The list of countries with new personal insolvency laws continues to grow. Bloomberg noted today that the President of Kazakhstan had signed a new law setting out several procedures for relieving the debts of non-entrepreneur individuals (sole proprietors remain relegated to the existing law on rehabilitation and bankruptcy).
I have a new draft article up on SSRN. It's called The Financial Inclusion Trilemma. The abstract is below.
The Washington Post has an article about a new business, "Karens for Hire," that is basically a way to hire a customer service advocate. Having spent way too much time with customer service of late, the article really hit a nerve. It gets at the central problem of consumer law, namely that the dollar amounts at issue in almost every dispute are way too small to litigate.
When the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic struck, it was vital for many firms to retain access to funding from banks. In order to calculate their capital requirements, banks measure borrowers’ credit risk using either “their own”, internal ratings-based (IRB) models, or a standardised approach. This analysis examines whether model-based bank regulation constrained lending during the COVID-19 crisis. Results show that banks using their own models extended less credit than banks using a standardised approach.
Alex Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy himself today. So what is Mr. Jones hoping to accomplish with the bankruptcy filing? I see three possible goals, but I'm skeptical that he'll achieve more than one of them.
Recent empirical findings (Bordalo et al., 2018, 2019; Greenwood et al., 2022) have vindicated the view thatsystemic risk in financial markets is also influenced by cognitive misperceptions about future economicdevelopments in addition to being influenced by financial frictions. Most of the literature on macroprudentialregulation, nonetheless, has omitted those misperceptions and instead has derived policy implicationsassuming rational expectations.
Earlier this fall I linked to a variety of resources, including webinars, on amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code to account for various types of digital assets. The scope includes but is not limited to commercial transactions involving cryptocurrency.
The Department of Justice, in coordination with the Department of Education, has announced a new process for its handling of bankruptcy cases in which debtors seek an undue hardship student loan discharge. This new guidance has been a long time coming. In 2016, the DOE issued a request for information regarding evaluating undue hardship claims.
Nine years ago, Credit Slips announced its new Twitter feed. Credit Slips is now also on Mastondon, at @creditslips.mastodon.lawprofs.org. We'll put links to our posts on Mastodon as they are published, as well as boost Credit Slips authors. For now, we'll also continue adding posts to our Twitter feed. Come find us on Mastodon!
For months, cryptocurrency FTX (and its majority owner, Sam Bankman-Fried) have been the lender of last resort in crypto markets and pretty much the only distressed acquirer around. Now we learn that FTX has itself failed and is getting scooped up in a distressed acquisition by Binance. Does this remind anyone of Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide in 2008? We'll see if the transaction closes, but at the very least it poses the question of whether Binance stands on any stronger ground than FTX?
