Shocking Business Bankruptcy Law

Another quick announcement that I have posted a draft essay on some under explored intersections between big business bankruptcy and big shocks here. The abstract is short, yes, but so is the essay. It also discusses ice cream. Thanks for reading! 

Recommended Reading: Bannon and Keith on Remote Court

Virtual court proceedings, an important public health intervention, have prompted many a judge and lawyer to envision heavy use of virtual hearings in more ordinary times - including in bankruptcy courts, which carry the highest federal court case load and feature financially distressed parties. The benefits of remote court are often touted, but what about the costs? Can "virtual justice" be achieved? To explore these issues, check out an article by Alicia Bannon and Douglas Keith of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice published in the Northwestern University Law Review.  

Here is the abstract: 

Across the country, courts at every level have relied on remote technology to adapt the justice system to a once-a-century global pandemic. This Essay describes and assesses this unprecedented journey into virtual justice, paying particular attention to eviction proceedings. While many judges have touted remote court as a revolutionary innovation, the reality is more complex. Remote court has brought substantial time savings and convenience to those who are able to access and use the required technology, but it has also posed hurdles to individuals on the other side of the digital divide, particularly self-represented litigants. The remote court experience has varied substantially depending on the nature of the proceedings, the rules and procedures courts put in place, and the relevant court users’ resources and tech savvy. Critically, the challenges posed by remote court have often been less visible to judges than the efficiency benefits. Drawing on these lessons, this Essay identifies a series of principles that should inform future uses of remote technology. Ultimately, new technology should be embraced when—and only when—it is consistent with fair proceedings and access to justice for all.

Getting Ahead of Consumer Loan Defaults Post-Pandemic

On this Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to lift a ban on evictions for tenants that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently extended through the end of July. The eviction moratoria is one of a handful of debt pauses put in place by the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic that are set to expire soon. The student loan moratorium ends on September 30. The mortgage foreclosure moratorium ends on July 31. In anticipation of the end of the foreclosure moratorium, this week, the CFPB finalized new rules that put into place protections for borrowers that servicers must use before they foreclose.

Student loans and mortgages are most people's two largest debts. But they are not the only large loans that people are in danger of getting behind on post-pandemic. Indeed, when student loan and mortgage debts become due, people may prioritize paying them ahead of car loans, credit cards, and similar. In a new op-ed in The Hill, Christopher Odinet, Slipster Dalié Jiménez, and I set forth how the CFPB can use its legal authority to steer a range of loan servicers to offering people affordable modifications. As a preview, we suggest that the CFPB should issue a compliance and enforcement bulletin directing loan servicers to make a reasonable determination that a borrower has the ability to make all required, scheduled payments in connection with any modification.

The piece is a short version of our new draft paper, Steering Loan Modifications Post-Pandemic, which we wrote as part of the upcoming "Crisis in Contracts" symposium hosted by Duke Law's Law & Contemporary Problems journal. The paper contains more about what federal agencies already are doing to get ahead of mortgage modification requests, about why similar is needed for the range of consumer loans, and about the reasoning behind our suggestion that the CFPB use its prevent what we term modification failures.

A Heroes Jubilee

Millions of heroes of the pandemic--health care workers, law enforcement and first responders, National Guard troops, public school teachers, and social workers--are suffering needless financial hardship because of student loans. Years ago Congress passed, and president Bush signed into law the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. After repaying student loans for ten years while working in public service, these workers are entitled to have their remaining debt canceled by the Education Secretary.  In a continual insult to these heroes, the Education Department and its contractor continue to reject 98% of PSLF applications, for absurd bureaucratic reasons I have elaborated on elsewhere.

Another act of Congress, the HEROES Act of 2003 gives Education Secretary Cardona clear legal authority to fix this failure and cancel hundreds of thousands of student loans now. The HEROES Act allows the Education Secretary to waive any regulation or even statute as necessary to ensure that no individual or class of people experiencing hardship because of a national emergency suffers financial harm because of the emergency. With a few simple waivers of unnecessary rules, the Education Department could implement PSLF loan cancellations for hundreds of thousands or even millions under existing legal authority.

A broad, one-time effort to extend PSLF relief to all those eligible could happen in a few simple steps. First, the federal loan servicing contractors could identify ALL borrowers who entered repayment more than ten years ago and who are not currently in default, and send every one of them an invitation to fill out a simple form asking if they have been working in public service. Second, the existing maze of paperwork created by the Department’s rules could be waived in favor of a simple one-page form. The PSLF applicant need only certify under penalty of law that they worked full–time for at least ten years and still work in a qualifying job. The form’s checklist of jobs should include the words of the statute: 

a full-time job in emergency management, government, ... military service, public safety, law enforcement, public health (including nurses, nurse practitioners, nurses in a clinical setting, and full-time professionals engaged in health care practitioner occupations and health care support occupations...), public education, social work in a public child or family service agency, public interest law services (including prosecution or public defense or legal advocacy on behalf of low-income communities at a nonprofit organization), early childhood education (including licensed or regulated childcare, Head Start, and State funded prekindergarten), public service for individuals with disabilities, public service for the elderly, public library sciences, school-based library sciences and other school-based services, or [a job] at a [501(c)(3) tax exempt organization].

Any borrower signing and returning the form should immediately have all federal student loans cancelled. The Department should provide adequate funding to its contractors to fully administer this PSLF jubilee.

Commercial and Contract Law: Questions, Ideas, Jargon

In the Spring I am teaching a research and writing seminar called Advanced Commercial Law and Contracts. Credit Slips readers have been important resources for project ideas in the past, and I'd appreciate hearing what you have seen out in the world on which you wish there was more research, and/or what you think might make a great exploration for an enterprising student. This course is not centered on bankruptcy, but things that happen in bankruptcy unearth puzzles from commercial and contract law more generally, so examples from bankruptcy cases are indeed welcome. You can share ideas through the comments below, by email to me, or direct message on Twitter.

