Bankruptcy Blogs

After focusing on the substance of personal bankruptcy laws around the world for years, I'm now convinced that I should instead have been focusing on institutions and procedure. Reports of the first year of the Russian personal bankruptcy process convince me further. In a paper anticipating the new law, I predicted potential process hangups, but I badly underestimated the degree to which procedural complications would waste time and resources and undermine the system's new effectiveness.

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Goodbye Dodd-Frank: President-elect Trump's transition team said it would dismantle the Obama administration's signature post-crisis financial reform law. Republicans are "salivating over a wish list of Dodd-Frank changes that until recently stood little chance of avoiding President Barack Obama's veto pen," the Wall Street Journal said. "The lineup includes everything from regulatory exemptions for community banks and regional banks to a new regime for insurers and asset managers to curbs on the...

Goldman Sachs' latest class of partners includes 19 women, which is as high as that number has ever been; a Trump adviser says Janet Yellen isn't going anywhere, for now; and what the election taught us about the depth of the gender divide. Also, Thasunda Duckett, Margaret Keane and Christine Lagarde.

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Winner and losers: Small and medium-size banks are likely to be the biggest winners in a Donald Trump administration. Big banks? Not so much. "One thing investors can likely be confident in is that substantial deregulation is coming for smaller banks," the Wall Street Journal said. There is already a bipartisan consensus that smaller banks are overly burdened by Dodd-Frank regulations, while there are several proposals that would raise the threshold for...

The new administration and Republican-controlled Congress have a historic opportunity in 2017 to bring banking into the 21st century.