Belly up?

Reader question:

Please explain “belly up” in this sentence: More than 700 U.S. companies went belly up in 2025.

My comments:

In 2025, more than 700 American companies went bust, i.e. bankrupt.

Due to harsh economic conditions and so forth, hundreds companies felt the squeeze. They could not make ends meet and decided to call it quits.

They declared bankruptcy and went out of business.

In short, they went belly up.

By “belly up”, these companies are likened to dead fish showing their white bellies while floating on the surface of water, be it in a pond, lake or river.

Live fish, of course, swim with their dark-colored back on top and white belly down. When they’re dying, however, they begin to show their down side, so to speak, because they no longer have the power to maintain body control.

Other dead or dying animals show their belly, too, of course.

Anyways, hence the idiom, belly up or belly-up, meaning dead, defeated, and lifeless.

In other words, doomed and done for.

All we need, actually, is a few media examples to enable us to really come to grips with “belly up”, both literally and idiomatically. And here they are:

1. If the sun is shining down on the verdant hills of Henry County, Virginia, chances are that Janice Merkel can be found on the side of the road somewhere, waving at the traffic from a lawn chair under a giant sign: “TRUMP GEAR”.

On a sweltering day in early July, she sits just feet from the traffic hurtling past in front of a motorcycle shop. Truckers blast their horns in approval as they thunder past.

“I’ve noticed a shift, I’m getting more honks and waves,” says the 48-year-old mother of two. “I’m actually disappointed I’m not getting flipped off.”

Since she began selling six weeks ago, Merkel has become something of an unofficial pollster for the people who stop to peruse her selection of (unofficial) Trump T-shirts and hats emblazoned with slogans like, “Build That Wall” and “Finally Someone With Balls”.

“The main viewpoint is they just don’t want Hillary,” she says. “That is the biggest comment. We just have to get rid of Obama, we have to get rid of the Clintons. And they’ll vote for Trump just to get rid of her.”

The people of Henry County – hundreds of miles away from the increasingly Democratic-leaning parts of northern Virginia closer to Washington – have long memories. They remember the heyday of the local economy in the 1960s and ’70s, when there were so many manufacturing jobs that you could quit one in the morning and have another by after lunch, as the local saying goes.

But then came globalisation, the North American Free Trade Agreement – ratified by potential first husband, former President Bill Clinton – and the textile plants and the furniture factories packed up for Mexico or went belly up. Unemployment hit 20%. When the US was declared officially in a recession, external in 2008, Henry County residents grumbled that they'd already been in one for 10 years.

Today, some locals would dearly love to stop bemoaning the job losses and the empty factories, which at this point have been shut so long an entire generation has grown up never knowing what it was like when the area was booming. But locals have yet to forgive the Clintons.

“No way I’d vote for Hillary Clinton,” says Andy Turner, a cemetery owner who drops by Merkel’s stand to buy two Trump yard signs. “If she was running by herself it just wouldn’t happen.”

- US election: Under the skin of Trump country, BBC.com, July 15, 2016.

2. At the end of the apocalypse, after the sun has fried every flower and tree, as the last skyscraper turns to dust, when each extant cockroach has gone belly-up with x’es for eyes, there will be one man standing tall, or somewhat tall: Tom Cruise is forever, and if that idea may have seemed mortifying 40-odd years ago, when he was mugging his way through thinly disguised navy recruitment ads or grinning and grinding in his skivvies to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” it’s more palatable now. Cruise has never been a great or subtle actor, but he has grown into a perfectly watchable one, and that has come to mean more at a time when the movies are shrinking, literally and metaphorically. He’s the star attraction of the seventh Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning Part One, and he carries the film ably on his back, along with his always-at-the-ready parachute. Cruise, still in love with what big mainstream movies used to be, has become a chivalric dreamer, striving to ensure their survival by sheer will. Maybe he can pull it off and maybe he can’t. But at least there’s some pleasure to be had in watching him try.

