go belly up

Example: “The little record shop went belly up after the rent doubled.”

Origin: Built on something any angler or pond-keeper has seen: a dead fish floats inverted. Decomposition fills the swim bladder with gas while the denser muscle running along the back pulls the spine downward, so the body rolls over and the pale belly surfaces — an unmistakable signal, readable at a distance, that the fish is dead. "Belly up" simply meaning dead is the older figurative use in American English. The now-dominant application to businesses, banks, and ventures that collapse came later and became especially common across the twentieth century, when a failed enterprise could be described as having gone belly up in precisely the way a fish in a tank does: suddenly, visibly, and past any hope of recovery.