Category: Consumer Bankruptcy

  • Bankruptcy Implications of AG Settlement

    Posted by

    Katie Porter

    Even though I was up at 4am Pacific this morning, the AG and federal government mortgage settlement was nearly old news by then. But in case you haven't heard, here is your official Credit Slips announcement–there was a $26 billion settlement.While the details are still being released, I am already concerned about how the settlement will affect bankruptcy cases. Remember that bankruptcy was one of the first places we saw the misbehavior of mortgage servicers–way back in 2005 when Tara Twomey and I did our study.

    As of December 1, new Bankruptcy Rules of Procedure 3001 and 3002 impose new requirements on servicers of loans owed by bankruptcy debtors. Are the terms of the settlement consistent with those new rules? If so, do they add any new procedural benefits to protect bankrupt homeowners against robo-signing and legal violations?

    The Department of Justice participated in the settlement and the U.S. Trustee's Office apparently was at the negotiating table. Their press release,  however, is just boilerplate of the general DOJ release. The only mention of bankruptcy is that the settlement will impose "new requirements to undertake pre-filing reviews of certain documents filed in bankruptcy court." I'm not sure what to make of that. Presumably, filing claims under penalty of perjury already required a review of claims, and Rule 9011 required a significant review of motions for relief from stay to permit a foreclosure to continue. What does the settlement add? I hope the US Trustee will let us know soon, as I am sure debtors' attorneys will get calls today on the issue.

    An additional observation is that it is important to remember who is not a party to the settlement–the chapter 13 trustees. Those folks are not bound by the settlement, meaning that they can still challenge servicing practices that comply with the settlement, but in the professional judgment of the trustee violate bankruptcy law. Of course, the trustees are supervised by the U.S. Trustee so perhaps there will be political pressure to make the settlement the final word on the obligations of servicers in bankruptcy, but this could be an issue.

    Comments and thoughts on the implications of the settlement for bankruptcy cases are very welcome!

  • The Backdrop for BROKE: Consumer Debt Then and Now

    Posted by

    Katie Porter

    In the introductory chapter of the book, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class,  I present some data about consumer debt levels in the United States. As Bob Lawless and others have shown, levels of consumer debt are strongly correlated with bankruptcy filings. While conditions such as unemployment, rising health care costs, and skyrocketing college tuition–and recessions–all create pressures on consumers that lead to borrow, debt is the sine qua non of bankruptcy–the relief offered by the system is the reduction or elimination of debt–not the promise of a good paying job or a strong social safety net. Because bankruptcy is driven by debt, those filings help reveal whether the levels of consumer debt will create serious problems for the economy and American families.

    In Broke, I present a figure, courtesy of the San Francisco Fed, that shows the dramatic growth in household debt in real dollars over the last few decades. Reproduced below, the figure shows that the sharp acceleration began in the mid 1980s. E-letter_figure_8 Figure1This is an important point to understanding why recovery is proving difficult from the recession. As I explain in the book, "The consumer debt overhang, however, began long before the financial crisis and the recession. Exhortations about subprime mortgages reflect only a relatively minor piece of a much broader recalibration in the balance sheets of middle-class families. . . . The boom in borrowing spans social classes, racial and ethnic groups, sexes and generations." Broke, pp 4-5. The gray bands on Figure show recessions; this recovery is more difficult, at least in part, because we have an unprecedented gap between income and debt. Is this gap disappearing as a consequence of consumer reluctance to borrower and tightened credit conditions?

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  • Consumer Friendly Forms for Bankruptcy

    Posted by

    Katie Porter

    In many respects, bankruptcy is a one-size-fits-all legal process. Yes, there are ample differences in the law (and a world of difference in practice) between the bankruptcy of a large corporation and a typical consumer. But the Bankruptcy Code itself contains plenty of provisions of general applicability. A major example of the one-size-fits-all approach to bankruptcy is the official forms for filing a case. The basic petition and schedules are the same forms for Big Airline Co. and Mr. Joe Blow. The information on the forms is wildly different, with Big Airline Co. listing hundreds or even thousands of creditors, with many more digits in their debts, than Joe Blow. But the form for those debts–Schedule F–is the same form. That may all be changing soon.

    The Bankruptcy Rules Committee began a Forms Modernization Project a few years ago, and one of its top agenda items has been creating new forms just for use in consumer bankruptcy cases. Although few people seem to be aware of the effort, a draft version of those new forms is available to the public and to my mind, well worth a look. To see the forms, go here, then click on September 2011, download the file, and look  at pp. 189-315 of the PDF (or tab 7.1 if you use the PDF index.) One thing that is obvious from the page numbers in the prior sentence is that the new forms are really long–way longer than the current forms as completed in the typical consumer case. The added length results in part from the development of extensive instructions for each form. Below is an example of a new form with some commentary on its notable new features.

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  • The GM & Chrysler Success

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    During the State of the Union address, the President crowed about the success of the GM/Chrysler bailouts, noting that these companies were thriving again. An NPR program this evening was holding up GM/Chrysler as a beacon of hope for Kodak, as if bankruptcy were now the fountain of corporate youth.  

