News Topic: CreditSlips

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

Italian sovereign borrowing is increasing, as the costs of dealing with a stalled economy and the pandemic build.  A recipe for disaster?  Turns out that Italian yields (and spreads with the risk free benchmark rate) are actually going down; down in the ... Read full article

Frank Partnoy has an important and unsettling piece in The   Atlantic about how CLOs (securitized syndicated loans, in short) might be at the core of the next bank meltdown, which he sees coming as soon as later this year. Because 2020 was starting to get ... Read full article

Argentina's capacity to trigger outrage in sovereign debt circles is to behold. After nine defaults, thousands of lawsuits, and enough intrigue and screaming matches to break Big Data, wouldn't you think that someone somewhere would learn to ... Read full article

By Mitu Gulati and Mark Weidemaier ... Read full article

Lest anyone thought they could quarantine or protest in peace, no such luck in the sovereign debt world. ... Read full article

My new book,  The Great American Housing Bubble:  What Went Wrong and How We Can Protect Ourselves in the Future  is being released on Tuesday by Harvard University Press. The book is co-authored with my long-time collaborator, Wharton real estate ... Read full article

The English-language press has discovered a long-gestating project to introduce personal bankruptcy law in China. ... Read full article

California's Attorney General has filed a lawsuit  against Betsy Devos challenging the failure to discharge student loans under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The suit asserts that US Ed's failure to create a simple and effective ... Read full article

Prediction: you will begin to see stories about an explosion of chapter 11 filings in May 2020. Well, that is not much of a prediction because I already have seen two. Chapter 11 filings did not explode in May. ... Read full article

The Supreme Court's opinion is out today , and the short answer is that the Board's appointment did not violate the Appointments Clause of the Constitution ( Article II , Section 2, Clause 2), and thus the First Circuit is reversed. ... Read full article

Wall Street Journal today has a story about Hertz having paid out $16 million in retention bonuses before filing for bankruptcy . It seems that several other firms have done the same recently. ... Read full article

While the House HEROES bill's scaled-down student loan forgiveness is unlikely to become law, many essential workers are eligible for student loan cancellation now under existing law. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program covers all police, ... Read full article

My coauthor Ed Balleisen has co-founded a program on consumer lending of interest to Credit Slips readers. Its initial data collection is particularly useful in documenting the North Carolina experience and its implications for other states. ... Read full article

A CapitalOne savings account ad has got me thinking about whether Van Halen has anything to teach regulators. Van Halen is famous for its use of a contract that requires provision of M&Ms for the band , but expressly prohibits provision of any brown ... Read full article