Also, I am considering having the students build another wiki of jargon as I did a few years ago in another course. Please pass along your favorite (or least favorite) terms du jour in commercial finance and beyond.

Thank you as always for your input, especially during such chaotic times.

Brilliant Contracts Podcast From Hoffman & Wilkinson-Ryan

I suspect that slipsters already know about this podcast.  But, just in case any of you have not, I wanted to flag Promises, Promises by Dave Hoffman and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan.  This is especially wonderful if you are teaching contract law via zoom this term and need additional content to add to what you are doing already. The podcast has been my savior in that it brightens my mood so much to hear these two brilliant scholars have fun talking through the classic cases while I'm on long walks. (Indeed, today I discussed their discussion of Hamer v. Sidway with Anna Gelpern for over an hour while I was walking).

Listening to the conversations between Tess and Dave makes me remember why I wanted to be an academic in the first place -- and it was not to write boring law review articles with ridiculous numbers of footnotes. It was at least in part to have conversations like the ones Tess and Dave have on their podcast (ideally, with some good scotch at hand).  I imagine that it is a special treat to be a student in their classes (or to be their colleague).

Bravo, my friends. Bravo.

The podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and a bunch of other places.  

p.s. I wonder whether I might be able to persuade them to do an episode on the Gold Clause cases.  Hmmm.

Clauses and Controversies podcast

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati

Both of us are teaching 1L Contracts online this semester and fear we also may have to do the same for our joint Duke/UNC sovereign debt class next semester. One silver lining is that we have been forced to think of ways to break up the normal class routine. One of these ways is that we are creating a podcast titled "Clauses and Controversies." Thanks to our superb producer, Leanna Doty, the first three episodes are up on iTunes, and Soundcloud, and Overcast. We wanted to come up with something to expose students to ideas and topics that excite us, while giving them a chance to hear conversations with our favorite commentators who study and work on contracts and sovereign debt. The timing seemed right, too, as the economic fallout of Covid-19 may cause many sovereign debt defaults and restructurings.

There is no global mechanism for efficiently and fairly handling a global wave of sovereign financial distress and default. The wave almost hit this past March, when the financial system hit a sudden stop as people seemed to finally recognize the pandemic. Since then, massive infusions of Official Sector capital have allowed government borrowing to continue. But another sudden stop may be in the offing, and even if not the long-term economic damage of the pandemic may tip governments into insolvency.

The first episode is an introduction, which sets out what we hope to do with the series and then gets into the ongoing dispute over whether investors can seize Venezuela’s prize oil refinery in Texas. The absence of a handful of words in the PDVSA governing law clause might make all the difference. But we don’t think it should. (For anyone seeking a deeper dive into the issue, see here.)

We owe an immense debt to our friends in the business who have been so generous in giving us their time, energy, and insight. We also owe a debt to Dave Hoffman and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan for providing us with inspiration with their brilliant contract law podcast series, “Promises, Promises." Fair warning: they are much more brilliant and hilarious than we are. It must be a treat to be in their classes.

Student Loan Relief Update

Student loan relief provisions required by the CARES Act expire on September 30. Those protections included 1) for all federal direct loans: zero interest and automatic payment forbearance, 2) credit towards IDR and PSLF forgiveness for the 6 months covered by the Act, and importantly, 3) suspension of wage garnishments and other collections on defaulted loans. The Act called for student loan borrowers to receive notice in August that payments will restart October 1 and that borrowers not already in income-driven repayment plans can switch, so that borrowers with no or little income can remain on zero payments (but not if they were in default.)

The President’s Executive Memorandum calls on the Secretary of Education to take action to extend economic hardship deferments under 20 U.S.C. 1087e(f)(2)(D) to provide “cessation of payments and the waiver of all interest” through December 31 2020.  These deferments are to be provided to “borrowers.” The Memorandum does not specify which loan categories (Direct, FFEL, Perkins, private) should be included, nor whether relief to borrowers in default should continue. Advocates also note that the Memorandum is vague as to whether borrower relief will continue automatically, or instead whether students will have to request extended relief, as under the Education Department’s administrative action just prior to passage of the CARES ACT. As of this writing the Education Department has posted no guidance for borrowers or servicers on its web site. Servicers will need guidance soon, and borrowers meanwhile will be receiving a confusing series of CARES Act termination letters and conflicting information about the latest executive action. UPDATE - USED has apparently issued guidance to collection agencies saying that borrowers in default are included in the Executive action so that garnishments and other collection should remain suspended through December 31, 2020.

The HEROES Act passed by the House would extend all borrower relief until at least September 30 2021, would bring in all federal direct, guaranteed and Perkins loans, and would grant a $10,000 principal balance reduction to “distressed” borrowers. The House also included an interesting fix to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program so that borrowers will not have to restart their ten-year clock towards loan forgiveness when they consolidate federal loans. In lieu of any extended student loan relief, Senate Republicans have proposed that borrowers just be shifted to existing income-dependent repayment plans. Existing IDR plans already allow zero payments for borrowers with zero or very low income, but do not stop the accrual of interest. They are not available to borrowers in default, so wage garnishments and collections for borrowers who were in default before March would resume October 1 under the Republican proposals.

