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Bankruptcy

Credit Slips

A discussion on credit and bankruptcy.
By Bob Lawless, Adam Levitin, Angie Littwin, Katie Porter, John Pottow, Debb Thorne, Elizabeth Warren

Post Frequency: 12.8/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 09:01:41

Resolution Authority, Part II: What's Wrong With the Dodd Bill

Posted on April 23, 2010
The Dodd bill gets things right on first principles: there needs to be some type of resolution authority, and it needs to provide the ability to impose haircuts on creditors. The bill accomplishes that much. But it goes way off...

Resolution Authority, Part I: What's Wrong With the Republicans' Argument

Posted on April 23, 2010
The Senate Republicans are arguing that resolution authority, including a $50B resolution fund, would institutionalize bailouts. Implicit in this argument is the belief that without such resolution authority or fund there would not be bailouts. This is a demonstrably false...

Constitutionality of Proposed Resolution Authority?

Posted on April 23, 2010
The Dodd financial services reform bill, S. 3217 would give "original and exclusive jurisdiction" over liquidation petitions for failed systemically important financial firms to a panel of three Delaware bankruptcy judges appointed by a the Chief Bankruptcy Judge for the...

The President on Financial Reform

Posted on April 22, 2010
I had the honor of being invited to the President's speech on financial reform this morning at Cooper Union. The speech was somewhat general, but that is probably to be expected when talking for a short time about a complex...

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Resolution Authority -- Part 1 (Safe Harbors)

Posted on April 22, 2010
This is the first of a series of posts commenting on the resolution authority as it currently appears in the Dodd bill. The present draft of the bill includes ?safe harbors? that excuse derivatives from the normal operation of the...

How to Find the Owner of Your Mortgage

Posted on April 20, 2010
Concerns continue about parties filing foreclosures when they do not own the note. Florida recently enacted a rules requiring plaintiffs in foreclosure to verify ownership of the note. (Here's a brief article on the rules, with the original subheading "Bankers...

Can You Deduct an Expense for a Car You Own?

Posted on April 19, 2010
The news came today that the Supreme Court has granted cert in Ransom v. MBNA Bank. The issue is whether the Bankruptcy Code means what it says. OK, I'm giving away what I think is the right answer. The question...

Putting the Bankruptcy Option Back on the Table for Distressed Homeowners

Posted on April 16, 2010
The New York Times editorialized that "it is time to revive the fight to open the courthouse door to bankrupt homeowners." Specifically, the NYT wants to revive the proposal to let homeowners use the bankruptcy process to write down the...

SEC v. Goldman Sachs: What's the End Game?

Posted on April 16, 2010
So far no one seems to be talking about the end-game of the SEC suit against Goldman Sachs over the Abacus CDO. What is the SEC really looking to do here? Regardless of whether this case goes to trial or...

Explaining the Abacus CDO

Posted on April 16, 2010
I'm taking particular glee in the SEC's suit against Goldman Sachs for alleged market manipulation with the Abacus CDO. This isn't Schadenfreude. Instead, it's that I just taught synthetic CDOs to my structured finance class last week. The timing couldn't...

Some Thoughts on Central Clearing

Posted on April 15, 2010
As the financial reform legislation moves forward, central clearing of derivatives has become a key topic of interest, along with the related, but distinct issue of exchange trading of derivatives. Central clearing refers to having a party that acts as...

Collateral and Derivatives

Posted on April 13, 2010
One of the arguments I've been seeing a lot of lately is that industry X needs an exemption from the financial reform legislation, because the new requirements that most swaps be collateralized -- that is, backed up with collateral to...

Wanted: People with Good Credit for Low-Paying Jobs

Posted on April 13, 2010
Despite the increased proportion of Americans who are behind on their mortgages or have lost their houses to foreclosure, the practice of doing credit checks on prospective employees continues to climb sharply in popularity. The Society of Human Resources Management?s...

The Rhetoric of "Ending" Too Big To Fail

Posted on April 08, 2010
From both right and left the theme of the recent days has been the need to end too big to fail. The left seems to think this can be done by breaking up financial institutions, the right thinks it will...

The Congressional Research Service Says No Real Effect from BAPCPA

Posted on April 07, 2010
According to a story in this morning's BNA Bankruptcy Law Reporter, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a study stating the 2005 amendments to the bankruptcy law (the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act or BAPCPA) will not permanently...