If you’re fond of MacGuffins, you’ll love Dead Reckoning Part One, whose central thingie is a two-piece key that can be used to control an instance of artificial intelligence gone rogue, a manmade smarty-pants that has beehived into an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity known, cleverly, as the Entity. Basically, it’s all just an excuse for Cruise – returning as Impossible Mission Force veteran Ethan Hunt – to do stuff like ride motorcycles off cliffs and drive teeny-tiny cars down Rome’s Spanish Steps. Cruise’s devotion to practical action and his insistence on doing most of his own stunts, many of them quite dangerous, are already the stuff of legend, or at least a bunch of press releases, and it’s not giving too much away to say that the plot of Dead Reckoning Part One – directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who has been pulling the franchise’s various strings and levers since 2015’s Rogue Nation – is virtually unfollowable after about the first third. The story exists only as flimsy interstitial tissue between the Tom-centric stunts, but maybe that’s enough. Ostensibly greater movies have given us less.

As it is, the action in Dead Reckoning zips from the desert to the office to Rome to Venice to the Austrian Alps – the locations alone are transportive, even if the plot is a mess. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames return as Ethan’s sidekicks Benji and Luther, and the three of them make almost as many solemn pronouncements about loyalty and family and friendship as Vin Diesel does in the Fast and Furious movies. Ethan stands by his team; he’s willing, he reminds us more than once, to die for them, and that includes any newbie who might enter the fold. In this case, that would be Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a pickpocket extraordinaire and sleight-of-hand expert who, at any given point in the movie, may or may not have the all-important half-key. The point is to keep it out of the hands of Ethan’s adversaries, which include Vanessa Kirby’s Alanna, AKA the White Widow, and an acrobatic assassin, Paris, played by Pom Klementieff. Ethan’s biggest enemy, though, is evil silver fox Gabriel (Esai Morales), who seeks the key to unleash chaos upon the world. Or something.

- Tom Cruise Is Doing the Most to Try to Save the Movies in the New Mission Impossible, Time.com, July 6, 2023.

3. Jennifer and Dean Bye were just getting by before Hurricane Ida slammed into southern Louisiana in 2021. The couple own a house in a comfortable subdivision in Paulina, a town about an hour west of New Orleans, that they share with their three kids. They had their challenges before the storm – Jennifer had recently been diagnosed with uterine cancer around the same time that one of their children was diagnosed with nonverbal autism – but the Byes were making it work. Then Ida turned everything upside down.

“The living room fell in and everything had to be gutted,” Jennifer, a nursing assistant, said. “We lost everything we owned.”

After pummeling the Caribbean, Hurricane Ida made its U.S. landfall on August 29. The storm had evolved from a Category 1 into a Category 4 in the span of just 24 hours, a rapid intensification powered in part by unusually hot seawater in the Gulf of Mexico. It dumped a foot of rain on Louisiana and meandered north, blowing through 17 states before it reentered the Atlantic Ocean north of Maine. The storm, one of the strongest to hit Louisiana on record, left a trail of devastation in its wake: More than 100 people died and economic losses totalled $75 billion.

Four years later, the Byes are still living in a damaged house. Patches of tattered plywood siding are exposed to the elements. Inside, the windowsills are blackened with mildew. The kids play in a stripped living room, bare cement and grout underfoot. Fast-food wrappers and trash mingle with packing boxes and pulled-up carpet. The other houses in the neighborhood are neatly manicured, but the Byes’ house is still a wreck.

On paper, the family did everything right. They had homeowners insurance through an A+ rated, Better Business Bureau-accredited insurer called FedNat Insurance Company and kept up with their payments – some of the highest in the country.

What they didn’t account for was what might happen if their insurance company couldn’t make its payments.

In recent years, extreme weather events supercharged by climate change have revealed how fragile the country’s property insurance landscape is – and how quickly insurance companies can go from profitable to nonexistent. In the five years between 2018 and 2023, more than 1.9 million home insurance policies were dropped in disaster-prone states like Florida, Louisiana, California, and Texas by insurance companies that either voluntarily withdrew from those states or went bankrupt. FedNat was one of seven Florida-based property insurers to go bankrupt during 2021 and 2022 due to insurmountable financial troubles. In Louisiana, 11 insurance companies were declared insolvent between 2021 and 2022.

The resulting scramble to secure insurance in high-risk areas often means homeowners face a daunting choice: high premiums in a private market that is loath to insure them, or limited coverage through state-mandated insurance programs that can cost just as much or more.

“How do you do that to people?” Bye asked. “How do you insure people in the South, take all of these premiums, and then just belly-up?”

- They survived the hurricane. Their insurance company didn’t. Grist.org, November 4, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）