    But this just begs the question of why did the GM/Chrysler bankruptcies work? What made these bankruptcies success stories? NPR raised the question, but had some lame answers, namely that it forced management to make decisions it hadn't wanted to do like cutting loser brands (Saturn, Pontiac). It might have helped focus management decision-making, but that alone can't be the answer, I think. I'm curious to hear readers' thoughts. A few thoughts of my own below the break.

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  • How to Address Apparent Racial Disparity in the Consumer Bankruptcy System

    Posted by

    Jean Braucher

    The article discussed in the N.Y. Times story today is heavily empirical. It is also deliberately light on the prescriptive. Bob Lawless, Dov Cohen and I did make two modest proposals: (1) that a question about race of the debtor should be included on the form for a bankruptcy petition to make it possible to confirm (or disprove) the finding that African Americans file in chapter 13 at a much higher rate than debtors of other races (about double in the data we have), and (2) that all actors in the bankruptcy system—judges, trustees, attorneys and clients—be educated about the apparent racial disparity and the possibility that subtle racial bias may be producing it. The Times certainly helped with the second one!

    Beyond that, we leave it to others and to each of us individually to come up with policy responses. In my view, Henry Hildebrand, a longtime chapter 13 trustee in Tennessee, got the big picture exactly right; he is quoted in the Times story as saying we should “use this study as an indication that we should be attempting to fix what has become a complex, expensive, unproductive system.” He will probably reappraise his views if he finds out that I agree with him! Those of us who participate in or study the system know that its complexity is onerous.

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  • Race and Chapter 13

    Posted by

    Bob Lawless

    As Adam noted in his kind post, the New York Times today featured our study, "Race, Attorney Influence, and Bankruptcy Chapter Choice." My co-authors are Credit Slips blogger Jean Braucher, a law professor at the University of Arizona, and Dov Cohen, a professor at the University of Illinois who holds a cross appointment in psychology and law. And, we all express many thanks to the NYT reporter, Tara Siegel Bernard, who spent a lot of time slogging through the statistics and legal intricacies in our study.

    In a nutshell, the study reports real-world data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project showing that, among bankrupcy filers, blacks file chapter 13 at higher rates than all other races. The effect is large — for example, blacks even had a higher chapter 13 rate (54.6%) than homeowners (47.1%). The second part of the study showed that, in a random sample, bankruptcy attorneys were more likely to recommend chapter 13 for a hypothetical couple named "Reggie & Latisha" who went to the African Methodist Episcopal Church as compared to "Todd & Allison" who went to the United Methodist Church. Also, attorneys were more likely to see "Reggie & Latisha" as having good values and being more competent when they expressed a preference for chapter 13.

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  • Kudos to Jean Braucher and Bob Lawless!

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    A new study by Credit Slips own Jean Braucher and Bob Lawless (with Dov Cohen) on race and bankruptcy filings received very prominent and well-deserved page A1 coverage in the New York Times.  It's a fabulous study, and it's wonderful to see it getting such great media attention. 

  • Bankruptcy, Backwards

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    Credit Slips Own Anna Gelpern has a great new article in the Yale Law Journal that very much deserves a plug. It's called "Bankruptcy, Backwards:  The Problem of Quasi-Sovereign Debt." The article deals with the problems of financial distress for quasi-sovereigns, like US states or even to some degree EU member states. As Anna points out, bankruptcy seems to mean all things to all people, and as a result framing discussions of how to deal with quasi-sovereign debt—where there is no bankruptcy regime of any sort–quickly devolves into debates about existing bankruptcy systems, like US Chapter 9, rather than starting from the unique problems of quasi-sovereign debtors and then figuring out what sort of financial restructuring system might make sense.

    I highly recommend the article, particularly for those of us who don't regularly deal with sovereign debt issues. There's a strange divide in practice and scholarship between domestic bankruptcy and sovereign debt restructuring. A few people (David Skeel, Steven Schwarcz, Bob Rasmussen, e.g.) have written in both areas, but they remain pretty separate fields. Anna's insights from the sovereign debt field are very useful for domestic bankruptcy scholars, as they help us step back and see the larger picture of what is going on.  

  • Foreclosure Timelines and Mortgage Delinquency: More Evidence from Bankruptcy

    Posted by

    Melissa Jacoby

    At the end of a lively session yesterday at Duke Law School featuring Professor Stephen Ware of University of Kansas Law School, there was a brief discussion of whether shorter foreclosure timelines and clearer rules would promote more workouts of delinquent mortgages. The aforementioned paper about bankrupt homeowners suggests that the opposite might actually be the case: among homeowners in bankruptcy, longer foreclosure timelines in their home states were associated with a lower probability of foreclosure initiation while shorter timelines were associated with a higher probability of foreclosure initiation.

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  • What is the Relationship Between Credit Cards and Mortgage Delinquency?

    Posted by

    Melissa Jacoby

    Previously I mentioned this new paper on homeowners in bankruptcy in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. The central goal of the paper was to investigate what makes homeowners more or less likely to have mortgage troubles as they head into bankruptcy. One of the notable findings is that, across all the models, credit access had a significant effect on keeping mortgages current and avoiding foreclosure initiation (specifics listed pp. 302-304). But why?

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