CreditSlips

Thanks for the chance to post.

04/20/15

Thanks to the folks who run Credit Slips for the opportunity to post.  I hope to be back in a few months with musings about the following: 

[more]

Ukraine's Bond Restructuring: Surgery, Conspiracy, and Campaign

04/17/15

Debt restructuring is the second largest source of outside financing for Ukraine’s new IMF program.

[more]

Russia's Bond: It's Official! (... and Private ... and Anything Else It Wants to Be ...)

04/17/15

Ukraine's bond restructuring talks are in high gear, and, as ever, Russia is trouble du jour. Not only is it threatening to hold out in the bond deal and take Ukraine to arbitration, Russia also seems poised to block IMF disbursements to Ukraine using an arcane Fund policy on "lending into arrears." My hunch is that this last risk is overblown, and in any event should not drive IMF policy or Ukraine's restructuring strategy. 

[more]

Dodd Frank and Pink Champagne

04/16/15

Over at Dealb%k, I argue that section 117 of Dodd-Frank is more Siouxsie and the Banshees than Eagles.

[more]

Lessons For Consumer Protection From The World Of Inclusive Capitalism

04/16/15

Lately I have been teaching courses with names such as "Global and Economic Justice" and "History, Impacts and Regulation of Consumer Credit" instead of "Bankruptcy," "Secured Transactions" and "Chapter 11 Reorganizations." So I have been reading different books and listening to different speakers.

[more]

Dodd-Frank 2.0: The Unfinished Business of Financial Reform

04/16/15

Our former co-blogger, Senator Elizabeth Warren, delivered an incredibly important speech yesterday laying out the work still to be done on financial reform. This speech is a bigger deal than Senator Warren's Antonio Weiss speech or her famous Citibank speech. This speech is a blueprint for Dodd-Frank 2.0.  It lays out a detailed vision of the challenges for reform work going forward:

[more]

Who is Helping Consumers With Defaulted Student Loans?

04/16/15

Clearly, the biggest surprise in consumer borrowing since the crash has been the explosive expansion of student loan debt. It has surpassed both auto lending and credit card lending. And, since it ties with Payday Lending and pre-crash sub-prime mortgage lending for the thinnest underwriting there are defaults aplenty. 

[more]

Can We Count on Macro-Economists to Analyze the Impacts of Inequality?

04/15/15

Prior to the crash, only a very few macro-economists were studying consumer borrowing and fewer still were investigating inequality of income or of wealth as an important macro-economic factor. Work in macro-economics is done at academic institutions, the Fed, think tanks and government and private enterprises. Historically, very few PhD dissertations in macro-economics dealt with consumer finance or consumer spending or inequality issues.

[more]

Bankruptcy Lawyers Have Right to Work

04/14/15

 In the debate in Wisconsin over the  Right to Work bill, the legislators opposed to the bill questioned why no businesses were testifying in support of the law, if it was--as stated--going to drive business growth.

[more]

Why Has Chapter 11 Failed as a Reorganizing Chapter?

04/14/15

The ABI has spent thousands of hours on its Chapter 11 Commission Report; the National Bankruptcy Conference is hard at work on its "Rethinking Chapter 11" project. Underlying these and other such efforts is an overwhelming frustration with the failure of Chapter 11, under current circumstances to empower true reorganization. Hard to believe but it was not always this way. During the first decade or two of the Bankruptcy Code it seemed to be working pretty well; in fact many courts were unwilling to consider quick sales of the entire business.

[more]