Most of What You Read about the Bankruptcy Filing Rate Is Wrong

A popular narrative is that bankruptcy filing rates are increasing dramatically. That is not true. If you want to know what is happening with the bankruptcy filing rate during covid-19, the best source is Ed Flynn's analyses over at the American Bankruptcy Institute (current analysis here with a historical archive here). Here some facts, using my own data as well as Flynn's very useful numbers:

1. Total bankruptcy filings have had some modest gains in recent weeks after falling off the cliff early in the crisis, but total filings remain down 33% on a year-over-year basis.
2. The number of chapter 11s filings has been very artificially inflated by counting affiliate filings. If one only counts the "parent" and "solo" filings, the chapter 11 rate actually declined in July!
3. The decline in chapter 13 filings has been much deeper than the decline in chapter 7 filings.

Before expanding on each of these points and like I wrote in an earlier post with the same theme, I am not Pollyannaish about the economy. Things are as bad as they seem. My plea is for accuracy. An understanding of whether and when people turn to the bankruptcy system to help them deal with their business or personal issues makes that system more effective.

Chapter 11 Filings in May Are Not Up as Much as Everybody Will Say There Are

Prediction: you will begin to see stories about an explosion of chapter 11 filings in May 2020. Well, that is not much of a prediction because I already have seen two. Chapter 11 filings did not explode in May.

A few weeks ago, I posted about the huge drop in overall bankruptcy filings and what looks like a modest rise in chapter 11 filings. I did not want to venture more because chapter 11 filings are hard to count. Every petition filed by every subsidiary in a corporate group gets counted as a case, and the number of subsidiaries in a corporate group is arbitrary. Thus, one economic unit can generate what looks like many bankruptcy filings.

Total Bankruptcy Filings Remain Low, Chapter 11s Not So Much

(Updated and corrected, 5/22). An earlier post noted that bankruptcy filings were down substantially over 50% the first two weeks of April. As the American Bankruptcy Institute reported, bankruptcy filings declined by 46% over the entire month and on a year-over-year basis. I wondered whether the expected increase in bankruptcy filings had begun, and the answer appears to be "not yet."

Using PACER docket searches, I get the following filing numbers for the past six weeks. The decline in filings for the first two weeks of May was roughly the same as the last two weeks of April. There were the same number of business days in all these time periods so the numbers should be comparable:

Total Bankruptcy Filings
	2019	2020	change
April 1 - April 15	33,017	16,097	-51.2%
April 16 - April 30	38,289	22,347	-41.6%
May 1 - May 15	31,958	18,578	-41.8%

How Are So Many EM Sovereigns Issuing New Debt?

Mitu Gulati and Mark Weidemaier

We have been working on building a dataset of sovereign bonds and their contract terms. Given the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic--close to 100 countries have approached the IMF for assistance--we would not have been surprised if few low- to mid-income countries had issued sovereign bonds in recent months. Instead, there have been large issuances by Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Philippines, Hungary, Mexico and others. 

Take Mexico, one of the biggest players in the sovereign debt market. The country has been badly hit not only by Covid-19 but by brutal drops in oil prices, tourism, and remittances. These developments surely increased the need to borrow in dollar/euro bond markets, but we would have expected investors to balk, or at least to demand punitive coupons. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.

What explains investors’ continued willingness to lend? Might they have drunk the bleach-flavored Kool-Aid and decided that there will be no deep and sustained economic downturn? Possible, we suppose, but unlikely. More plausible explanations include (i) that financial markets are so awash with QE money that investors have few places to go for yield and (ii) that investors may be betting that countries will be bailed out by an official sector desperate to prevent widespread defaults on sovereign debt.

But, because we are interested in the terms of sovereign bonds, we also wondered if investors were demanding extra contractual protections against the risk of non-payment. That would be a sensible precaution given the likelihood that many countries will be unable to make payments. Indeed, colleagues working on M&A contracts have documented a trend towards including risk-shifting clauses that explicitly address pandemic-related events (for a recent paper by Jennejohn, Talley & Nyarko, see here). With superb research assistance from Amanda Dixon, Hadar Tanne, and Madison Whalen, we wondered whether we would find a similar trend in the sovereign bond markets.

Immunity, Necessity and the Enforcement of Italian Debt in the Era of Covid-19

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati

The sovereign debt world has been debating how to design an emergency debt standstill for the poorest nations, so that they can devote scarce resources to public health rather than debt service. As we’ve discussed on this blog, the question has come up as to whether countries might be able to use the customary international law doctrine of necessity to defend against creditor lawsuits.

Our discussion hasn’t focused on any particular jurisdiction, although we have implicitly assumed that much of the litigation would take place in New York. Now, let us switch gears to assume (plausibly, we think) that Italy is one of the countries that might need a debt standstill. It has been among the worst hit by COVID-19 and will likely soon have a debt/GDP ratio upwards of 150%. To quote a scary new report out from Schroders (here): “Italy is the prime candidate for being the first [Eurozone] casualty [from the Covid-19 crisis]. Its high indebtedness and lack of economic growth require policies that are either illegal in the eurozone, or politically unpalatable domestically.” 

Our work on the mechanics of an Italian debt restructuring—see here (Mark) and here (Theresa Arnold, Ugo Panizza, and Mitu)—has not discussed necessity or other defenses to enforcement. That’s because most of Italy’s debt is subject to Italian law, and our focus was on how Italy might change this law to enable a restructuring. But let us say that Italy does not take this approach. Perhaps it continues to pretend that a debt restructuring is simply inconceivable. It does not lay any legal groundwork for a restructuring. Instead, Italian politicians simply pray for some magical combination of high growth (unprecedented) and a no-strings-attached bailout package from European authorities. In that event, it is conceivable that a sudden spike in interest rates might prevent Italy from making payments. Assuming no immediate European bailout (Italy’s politicians have demonstrated a distaste for any of the conditionality that would come with ESM funding), that means some risk of having to defend the non-payment against creditor lawsuits.

