CreditSlips

A Rock and a Hard Place Await for Me

01/09/13

Some thoughts on the tough spot AIG's board finds itself in, and how it could have handled the PR angle better, over at Dealbook.

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Small Bank Exemptions

01/09/13

Community banks and credit unions are the darlings of Congress in the financial services industry. This is quite understandable--they play an important economic role in their communities and have a much greater civic presence than the big banks. The president of the local community bank is much more likely to be involved in major civic organizations than the Bank of America branch manager. As a result, a parallel regulatory system has developed for community banks and credit unions.

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Hackers, Bank Records, and Going Paperless

01/09/13

The traditional allocation of losses at a bank was first loss bank, second loss government, but never losses to insured depositors. To wit, if Willie Sutton robs a bank, the money lost is the bank's, not that of any particular depositor.  If bank fails, then the FDIC steps in pays out the insured depositors. It does so on the basis of the bank's books and records.  

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Financial Dermatologists

01/09/13

The Yellow Pages that arrived at my door yesterday. This strange book is an object of great fascination to a generation that has grown up watching YouTube and relying on Wikipedia instead of World Book and Brittanica.  It was pure Kismet, but when I opened the volume, it was to Lawyers-Bankruptcy.  It turned out to be an enlightening experience. The Yellow Pages is perhaps the only place one can find concentrated advertising by bankruptcy (and other) lawyers.

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Blogging Like It's 2009 -- Now with Facebook!

01/08/13

It seemed time to catch up with the rest of the world. My kids tell me there is this thing called "Facebook" that might just catch on. We now have a Facebook page. Perhaps even better, you can "Like" or "Share" individual posts, or you can "Like" the whole blog from the button on the right. For Facebook neophytes like me, the difference between a "Like" and a "Share" is who sees your activity in Facebook.

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OCC review whistleblower

01/05/13

Adam Levitin predicted here that the "independent" review of banks' foreclosure files ordered by the OCC in the wake of the robosigning scandals would be a sham, based among other things on the adverts to hire the reviewers.  Now, one apparently overqualified reviewer has told his

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Today's Bankruptcy Statistics Challenge

01/04/13

A friend wrote me and pointed out that Chief Justice Roberts's annual report noted that bankruptcy filings had declined in "89 of the 90 bankruptcy courts." He wondered which court was the exception, and for that sort of information, he wrote me.

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An Empirical Overview of Modern Sovereign Debt Litigation

01/04/13

In December, I attended a terrific conference examining historical parallels to the European debt crisis. I was there to talk about the early-20th century antecedents of modern collective action clauses, the magic contractual potion - or is it snake oil?

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