CreditSlips

MBS Settlements--Following the Money

08/25/14

Financial crisis litigation has been going on for several years now and has been resulting in lots of piecemeal settlements. As a result, it's easy to miss the big picture.  There's actually been quite a lot of settlements covering a fair amount of money.  (Not all of it is real money, of course, but the notionals add up).  

By my counting, there have been some $94.6 billion in settlements announced or proposed to date dealing with mortgages and MBS.  

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Toward a Universal Ability to Repay Requirement

08/23/14

The latest consumer financial product to come under the regulatory microscope is subprime auto lending, which has seen a boom in the last few years.  The subprime auto market's boom underscores a real problem in consumer financial regulation: different consumer financial products have developed different substantive regulatory regimes that are not justified by differences in the products.

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Criminal Law and Financial Distress

08/21/14

I commend to Slips readers Alex Tabarrok's post over at Marginal Revolution entitled "Ferguson and the Modern Debtor’s Prison." 

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Argentina and the Swap Puzzle

08/20/14

President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has proposed a law authorizing the executive to reroute payments on the restructured bonds out of New York, and to offer all bondholders local-law bonds on 2010 exchange terms. All the buzz has been about the swap.

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Escalating to Nowhere?

08/20/14

Here is the proposed law rerouting payments under the restructured, now-defaulted Argentine bonds away from New York. Contrary to some reports, it is not a swap, just a unilateral attempt at firing Bank of New York Mellon and substituting Banco Nacion in Buenos Aires (or an alternative, if voted by the bondholders). The proposal would also reopen the 2010 swap to the remaining holdouts.

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A National Debt Registry?

08/16/14

There's a fascinating long magazine piece in the NYTimes about consumer debt sales and collection. The piece ends by asking why we don't have a national debt registry, as if that were the solution to all debt collection problems.

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Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld

08/15/14

That's the name of a new book by Jake Halpern coming out in October. The New York Times has an excerpt on their site. If the excerpt is anything like the book, it's going to be gripping.

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