CreditSlips

About the Student Loan Forgiveness Price Tag...

04/23/19

Senator Warren's student loan forgiveness proposal has a lot of scolds moaning about the immorality of debt forgiveness, the unfairness to those who paid their debts, and complaining about the price tag. It's pretty obvious that none of those folks know anything about how the federal student loan system works. If they did, they'd know the we crossed the debt forgiveness Rubicon long, long ago.

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Student Loan Borrowing Is Different

04/23/19

Education finance and student loan forgiveness have been getting a lot of attention the last couple of days because of our former co-blogger's loan forgiveness proposal.  I'm not going to address the merits of that proposal here.  Instead, I want to make a simple point that many of the critics of Senator Warren's proposal don't seem to understand:  student loan borrowing is materially different from other types of borrowing, such that the borrower has no idea what s/he is getting into.

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The Second Circuit Got It Right in Madden v. Midland Funding

04/18/19

Professor Peter Conti-Brown of the Wharton School has written a short article for Brookings decrying the Second Circuit’s 2015 Madden v. Midland Funding decision. Professor Conti-Brown doesn’t like the Madden decision for two reasons. First, he thinks its wrong on the law.

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Plan Optionality: Extreme Edition (A Pick-Your-Own-Adventure Restructuring with Shopko)

04/17/19

I've seen some Chapter 11 plans that include some optionality, such as allowing the debtor, based on subsequent market conditions or litigation outcomes to undertake a transaction or change the way a class is paid.

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Consumer Bankruptcy Reform ... and American Xenophobia?

04/16/19

I hope I'm not stepping on Bob's toes in announcing the public release of the long-awaited report of the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy.

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DebtCon3: A Curtain Raiser and a Love Story

04/11/19

DebtCon3, the Third Interdisciplinary Sovereign Debt Research DebtconX

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P2P Payments Fraud

04/08/19

AARP has a nice piece (featuring yours truly) about the consumer fraud risks with peer-to-peer (p2p) payment systems like Zelle and Venmo.  

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The Local Law Advantage in the Euro Area: How Much of a Constraint are the Existing CACs?

04/03/19

Collective Action Clauses for the Euro Area were mandated, starting in January 2013.  Yes, bizarrely, even though the introduction of Euro CACs was literally the single biggest innovation in sovereign bond contract terms in the history of this market, no one seems to have a clear idea of how these CACs (contractual restructuring mechanisms) are actually going to operate.  Specifically, if a Euro area country needs to restructure some day soon (e.g., Italy?), and it has a subset of bonds with these CACs (by next year, Italy will have something close

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Nonpartisan Supreme Court Expansion

04/02/19

My latest argument for a substantial nonpartisan expansion (i.e., not a partisan "packing") of the Supreme Court, which would require the Court to sit in randomly assigned panels, is up on Bloomberg Law.   Among other benefits, it would enable the court to hear more cases, so the bankruptcy world might finally rid itself of some of the lingering circuit splits (e.g., equitable mootness or actual vs. hypothetical test for assumption). 

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