The Resurgence of Calls For Financial Literacy

Today is the last day of National Financial Literacy Month. At a time when the economy has come to a grinding halt, it seems pertinent to talk about financial literacy, or, more accurately, the fallacy of financial education. Agata Soroko recently published a short essay in Public Seminar -- The Financial Literacy Delusion. In it, she details how calls for financial education already are ramping up in light of the coronavirus's highlighting how little savings most Americans have. I suspected that the refrain that it's people's fault that they didn't have sufficient savings to cover a few months, and thus that they exacerbated the economic downturn with their inability to control themselves enough to save, would emerge with a vengeance in the coming months.

Combating that narrative will become more important than ever, as a matter of economic policy, but also of kindness and understanding to each other. Indeed, it's important right now as Congress considers how to help American families during the crisis. As Slipster Dalie Jimenez, Chris Odinet, and I wrote in our just-uploaded-to-SSRN essay, The Folly of Credit As Pandemic Relief, forthcoming in UCLA Law Review Discourse, in the CARES Act, Congress predominately provided relief to Americans in the form of credit products, not actual cash. This very likely will prove to be problematic because people will be unable to repay in the coming months, just as they are unable to pay for their necessities now. They simply do not have the money, and will not in the future because people still won't have sufficient income to accumulate meaningful savings. As Soroko writes, financial education cannot solve widening income disparities, rising costs, and wealth inequality--the roots of why many Americans have so little savings.

PPP Loan Fees for Banks

$10 billion of CARES Act funds are going to the banks, especially megabanks, in fees for making “small” business PPP loans. The fees established by Congress, to be paid by the Small Business Administration, i.e. Treasury, range from 1% for loans above $2 million to 5% for loans below $350,000.

The maximum loan amount is $10 million, so those loans generate a nifty $100,000 fee each. At least 40 large public companies received loans from $1 to $10 million.

Given the highly streamlined application process, these fees likely far exceed the costs of originating these loans. The 1% interest rate, while low, still exceeds bank cost of funds. Do the banks need a bailout? First quarter earnings reports for the largest banks show steep drops in earnings, but earnings are still positive. The earnings drop is entirely due to provisioning for expected loan losses; obviously predicting loan performance over the next year is a very tricky business. Nevertheless, the PPP fee structure is designed to subsidize financial institutions not especially in need of a bailout, especially compared to restaurants, main street stores, and other small businesses. In fact, given that SBA is waiving the guarantee fee, why don’t the banks just waive the fees and interest on these loans? And given the robust public subsidies to megabanks, why should SBA pay these fees in the first place? If banks have inadequate capital to weather the coming storm, surely there is a better way to support them than having SBA pay these arbitrary PPP loan fees.

The Role of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in Addressing the Consequences of COVID19.

Many businesses may require bankruptcy proceedings to assist in recovery from the CV Recession. In my view, the best legal approach to any Chapter 11 reforms necessitated by the emerging CV-induced economic crisis lies in building up from the Small Business Reorganization Act (SBRA) to cover more Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), rather than trying to adjust the general provisions of Chapter 11, the home of bankruptcies like General Motors and American Airlines. Our database at the Business Bankruptcy Project shows that in 2018 more than half of the businesses that filed in Chapter 11 in the Southern District of New York would fall under the temporary SBRA cap, $7.5 million.

Most immediately, the recently voted funds for small business must be available in bankruptcy reorganization cases. We must remove any barrier to using them in that way. I start the study of Chapter 11 by reminding students that the clerk at the bankruptcy court does not hand out money. Bankruptcy does not produce funding, although it can help facilitate it in important ways. Thus there is no legal reform that will avoid the need for very substantial financing with implications far beyond reorganization procedures. Bankruptcy cannot help unless it can be used in connection with rescue funding.

Further Thoughts on Necessity as a Reason to Defer Sovereign Debt Obligations

Mitu and I posted some preliminary thoughts about the defense of necessity, which might be raised as a basis for allowing sovereign borrowers to defer debt service during the crisis. I wanted to follow up on some of the open issues. A few are technical, addressing some potential objections to the defense. I’ll deal with these first and close with a more fundamental question: What good does this potential defense really do for a sovereign? In thinking through that question, my premise is that many sovereigns will need a temporary standstill on debt service during the crisis. For proposals to this effect, see here, here, and here. (Others will eventually need a debt restructuring, but that’s a topic for another day.) But of course private creditors must agree to a standstill on payments. Those who don’t might sue or file arbitration claims, which will potentially put the sovereign's assets at risk and will certainly consume time and resources to defend. [Last sentence edited for clarity.]

Some background

Necessity is a rule of customary international law. As expressed in Article 25 of the International Law Commission’s draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, a state can invoke necessity to excuse its non-performance of an “international obligation” if non-performance is the only way to address “a grave and imminent peril,” as long as non-performance does not seriously impair an essential interest of the “State or States towards which the obligation exists.” Even if these conditions are satisfied, the state cannot invoke necessity to excuse the violation of an international obligation that “excludes the possibility of invoking necessity.” (Put differently, the doctrine purports to treat necessity as a default rule.) Nor can a state invoke the defense if it has contributed to the state of necessity. Finally, even if the defense is available, non-performance is excused only while the threat persists. The state must resume performance when the crisis ends, and it may have to pay compensation for any loss caused by its non-compliance.

It may not be obvious, but this is a remarkably crabbed conception of “necessity.”

