CreditSlips

Best Interest Blog

06/25/20

There's a new bankruptcy blog around:  the Best Interest Blog.  Welcome to the blogosphere!  

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How Many People Have Filed Bankruptcy?

06/22/20

The past few days I had been wondering exactly how many persons in the U.S. have filed bankruptcy. By that, I don't mean how many filed last week, last month, or last year. Rather, how many persons walking around the U.S. have ever filed a bankruptcy case? My estimate is around 10% or 33 million persons. Here is the math.

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David Graeber’s Debt, The First 5000 Years

06/18/20

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 debunking the myth of barter, the story told in introductory economics textbooks that money was spontaneously invented to permit merchants to exchange goods and services in imaginary markets, as an improvement over primitive market economies based on barter.

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Selling CITGO--Timing and Process

06/18/20

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 attachment. Other briefs argue about what an execution sale should look like, if a sale goes forward. An execution sale is typically an informal, auction-on-the-courthouse-steps kind of thing. That’s not the usual way to sell a multi-billion dollar oil company.

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How to Start Closing the Racial Wealth Gap

06/17/20

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 any need for legislation or even notice-and-comment rulemaking.

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Brazilian 5 Year Sovereign Bonds at a 2.875% Yield: Aiyiyiyi

06/16/20

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 recent examples of this bizarre pandemic bubble (here). Why the rush to buy overpriced rubbish?

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Italian Sovereign Debt: Time to Worry or Party?

06/15/20

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 vicinity of zero. (for the WSJ's treatment of this last week, see here).

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Fun with CLOs

06/14/20

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 dull ... 

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Keeping Cosy by the Dumpster Fire: Argentina Reads Its Contracts ... Twice ... Quel Scandale!

06/10/20

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 yawn at another Argentina debt drama. And yet ...

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