Today In Dog-Bites-Man News
By From an excellent NYT article about a woman buried under a mountain of debt following the dissolution of her marriage, loss of job, and large medical expenses, this shocking news about the bankruptcy bill disgracefully passed by Congress:
Not surprisingly, such practices generated dazzling profits for the nation’s financial companies. And since 2005, when the bankruptcy law was changed, the credit card industry has increased its earnings 25 percent, according to a new study by Michael Simkovic, a former James M. Olin fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard Law School.
The “2005 bankruptcy reform benefited credit card companies and hurt their customers,” Mr. Simkovic concluded in his study. He said that even though sponsors of the bankruptcy bill promised that consumers would benefit from lower borrowing costs as delinquent borrowers were held more accountable, the cost of borrowing from credit card companies has actually increased anywhere from 5 percent to 17 percent.
Why, it’s almost enough to make me think that the bill was a gift to already-flush credit card companies with no benefits to the consumer at all!
More on the general subject from Slacktivist.
…a commenter finds this from Richard Posner, which holds up about as well as his defense of Bush v. Gore.