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 ... Read full article
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 ... Read full article
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 ... Read full article
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 ... Read full article
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 ... Read full article
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 ? ... Read full article
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 ... Read full article
Welcome to 2013 Credit Slips Readers! It’s time to think about our debtor/creditor future, what to keep and what to leave behind. Sometimes I ask my fellow bloggers if they made any financially-related resolutions but usually everyone say no, so this ... Read full article
Wi ... Read full article
Immigration issues continue to be a major political football, and the work of Jean Braucher, Bob Lawless, and Dov Cohen on race in bankruptcy garnered front-page NY Times attention this year. This makes the publication of Chrystin Ondersma 's paper ... Read full article
There's an interesting new paper out on the role of the Community Reinvestment Act and the housing bubble. The paper, called "Did the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Lead to Risky Lending?" is by Sumit Agrawal, Efraim Benmelech, Nittai ... Read full article
Every so often in the United States, I come across a discusion of the choice of the word "cramdown" (cram down, cram-down) to describe either stripping down liens or confirming a repayment plan without creditor consent. The basic thrust of these ... Read full article
The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg has ordered Ghana to release Argentina's tall ship Libertad. ... Read full article
Which is available here . Slow going: ... Read full article
How's that for a catchy title? I was inspired by an interesting post over at Lawfare , where the author notes that the term "assassination" has a specialized meaning in legal circles – namely, it involves an unlawful killing – whereas in ... Read full article
Until a month or so ago, you could have asked almost any economist or political scientist whether sovereign borrowers worry about legal enforcement, and, by way of answer, you would gotten a technical version of "Huh?" Academics disagree about ... Read full article
Every morning, I go through the list of comments and unpublish all the comment spam. Typically, the comment spam tries to engage with the blog content in what I can only suppose is an attempt to not look like spam. In this morning's comment queue was ... Read full article
