CreditSlips

No More Bailouts

06/30/20

I have a new white paper out from the Roosevelt Institute's Great Democracy Initiative. The paper, which is co-authored with Lindsay Owens and Ganesh Sitaraman, proposes a standing emergency economic stabilization authority to provide an off-the-shelf immediately available response to common problems that recur in national economic crises.

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Seila Law v CFPB: Winners and Losers

06/29/20

The Supreme Court's long-awaited decision about the CFPB's constitutionality is out. It's a tricky opinion to parse politically. The Court, in a 5-4 partisan decision, held that the CFPB's structure violates the separation of powers because of the for-cause only removal provision for the CFPB Director in conjunction with the Bureau's other features. Accordingly, the Court found that the Director must be removable at will. Here's my attempt to lay out the winners and losers.

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Puerto Rico as a State?

06/26/20

The House of Representatives has just voted to make the District of Columbia a state. Obviously the Senate half of the process might have to wait until next year, at least.

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Best Interest Blog

06/25/20

There's a new bankruptcy blog around:  the Best Interest Blog.  Welcome to the blogosphere!  

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How Many People Have Filed Bankruptcy?

06/22/20

The past few days I had been wondering exactly how many persons in the U.S. have filed bankruptcy. By that, I don't mean how many filed last week, last month, or last year. Rather, how many persons walking around the U.S. have ever filed a bankruptcy case? My estimate is around 10% or 33 million persons. Here is the math.

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David Graeber’s Debt, The First 5000 Years

06/18/20

I’m just getting around to reading a 2014 book some Creditslips readers may be familiar with, Debt: The First 5000 Years. In this utterly fascinating work, Anthropologist David Graeber exhaustively recounts the history of debt and money. He begins by debunking the myth of barter, the story told in introductory economics textbooks that money was spontaneously invented to permit merchants to exchange goods and services in imaginary markets, as an improvement over primitive market economies based on barter.

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Selling CITGO--Timing and Process

06/18/20

Yesterday was the deadline for opening briefs regarding the writ of attachment and potential execution sale of PDVSA’s shares in PDVH, the parent company of US oil refiner CITGO. As expected, Venezuela has asked the court to set aside the writ of attachment. Other briefs argue about what an execution sale should look like, if a sale goes forward. An execution sale is typically an informal, auction-on-the-courthouse-steps kind of thing. That’s not the usual way to sell a multi-billion dollar oil company.

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How to Start Closing the Racial Wealth Gap

06/17/20

I have an article out in The American Prospect about How to Start Closing the Racial Wealth Gap. Unlike a lot of writing bemoaning the racial wealth gap, this piece has a concrete reform that could be undertaken on day 1 of a Biden administration without any need for legislation or even notice-and-comment rulemaking.

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Brazilian 5 Year Sovereign Bonds at a 2.875% Yield: Aiyiyiyi

06/16/20

Paul Krugman had a piece in yesterday’s NYT about the lunacy in the stock market, where a bankrupt company like Hertz is merrily issuing new stock (here).  Matt Levine of Bloomberg has similarly, and hilariously, discussed the Hertz case and other recent examples of this bizarre pandemic bubble (here). Why the rush to buy overpriced rubbish?

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