Experian and FreeCreditReport.com Sink to a New Low

Posted on April 07, 2010
One of the many banes of my existence is FreeCreditReport.com. Not only do their ads play incessantly during any sporting event that I care to watch, but my children also used to walk around the house singing the catchy tunes...

Repo Madness

Posted on April 06, 2010
A few months ago on Credit Slips Bob Lawless described a situation in which a car repo agent in California took a car with a toddler inside. Bob thought it wasn't breach of the peace, but I think Bob was...

The Business of Document Production

Posted on April 05, 2010
In legal circles, "document production" is a term of art usually used to describe the transmission of evidentiary documents from one side to another as part of the discovery process in civil procedure. With the mortgage crisis, it also now...

Warren op-ed: Banking on Hypocrisy

Posted on April 02, 2010
Check out Credit Slips co-blogger Elizabeth Warren's op-ed on Politico, entitled Banking on Hypocrisy. She quotes extensively from a letter that the American Bankers Association sent to banking regulators in 2006 in opposition to the proposed intra-agency guidance that would...

March Bankruptcy Filings Are Up But Not "Spiking"

Posted on April 02, 2010
Media outlets are reporting that bankruptcy filings climbed sharply in March (see, for example, Duff Wilson's report in the New York Times or the Reuters wire story). Those reports are not wrong, but they don't tell the whole story. As...

The Fed as Distressed Investor

Posted on April 01, 2010
Fascinating article over at Bloomberg detailing all the distressed assets that the Fed took onto its balance sheet during the financial crisis. Among other things, it appears that the Fed will be a beneficiary of the recent moves at Ambac,...

I Don't Get It

Posted on April 01, 2010
So yesterday Lehman filed a motion, asking for permission to buy stakes in the CDOs that have been the subject of dueling opinions in New York and London. The plan is to buy the stakes and force an unwind in...

Redemption (of the 722 variety) for Struggling Homeowners

Posted on March 30, 2010
Homeowners continue to struggle, foreclosures continue to climb, and loan modification efforts continue to lag. A persistent problem, pointedly described in these letters (July 10, 2009 and March 4, 2010) from Rep. Barney Frank to the large banks, is that...

The Need for More Bankruptcy Knowledge on the Circuit Courts

Posted on March 30, 2010
So today I take up Adam's invitation and talk a bit about the 3d Circuit's recent opinion in Philadelphia Newspapers. I previously had posted suggesting it was a good thing that the 3d Circuit was getting involved, because the District...

Ambac & the Safe Harbors

Posted on March 25, 2010
Ambac, the former municipal bond insurer who decided it would be fun to write CDS on mortgage backed securities, has entered into an interesting arrangement in Wisconsin, that has some implications for those of us who think the safe harbors...

Credit Bidding

Posted on March 23, 2010
The Third Circuit has ruled in Philadelphia Newspapers that a cramdown plan that includes an asset sale not subject to credit bidding is confirmable. The ruling overs only sales under a plan (1123(a)(5)(D) sales), not pre-plan sales (363 sales). It...

Today's Consumers Prefer Chapter 7 Bankruptcy 3 to 1

Posted on March 22, 2010
While the media focuses on the total number of filings, a drill down into those data can also tell us something about the pain that families are suffering. In the last two years, since the foreclosure crisis, the fraction of...

Consumer Protection & Bank Soundness

Posted on March 18, 2010
To date I've left the issue of the "Consumer Financial Products Safety Commission," or whatever name it ultimately ends up with, to my co-bloggers, who are much more versed in matters consumer. But then today I read that Senator Shelby...

The Financial Stability Oversight Counsel

Posted on March 17, 2010
I want to pick up on yesterday's post by Bob and friend and expand upon it a bit. Under section 111 of Chairman Dodd's proposed bill, the new Financial Stability Oversight Counsel will be made up of the Treasury Secretary,...

Reasonably Equivalent Value for Academic Prestige?!

Posted on March 16, 2010
BearingPoint's Trustee has just brought a fraudulent transfer action to get back a donation it paid Yale of $6 million to endow a chair and earn naming rights of certain on-campus buildings at its School of Management. (If someone can...

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