CreditSlips

Arbitration in Bankruptcy -- Discharge, the Easy Case

02/18/19

Now that the major work of the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy is done, I seem to have this thing called "time" again. One of the topics that I have been wanting to post about is arbitration in bankruptcy. If I follow through on my intentions, this will be the first of a few posts on arbitration in bankruptcy.

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ABI Consumer Commission Report Is Nearly Finished

02/18/19

For the past two years, the American Bankruptcy Institute's Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy has been hard at work. As the Commission's reporter, I am very happy to say that the work is nearly finished. All of the drafting is completed, and we are in the final stages of the editing process.

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Student Loan Servicing Fail (continued)

02/14/19

The U.S. Education Department is doing a lousy job of overseeing the private companies servicing $1.1 TRILLION of federal student loans. That is the gist of the Inspector General's findings in a new report. Among other problems, the IG found that servicers were not telling borrowers about available repayment options, and were miscalculating income-based repayment amounts.

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More data, please!

02/13/19

Effective reform requires detailed knowledge of exactly what's being reformed. This is especially true of complex systems like corporate and individual insolvency regimes, with numerous inputs and outputs and carefully counterbalanced policy objectives. Two recent papers accentuate an acute weakness in global insolvency reform development--a lack of reliable and comprehensive data on the operation of existing systems, which will of course infect future planned procedures, as well.

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New (from the archives) paper on determinants of personal bankruptcy

02/13/19

This working paper is a longitudinal empirical study of lower-income homeowners, including a subset of bankruptcy filers, produced with an interdisciplinary team of cross-campus colleagues, including Professor Roberto Quercia, director of UNC's

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New Paper: Consumer Protection After the Global Financial Crisis

02/13/19

Historian Ed Balleisen and I have just posted a paper of interest to Credit Slips readers who are interested in consumer protection, financial crises, and inputs into post-crisis policymaking more generally. I will let the abstract speak for itself:

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Republic and PDVSA Bonds: No Trades With Friends and Family

02/04/19

Mark Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati

A few days ago, we wondered why the U.S. government had constrained U.S. holders of PDVSA debt instruments to sell only to non-U.S. parties. The constraint would likely kill liquidity for these bonds and impose losses on bondholders. But why? And why impose the constraint on PDVSA bonds but not the Republic’s bonds?

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