Necessity in the Time of COVID-19

Mark Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati

COVID-19 has wrought an unprecedented economic crisis, which will most severely impact the poorest countries. Anna has written insightfully (here and here) about the G-20’s agreement to a temporary debt standstill for a subset of poor countries. And there have been numerous proposals (e.g., here and here) for a broader standstill to allow all countries the ability to devote necessary financial resources to the crisis. The basic idea behind these proposals is that countries should have the option to defer debt payments to both official and private creditors during the time of the crisis. A limitation of these proposals is that their efficacy depends on high levels of voluntary participation by private creditors. What is to stop less public-spirited creditors from insisting on full payment, even filing lawsuits or arbitration claims to enforce their debts? One answer to this question is that borrower governments could invoke the defense of necessity—long recognized as a rule of customary international law—as a defense to such lawsuits. We want to address that defense here briefly, recognizing that the topic deserves a lengthier treatment than we can give it here.

To clarify, here is how we understand the necessity defense: If successfully invoked, a sovereign could defer payment of any principal and interest that came due during the crisis, although it would have to make the payments once the crisis ended. It might also (although this is less clear) have to pay some compensation, likely in the form of interest on the delayed payments. But any compensation would reflect a below-market interest rate. In this sense, investors would suffer a real loss. They would be subsidizing the crisis response, although this does not make them unique. So is every other person with a claim on the sovereign’s resources, including the citizens and residents for whose welfare the state is responsible.

Now That Everyone Is on the Standstill Bandwagon ... Where to? Part I

A sovereign debt standstill might not cure COVID-19, but it sure seems like the one thing we can all agree on.

In the run-up to last week's all-virtual IMF-World Bank-G-20 meetings, a chorus of private and public sector, NGO, think tank and academic voices (me included) had called for some version of a pandemic-themed pause on sovereign debt payments. Hardly anyone opposed the idea in public, but relief proposals ran the gamut from ambitious to cosmetic, and it took intense negotiations to get the G-20 to agree on a relatively modest NPV-neutral eight-month respite for the world's poorest countries.  Perhaps most importantly, Saudi Arabia was in the chair and China signed on, signaling that the new(ish) creditor cohort might be taking ownership of the global sovereign debt regime alongside the old bilateral and multilateral creditors. If they follow through, it is a major achievement, and a long overdue first step. The fact that a big financial industry group worked closely with the G-20 and is on board with the outcome is also a good sign. All that's left is ... elaborating the substance and implementing the thing. In this post, I try to sort out what problems a standstill might solve, and how these fit with the G-20 statement. Part II offers three ideas on implementation.

A Coming Consumer Bankruptcy Tsunami, Wave, or Ripple?

With the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a lot of talk about a coming surge of consumer bankruptcy filings. In the very short-term, however, bankruptcy filing numbers are down. According to data from Epiq Systems, daily bankruptcy filings declined 18.4% in March 2020 on a year-over-year basis. March 2020 filings were 62,847 as compared to 73,521 in March 2019 but were spread out over one more business day (and hence had an even lower daily filing rate).

The downward trend appears to have continued in April. I say "appear to" because the numbers are down so much that I wonder whether my computations are accurate. Immediate national bankruptcy filing numbers are hard to assemble. Using docket searches on Bloomberg Law that produced all of the bankruptcy cases filed on particular dates, I got the following national bankruptcy filing counts in 2020 as compared to 2019

	2019	2020	decline
last seven days of March	21,656	15,096	-30.3%
first seven days of April	14,886	7,432	-50.1%
second seven days of April	15,602	7,225	-53.7%

If anyone has better data or can confirm these numbers, please leave a comment. Even if these numbers are not spot on, I am confident enough to say there have been big drops in consumer bankruptcy filings the first two weeks in April.

Model Standstill/Tolling Agreement

The Business Law Section of the American Bar Association has posted a model standstill/tolling agreement drafted by Jonathan Lipson and Norm Powell. Business relationships will undoubtedly strain as the crisis means more parties are not able to fulfill their side of a deal. Often, an aggrieved party will have to enforce their rights lest they lose these rights by not taking action. A "standstill/tolling agreement" removes that pressure and preserves the status quo. In Lipson and Powell's words, the goal is to allow parties "to produce an acceptable, temporary workout that obviates the need for litigation and, ideally, preserves a productive economic relationship."

They have made the model agreement publicly available, recognizing that not every business will be able to retain counsel. The agreement is available with annotations to explain its provisions as well as a clean version that parties can use by filling in the blanks. As Lipson and Powell also stress, the model agreement is not intended as a substitute for legal advice and parties should consider retaining legal counsel when possible.

Coronavirus Will Hasten the Shift To App-Based Banking and Lending. How Will That Affect People's Pocketbooks?

Over at the Machine Lawyering blog -- organized and edited by the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Law Faculty’s Centre for Financial Regulation and Economic Development -- Slipster Nathalie Martin and I just posted some commentary about our new article, Reducing The Wealth Gap Through Fintech "Advances" in Consumer Banking and Lending, forthcoming in the University of Illinois Law Review. The article, in part, assessing new "advances" in fintech products that promise to provide people with lower-cost banking and lending options. We focus on prepaid cards for wages, early wage access programs, and auto lending apps. We conclude that these products more likely than not will prove to be disadvantageous to consumers. The article's connection to the wealth gap is the recognition that high-cost banking and lending products impede people's ability to convert income into savings. We put forth a few ideas about the hallmarks of banking and lending products that actually may help close the wealth gap by targeting Americans’ unequal access to banking and lending services. 

Nathalie and I, of course, wrote this article before the coronavirus pandemic. With stay-at-home orders and social distancing in effect, it is highly likely that people's already increasing use of online and app-based banking and lending products will increase even faster. If our analysis proves correct, the spoils of the increased shift will accrue more to providers than to consumers, and people may be able to save even less of their income. The pandemic has highlighted American's lack of savings. Hopefully helping Americans save will become more of a focus in the future.

