The high was between 2006 and 2011 (including both years). Interestingly it started way before the financial crises, when the interest rates were still high. The with the cheap money as the interest rates were declining year over year the bankruptcy rates were declining as well. A common understand of this is, because companies that were on a decline anyways could live longer because they were able to borrow cheap money. But this didn't really helped the companies to reinvent themselves it helped them to stay afloat. But at one point, they cannot live anymore.
So finally it is some kind of a cleanup. But it doesn't mean that the bankruptcy numbers soar.
Try to take a look into the startup arena. Does the number of bankruptcies in startups soar, because the time of cheap money is over? Or is it more that the numbers are coming back into a normal level and in the last years of cheap money, it was too easy to keep companies afloat, which never really had a sustainable business model.