News Topic: municipal bankruptcy

It has become something like conventional wisdom that the pending SCOTUS case involving the Recovery Act is no longer relevant. After all, the giant interest payment due July 1 is largely attributable to GO bonds , and the Commonwealth itself is not even ... Read full article

I'm still working through the new draft of the PROMESA bill , which readers will recall provides new restructuring options for US territories (including Puerto Rico, of course). But I have to say I got a chuckle out of proposed section 303(3), which ... Read full article

After taking a look at titles III and VI of the new draft , some quick observations: ... Read full article

It appears that the House legislation has bogged down .  Two or three issues keep coming up, none of which make a whole lot of sense: ... Read full article

The revised draft PROMESA bill (available  here ) is now under debate in Congress. The bill appears to respond to some early criticisms, although its length and complexity obscures answers to some important questions. Under the circumstances, it seems ... Read full article

I again offer some initial thoughts on the revised draft bill , now subject to much debate in Congress: ... Read full article

The question is whether it is playing against the House of Representatives, and its heavy handed PROMESA draft bill, or its creditors. In any event, according to the Financial Times , Puerto Rico's legislature has passed a law giving its governor ... Read full article

Some quick thoughts on the "bankruptcy" part of the proposed bill: ... Read full article

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I did not realize that a US state had defaulted on its bonds, offering a historical comparative example of the difficulties facing Puerto Rico, its creditors, and mostly its citizens if the mess there is not subjected to an orderly, judicially supervised ... Read full article

So Noah Feldman has a column up on Bloomberg that suggests that section 903(1) of the Code should clearly apply to the Commonwealth. It's a sensible argument, if you read that section entirely in isolation and know nothing about the overall structure ... Read full article

The transcript can be found here .  Based on my initial read, it seems like the First Circuit might be reversed, which opens up all the issues Jacoby noted earlier (namely, will the statute pass Contracts Clause review – assuming the Clause even applies ... Read full article

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With a fiasco as big as the financial crisis, one of the only positive outcomes is there are a lot of lessons for the future. As Credit Slips thinks about how the administration might influence the resolution of Puerto Rico's bond problems, I think ... Read full article

When I think about "bondholders," I tend to think about their lawyers. (That probably says a lot about the crowds that I run in). In the case of Puerto Rico, we've seen affable, whip smart, expensively dressed New York lawyers make cogent ... Read full article

It has been a humbling torrent of creativity, and I am honored to chip in a tuppence at the eleventh hour. After an existential preface, I consider how one might use (or resist using) federal credit enhancement in the inevitable debt exchange. ... Read full article