been reeling from the corona epidemic, on top of repeated currency crises.

Yesterday, after being squeezed and squeezed by its American bondholders, Argentina and most of its creditors finally made a deal. Argentina will settle its existing debt at 55 cents on the dollar, allowing for a restructuring and some breathing room for recovery. Argentina’s progressive president, Alberto Fernández, took a fairly hard line with bondholders who were demanding more.

And here’s the most revealing part: Some of Argentina’s creditors, who speculated in its debt, are the same crowd who play financial games with America’s retailers. The law is stacked in their favor in both cases. And in both cases, it’s poor and working people, whether U.S. retail workers or Argentine citizens, who get screwed so that billionaire speculators can get even richer.

I actually wrote a book, Debtors’ Prison, about this double standard in bankruptcy, which dates to the reign of Queen Anne.

Bottom line: We need to reform the bankruptcy laws so that nations have their own version of Chapter 11—and private equity and hedge fund operators can no longer abuse it.