Also, on the note of early wage access programs, when we drafted the article, we found effectively no published analysis of early wage access programs. As we were writing, Nakita Cuttino and Jim Hawkins kindly shared their draft articles with us. Both articles are now available SSRN and present interesting (and different) analyzes of early wage access programs. Nakita's article is titled, The Rise of "FringeTech": Regulatory Risk in Early Wage Access. And Jim's article is titled, Earned Wage Access and the End of Payday Lending.

Corona Cash and Refund Anticipation Checks

Vijay Raghavan, who will be joining the Brooklyn Law School faculty this summer shared a troubling observation about the payment of the recovery rebates ("Corona Cash" or "Mnuchin Mnoney") through direct deposit to taxpayers. It seems that the payments for around 15% of individual tax filings might be going to bank accounts that are closed or not controlled by the taxpayers. That 15% is surely a much larger percentage of households eligible for Corona Cash. I wouldn't be surprised if close to a quarter of eligible households are affected.

Raghavan writes:

Recovery rebates (stimulus payments) under the CARES Act are supposed
to go out this week. A number of people have noted that the payments
will be delayed for unbanked consumers and the funds are at risk of
being swept by lenders or debt collectors. What has received less
attention is the fact that many banked or underbanked taxpayers may
not receive their rebates because they financed tax preparation with a
refund anticipation check (“RAC”). [AJL: a RAC is distinct from a refund anticipation loan, when the preparer advances the taxpayer part of the anticipated tax refund.]

RACs allow taxpayers to defer the cost of tax preparation and finance
preparation out of their refund. The refund is deposited in a
temporary bank account that the tax preparer arranges to have opened.
The taxpayer may never be made aware that the temporary account
exists. The refund is then distributed to the taxpayer minus
preparation fees and ancillary fees via check, direct deposit, or
using some other payment instrument.

The conventional wisdom is RACs are primarily used by unbanked
consumers. But many banked or underbanked taxpayers may also use RACs.
Smaller tax prep chains and individual tax prep stores rely on RAC
financing for at least two reasons. First, the intermediaries these
tax preparers use to process the returns charge numerous
per-transaction fees, which are easier to pay for out of a taxpayer’s
refund since the cash-strapped taxpayer can’t afford to pay for the
intermediaries’ services up-front. Second, financing may serve to
conceal inordinately high tax preparation fees. As a result, it is not
uncommon to find tax preparation stores in low-income neighborhoods
that refuse to accept up-front payment and only process RAC-financed
returns. In the 2018 tax year, approximately 21 million returns were
financed with RACs. [AJL: for context, there were around 150 million individual returns filed in 2018.]

RACs present a few problems for stimulus distribution. If returns were
already filed and processed, the temporary banks accounts may be
closed, which will delay distribution of the rebate. If the temporary
account is still open, the rebate may sit in the account without being
distributed. There should be less problems if returns have not been
filed or are still pending. But if refunds are initially distributed
to the tax preparer as opposed to the taxpayer (which happens in some
cases), there is some risk tax preparer may take the CARES Act money.

The good news is large chains like H&R Block and tax software
companies should have bank account information for the returns they
processed. They could turn this data over to the Treasury but the
CARES Act may limit the Treasury's ability to disburse payments. The
CARES Act seems to only allow electronic disbursement to accounts the
taxpayer has previously authorized. Taxpayers who regularly financed
tax prep with RACs likely have not authorized disbursement to their
own bank account or may not maintain an open bank account in regular
use. Treasury probably has to lean on preparers and software companies
to ensure that payments to RAC-financed returns are disbursed to the
taxpayer bank accounts.

The problems in doing a quick disbursal of Corona Cash highlight some deficiencies in the US payment and banking system. The House counterproposal to the CARES Act had in it a provision for the creation of FedAccounts--giving every consumer a bank account held at the Fed. It's kind of late in the game to try and set up such a system to deal with the corona virus crisis, but the crisis is exposing areas that need to be shored up going forward. 

CARES Act "Rebates" and Bankruptcy

Related to Pamela's last post and our article regarding garnishments and the CARES Act "rebates," the US Trustee issued a notice to Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 trustees giving them guidance on what to do about them in a bankruptcy case.

The top line: these payments should not be included in the statutory definitions of "current monthly income" or "disposable income" per the CARES Act itself. But the Act failed to discuss whether these payments are property of the estate, which typically would mean that they are. I know bankruptcy lawyers have been dealing with this already and many feared that some trustees would try to obtain these mounts. I was therefore very pleased to read this in the US Trustee notice, in particular the part in bold:

Regardless of whether the rebate is property of the estate, the United States Trustee expects that it is highly unlikely that the trustee would administer the payment after consideration of all relevant circumstances ... Trustees are directed to notify the United States Trustee prior to taking any action to recover recovery rebates or objecting to a chapter 13 plan based on the treatment of recovery rebates.

Treasury Must Act Now To Protect Relief Payments From Debt Collectors

The CARES Act provides for direct "rebate" payments to American households. Treasury is gearing up to send some of those payments out soon. But Congress forgot to protect the payments from garnishment. American families may see needed funds deposited into their bank accounts only to watch that money disappear. Slipster Dalié Jiménez, Chris Odinet, and I just published a short piece on the Harvard Law Review blog detailing this problem and proposing a simple solution that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin should implement ASAP. 

CARES Act Mortgage Foreclosure and Tenant Eviction Relief

The final text of the act is now available here. The foreclosure relief is in Section 4022 and the eviction moratorium is in Section 4024. Mortgage borrowers with federally related loans (FHA, VA, Farmer's Home, Fannie or Freddie) may request 6 months of forbearance, i.e. no payments required, renewable for another 6 months, during which no late fees or penalties may be imposed, but interest continues to run (unlike student loans.) Homeowners need not provide documentation; a certification that they are affected by the COVID-19 crisis is enough. There is no statutory provision for loan modification after the forbearance period ends, so unpaid payments will still be due, but the agencies will likely be requiring or encouraging servicers to offer workouts when the forbearance ends. Section 4023 provides relief for landlords of multifamily buildings with federally related mortgages, conditioned on no evictions. 

