I have posted a short draft article about mass tort bankruptcy. If you would like to send me comments on the draft, that would be lovely, but please keep two caveats in mind. First, I must submit the revisions by February 9. Second, the article must not exceed 10,000 words. For every addition, some other thing must be subtracted.
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.
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.
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?
In 2022, consumer price inflation in the euro area has climbed to record highs. As a result, many households have increased their inflation expectations, thus increasing the risks of more persistent inflation in the future. Using the Bundesbank Online Panel Households as a laboratory, this column provides evidence that individuals who are shown ECB communication on the inflation outlook significantly reduce their inflation expectations. Furthermore, explaining the outlook verbally has a substantially larger effect than merely providing numerical projections.
