CreditSlips

No news as yet about whether the Supreme Court has reached a decision on Argentina's pending petition for certiorari. In the interim, however, the district judge decided to enter this order. Recall that the injunction against Argentina includes a "no workaround" part that forbids the country to take steps to evade the injunction.

I testified on housing finance reform today before Senate Banking. It was a strange experience being in the Hart and Dirksen Senate Office Buildings with the shutdown. The halls were eerily empty. Fortunately, the Senate Banking Committee is continuing to do the people's business.

Year Six of the great foreclosure crisis came to a close on June 30 with no real end in sight.  Five million homes have been foreclosed and another million or more were surrendered by distressed home owners in short sales or otherwise.  We are still far from returning to a stable mortgage market.  In normal times (from 1942 to 2005 for example) about 1% of mortgages are in the foreclosure process at any given time, and another 4% or so are delinquent.  At June

I'm floored that Attorney General Eric Holder was willing to take a private meeting with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jaimie Dimon while the bank is under criminal investigation and negotiating an enormous civil (and possibly criminal) settlement.  I can't recall something like this meeting happening before.

It’s become fashionable to ascribe the decline in big chapter 11 cases to the low interest rates created by the Federal Reserve. If so, yesterday’s actions suggest a revival in the restructuring trade is still further off.