CreditSlips

CARES Act mortgage foreclosure and tenant eviction relief

04/01/20

The final text of the act is now available here. The foreclosure relief is in Section 4022 and the eviction moratorium is in Section 4024. Mortgage borrowers with federally related loans (FHA, VA, Farmer's Home, Fannie or Freddie) may request 6 months of forbearance, i.e.

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CARES ACT student loan relief

03/31/20

The CARES Act signed into law last week suspends payments and eliminates interest accrual for all federally-held student loans for six months, through September 30. These measures exclude private loans, privately-held FFEL loans and Perkins loans. The other five subsections of section 3513 mandate important additional relief. Under subsection (c) the six suspended payments (April to September) are treated as paid for purposes of “any loan forgiveness program or loan rehabilitation program” under HEA title IV.

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How to Treat Post-Petition Attorneys' Fees

03/29/20

This is a hyper-technical bankruptcy question that's been bothering me for a while: what happens with post-petition attorneys' fees for undersecured/unsecured creditors after the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Travellers v. PG&E? Specifically, assuming that the post-petition attorneys' fees fees are allowed as an unsecured claim, are they credited against a collateral cushion before or after post-petition interest?  

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PSLF in the time of Coronavirus

03/29/20

The rules for student loan borrowers hoping for Public Service Loan Forgiveness are changing rapidly, and information even on Education Department and CFPB web sites is confusing and rapidly outdated. The CARES Act, section 3513, signed into law on March 27, requires the Secretary of Education to “suspend all payments due” for federally-held student loans until September 30.

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Boer Bonds and the Doctrine of War Debts

03/26/20

Concentrating on just about anything during these days of the coronavirus, let alone academic writing, has been a trifle difficult these.  A splendid new paper on Boer Bonds by Kim Oosterlinck and Marie Van Gansbeke (here) did, however, get me focused (for a bit).  And that’s in part because their paper has potentially turned upside down what I thought was an established part of customary international law.  That is, the law of

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ECB + CACs: Fig Leaf Aflutter

03/25/20

Further to Mitu's post about the European Central Bank's bond-buying bellyache, let us linger on the rationale for the 33.33% limit on the central bank's holdings of a euro area sovereign bond series. 

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Mitch McConnell Is Robbing Taxpayers to Bailout the Rich

03/24/20

There’s a lot of moving parts of the economic Rube Goldberg machine that is the latest McConnell bailout bill, but if you step back and look at the big picture, what becomes clear is that the bill is robbing taxpayers to bail out the rich. Everything in the bill is ultimately taxpayer funded.

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Do CACs Constrain the ECB From Buying Even More Bonds?

03/24/20

Answer: No

(This post borrows heavily from the ideas of my co author, Ugo Panizza, of the international economics department of the Graduate Institute in Geneva).

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Bailout Oversight Lessons from 2008

03/24/20

Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO's Policy Director and former Vice-Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, has a really important column about the oversight lessons from the 2008 bailout. It was a struggle to get the Obama administration to be forthcoming about what it was doing with the bailout. It will be a much bigger challenge in the current political environment. Read Damon's column here.

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How to Help Small Businesses...Fast

03/24/20

A debt collection moratorium operates as float, which is needed to buy time until the relief checks start flowing. In other words, a debt collection moratorium is a form of stimulus. My New York Times op-ed explaining this is here.  

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