CreditSlips

Where's the Bear?

04/24/17

For all of the attention that has been given to the Fearless Girl and Charging Bull statues on Wall Street, I've been marveling at what's missing from the picture:  a bear. It's not just that an ursine addition adds whimsy to virtually everything. It's what its absence says about our market culture. 

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Judge Selection in Municipal Bankruptcy and PROMESA

04/23/17

In light of the timeline on the Puerto Rico debt situation, I have just posted on SSRN a contribution to the ABLJ/ABA symposium last fall.

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Global Preferences

04/14/17

An important opinion by one of our most knowledgeable bankruptcy judges, Judge Bernstein in Manhattan, may have reached the right result by the wrong path in deciding if a foreign debtor’s Chapter 7 trustee can avoid a foreign transfer to a foreign creditor. In re Ampal-American Israel Corp., 562 B.R. 601 (2017) (Ampal). Because the opinion’s reasoning may seriously weaken section 547 of the Bankruptcy Code, it is worth imposing on the reader’s time for a brief analysis.

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Secured Transactions in the Funny Pages

04/14/17

From the always wonderful Pearls Before Swine, some humor for the secured lending crowd.

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New Report on Car Insurance Redlining

04/07/17

Empirical studies have shown that minorities pay more for goods and services, and that they pay more to finance their purchases of those goods and services -- for instance, through subprime home and auto loans. Machine Bias, a new study from ProPublica and Consumer Reports, adds car insurance premiums to the list of what minorities can expect to pay more for.

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Katie, Remember Us When

04/06/17

It is with incredibly mixed feelings that I pass along to our readers that Professor Katie Porter is leaving our blog. Katie was one of the original bloggers on Credit Slips back in 2006. There were a number of us who were working together in an intensive data-collection phase of a research project, and a blog was a great way to have some intellectual interaction that was more than how to word a survey question. It worked and somehow the blog stayed around. Katie's posts are insightful, thought-provoking, and witty.

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Foreclosure Crisis Update

04/05/17

As the subprime foreclosure crisis grinds down slowly (there are still roughly 3 million pre-crisis subprime mortgages outstanding, many of them delinquent), and the HAMP program sunsets, the time has come to appraise the total damage done.

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More Thoughts on Ukraine

04/04/17

Having had a few days to digest the ruling awarding summary judgment to the trustee (suing at the direction of the Russian government), I wanted to elaborate on my earlier thoughts about the court's reasoning.

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Ukraine's Loss: A Skid, Not a Crash

03/31/17

Mark posted a lucid analysis of Ukraine's loss to Russia in London yesterday (full 107-pp opinion here).

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