The eviction relief is limited to tenants in properties on which there is a federally related mortgage loan, and is only for 4 months. In brief, landlords may not send notices to quit or go forward with evictions. Tenant certifications of hardship are not required. An excellent summary of the eviction moratorium is available at the National Housing Law Project site here. Some states are also imposing eviction moratoria covering more tenants.

CARES ACT Student Loan Relief

The CARES Act signed into law last week suspends payments and eliminates interest accrual for all federally-held student loans for six months, through September 30. These measures exclude private loans, privately-held FFEL loans and Perkins loans. The other five subsections of section 3513 mandate important additional relief. Under subsection (c) the six suspended payments (April to September) are treated as paid for purposes of “any loan forgiveness program or loan rehabilitation program” under HEA title IV. In addition to PSLF, this would include loan cancellation at the end of the 20- or 25- year periods for income-dependent repayment. Loan rehabilitation is a vital tool for borrowers to get out of default status (with accompanying collection fees, wage garnishments, tax refund intercepts, and ineligibility for Pell grants) by making nine affordable monthly payments. This subsection seems to offer a path for six of those nine payments to be zero payments during the crisis suspension period.

Subsection (d) protects credit records by having suspended payments reported to credit bureaus as having been made. Subsection (e) suspends all collection on defaulted loans, including wage garnishments, federal tax refund offsets and federal benefit offsets.

Finally, and importantly, subsection (g) requires USED to notify all borrowers by April 11 that payments, interest and collections are suspended temporarily, and then beginning in August, to notify borrowers when payments will restart, and that borrowers can switch to income-driven repayment. This last provision attempts to avert the wave of default experienced after prior crises (hurricanes, etc.) when, after borrowers in affected areas had been automatically put into administrative forbearance, the forbearance period ended and borrowers continued missing payments. Whether the “not less than 6 notices by postal mail, telephone or electronic communication” will actually solve the payment restart problem will depend a great deal not only on the notices but also the capacity of USED servicers to handle the surge of borrower calls and emails. At present servicers are struggling with handling borrower requests because many employees are in lockdown or quarantine.

PSLF in the Time of Coronavirus

The rules for student loan borrowers hoping for Public Service Loan Forgiveness are changing rapidly, and information even on Education Department and CFPB web sites is confusing and rapidly outdated. The CARES Act, section 3513, signed into law on March 27, requires the Secretary of Education to “suspend all payments due” for federally-held student loans until September 30. The same section provides that interest shall not accrue on any loan for which payments are suspended. The law supersedes the prior Education Department administrative action suspending interest for 60 days. Of special relevance to PSLF, the third subsection provides that “The Secretary shall deem each month for which a loan payment was suspended under this section as if the borrower of the loan had made a payment for the purpose of any loan forgiveness program or loan rehabilitation program.”

The most important advice for borrowers is still to 1) be sure you are in a federal direct loan, using a direct consolidation loan if necessary to get out of FFEL, 2) get on an income-dependent repayment plan and 3) apply to have your IDR monthly payment recalculated now, not next year, if you have any job loss or drop in income.

“Suspending” payments is unfortunate language because it is not an existing repayment status. USED will probably interpret this to mean “forbearance,” rather than “deferment” but no announcement has yet been made. The third possibility is to treat all borrowers as if they were in income-dependent repayment (IDR) with a zero payment. The law also mandates zero interest for the next 6 months, and borrowers report that they are already seeing their interest rate changed to 0% on line. As a practical matter, forbearance with zero interest is similar to deferment or IDR with zero payment. However, months in forbearance would normally not count towards the 120 months required to get PSLF forgiveness, nor for that matter for the 20 or 25 years of payments required for forgiveness at for borrowers in income-dependent payment plans. Because the CARES act mandates that months in “suspension” count, the effect should be more like IDR with zero payment.

The good news is that 3513(c) effectively supersedes the 15-day rule, so early and late payments won't matter for the next 6 months.

The bad news is that a monthly payment does not count towards the 120 required unless the borrower is employed full-time during that month. The CARES Act language could be read to supersede that requirement. Unfortunately my guess is that USED will read 3513(c) to suspend the payment requirement but not the full-time employment requirement. As a practical matter, borrowers just need their employer to certify that they were a full-time employee during the relevant time period, which should include at least paid sick leave. Public servants on unpaid leave may be left out in the cold, as far as PSLF payment counting. USED does have the power under the prior pandemic legislation to waive statutory and regulatory requirements, and we’ll see how generously they choose to interpret this provision.

Borrowers in IDR payment plans are entitled to have their servicer recalculate their monthly payment based on current income if they lose a job or have reduced income. Payment “suspension” for those borrowers could create additional problems. If all federal loans are placed into administrative forbearance, borrowers whose IDR payment is based on job income may not act promptly to have their IDR payment recalculated based on current income.

If this advice is wrong or you have better information or ideas for PSLF borrowers, please comment.

Mitch McConnell Is Robbing Taxpayers to Bailout the Rich

There’s a lot of moving parts of the economic Rube Goldberg machine that is the latest McConnell bailout bill, but if you step back and look at the big picture, what becomes clear is that the bill is robbing taxpayers to bail out the rich. Everything in the bill is ultimately taxpayer funded. Yet the benefits of the bill are going disproportionately to the wealthiest households, which are precisely the ones which do not need assistance at this time.   

