Investment Banking interview preparation
Every question below is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers are written the way you would actually say them out loud — answer first, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 100
- Firms
- 46
- Updated
- September 2026
062What makes a company distressed, and why restructuring?EvercoreRestructuring · New York · 2025Rothschild & CoRestructuring · London · 2025
Say this
Distress is when a company cannot service its obligations from its cash flow, or cannot refinance a maturity. Distinguish operational distress, where the business is broken, from financial distress, where a good business carries the wrong capital structure.
Then walk it
- The observable triggers: interest coverage falling toward one, a covenant breach, a maturity wall it cannot refinance, bonds trading at a deep discount to par, and a credit downgrade.
- Financial distress means the operations work but the balance sheet does not. The fix is a balance sheet fix: amend and extend, a debt-for-equity swap, a rights issue, a liability management exercise.
- Operational distress means the business itself is impaired, by a lost contract, structural decline or a broken cost base. No amount of refinancing solves that; you need an operational turnaround or a sale.
- The distinction drives everything about the advice, so I would establish it first in any situation.
- On why restructuring specifically: the work is analytically harder than M&A because you are valuing the enterprise and then allocating it across a capital structure, and the negotiation is multi-party and adversarial. It is also counter-cyclical, which is a genuine reason to want to be in it.
Where candidates lose it
Not separating operational from financial distress. That single distinction is the core intellectual content of restructuring, and a restructuring interviewer will hear immediately whether you have it. Also, do not answer 'why restructuring' with 'because it is counter-cyclical' alone; that reads as cynical.
Expect next
- What is the recovery on each claim?
- Do you understand what we actually do here?
- What were the recent developments in the debt space?
Reported by candidates at Evercore (Restructuring, New York, 2025); Rothschild & Co (Restructuring, London, 2025). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.