Liquidation, or winding up, refers to a process whereby the assets of a business are converted to money. The conversion may be coerced by a legal process to pay off the debt of the business, or to satisfy any other business obligation that the business has not voluntarily satisfied. The person legally put in charge of the implementation of liquidation is called liquidator. The conversion may also be a voluntary action carried out by the business owners. In business and accounting an asset is anything owned which can produce future economic benefit, whether in possession or by right to take possession, by a person or a group acting together, e. ... Wall Street, Manhattan is the location of the New York Stock Exchange and is often used as a symbol for the world of business. ... An example of Money. ... For other uses, see Debt (disambiguation). ...

Liquidation is one of the forms of "insolvency" in the Courts of England and Wales and is used when the other methods of corporate recovery have failed. There are two forms of Liquidation - compulsory (or Court ordered winding-up) and voluntary (creditors or members winding-up). Insolvency is a financial condition experienced by a person or business entity when their assets no longer exceed their liabilities (commonly referred to as balance-sheet insolvency) or when the person or entity can no longer meet its debt obligations when they come due (commonly referred to as cash-flow... Schematic of court system for England and Wales The United Kingdom does not have a single unified judicial system—England and Wales have one system, Scotland another, and Northern Ireland a third. ...

The purpose of a liquidation is to realise the assets of the company in order that the creditors of the company can be paid off.

Although the initial principle of liquidation was that the creditors would be paid off pari passu, i.e. all creditors would receive an equal share of the assets of the company in accordance with the debt they were owed, there are now a number of classes: debenture or fixed charge holders, preferential creditors, floating charge holders and unsecured creditors. Pari passu is a Latin phrase that means at the same pace, and by extension also fairly, without partiality. In structured finance or bond securitization this term refers to two securities having equal rights of payment (i. ... A debenture in finance, is a long term debt instrument used by governments and large companies to obtain funds. ... A floating charge is a form of security (i. ...

Informally, liquidation may be used to refer to any rapid conversion of an asset into cash.