[marvin]

Perfectly agree that this is preferable to bankruptcy. I might have worded myself ambiguously -- the emergency government loan might be a sort of bailout, but it wasn't a gift to the shareholders. When I hear bailout, I normally expect the latter.

The government is expecting the loan to be repaid, and to make that expectation likely, they're requiring the company to use market mechanisms to strengthen its balance sheet. The result in this case is that existing shareholders are practically wiped out.

In the case of Norwegian, this is pretty clear-cut. They've been on the verge of bankruptcy before, and their losses now are mostly due to foreign routes shutting down. Even if you accept the somewhat dubious rhetoric that compensation is mandated when losses are partly due to government involvement, it doesn't apply to this case. There was no way they could service their debt during the Covid crisis.

Some sharehoders were expecting the government to give an unconditional loan to be defaulted on later, or participate in a stock offering at prices high enough to preserve their ownership percentage.

This is an unequivocal message to shareholders not to expect that sort of rescue operation in the future. Run your company with a debt ratio that will let you survive unexpected hardships, or accept the risk of facing such hardships on your own.