This massive handout for the wealthy is disguised because it involves the interaction of provisions in two separate titles of the bill, specifically the unemployment insurance provisions in title II and the $425 general billion bailout fund in title IV.  Because the government is picking up the tab for workers under title II and not requiring maintenance of employment by firms that receive the $425 billion under title IV, it is quite possible that the much of the $425 billion will just be used as a slush fund enrich corporate executives and shareholders, who happen to be overwhelmingly the wealthiest households in the country. 

[Update:  The $425 billion might actually be $4.25 trillion by the time the Fed gets done with it. The $425 billion might be a guaranty for an equity tranche that can be leveraged perhaps 10x.]

Bailout Oversight Lessons from 2008

Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO's Policy Director and former Vice-Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, has a really important column about the oversight lessons from the 2008 bailout. It was a struggle to get the Obama administration to be forthcoming about what it was doing with the bailout. It will be a much bigger challenge in the current political environment. Read Damon's column here.

How to Help Small Businesses...Fast

A debt collection moratorium operates as float, which is needed to buy time until the relief checks start flowing. In other words, a debt collection moratorium is a form of stimulus. My New York Times op-ed explaining this is here.  

Student Loan Relief for Public Service Workers: Repeal the 15-day Rule

More than one million public servants – nurses, soldiers, first responders, teachers—should be eligible now or soon for student loan cancellation under existing law – the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Congress and the Administration can accelerate this process now.

The Education Department and its servicer FedLoan have notoriously rejected 98% of PSLF loan cancellation requests. One of the reasons is a pointless and unhelpful regulation that was not part of the Congressional legislation, but was added by the Education Department – the 15-day rule. The PSLF law calls for public servants to have their loans cancelled after 10 years of repayment. The Department’s regulation defined 10 years of repayment as 120 payments, each made within 15 days of the due date. In real life borrowers make payments early and they make payment late. During the present crisis they cannot be expected to meet this rule.

Congress is already considering a bill that would give the Education Secretary broad authority to waive regulations. The 15-day rule should be the first to go. The Department and servicer FedLoan should work together to clear away ALL regulatory obstacles to full PSLF implementation.

Summary of the McConnell Bailout Bill

The McConnell Bailout Bill (a/k/a HR 748 or the CARES Act), weighs in at just shy of 600 pages. I've taken the liberty of summarizing it in a powerpoint deck for teaching (syllabus be damned) and thought it might be helpful to make generally available. Here it is. (11:00 3/23 updated/corrected version).

I only warrant it as best efforts (meaning I might have misread or just missed something in this monster bill) and I have made no attempt to summarize the details of the social insurance program (UI, Medicare, Medicaid) interventions because they are outside my expertise. You'll have to read the bill itself (Part I and Part II) for that.  

I'll note quickly two things for Slips aficionados: there's no bankruptcy piece anywhere within the bill. There might end up being some very minor bankruptcy changes, but bankruptcy really isn't where the action is right now. 

You might consider how the airline bailout package in the bill compared with GM/Chrysler. That ought to be the benchmark for direct government rescue lending to real economy firms.  

The Bailout Cronyism and Corruption Have Already Begun

We need to bail out the economy, and it's not going to be cheap. The government is going to have to carry the economy for 18-24 months. There's no way of avoiding that. But we don't need to be stupid or corrupt about the way we do it. And stupidity and corruption is unfortunately so hardwired into the Trump administration's DNA that it is being reflected in virtually every proposal out of the administration. 

Start with Treasury's ill-advised proposal to send checks out to every man, woman, and child in the United States. Beside being operationally difficult and misdirecting much of the aid, it is first and foremost a political move. These are serious times. They call for serious responses, not political maneuvers.  

And now, we learn that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is proposing turning to Goldman Sachs executives to provide assistance in administering the bailout. It's hard to think of anything more politically tone-deaf other than perhaps delegating the bailout to Wells Fargo.

More importantly, Goldman is objectively not the right institution to help. Goldman does virtually no small business lending, and their consumer lending is a small portfolio of loans to affluent individuals. It’s not even at the top of the bracket in commercial lending generally. Goldman is primarily an investment bank that does M&A and securities underwriting; they're not known as commercial bankers. The challenges in the bailout response are restructuring and commercial banking issues, including a lot of operational problems. That's just not where Goldman's strengths lie. So why Goldman? Just more cronyism.

This should be a bright flag to ever member of Congress that Steven Mnuchin cannot be trusted to lead the bailout efforts. If he does, we're looking at something a lot worse than HAMP 2.0. A key part of any bailout is going to be its governance. There's inevitably going to be a fair amount of discretion involved in the bailout efforts. We need the bailout to be led by serious people. Sadly, there are not many serious people in any position of authority in the Trump administration. That suggests that Congress needs to come up with a governance structure for any bailout funds that is new and independent of the Trump administration.

I don't mean by this that it needs to be a bunch of people who share my political views. There are plenty of competent and serious people from both parties who aren't in the Trump administration. Hopefully this is a time that Senator McConnell recognizes that he can't turn the keys over the Trumpists; the effectiveness of a bailout is going to depend on whether Congress gets the governance structure right. We need to take a serious problem serious and not see it as an opportunity for self-enrichment and political gain. 

 

Puerto Rican Debt and Force Majeure

Among other things, the Coronavirus and the near global shutdown, has gotten contracting parties scrambling to read their force majeure clauses.  But what about if the parties in question didn’t explicitly contract for an “act of god” clause that covered unexpected pandemics? The question, as we’ve discussed on this blog before, would become one of whether such a clause was implicit in the contract (here).  That, in turn, will in part be a function of the contract’s governing law (here).  Puerto Rico, already mired in a debt crisis, is going to need even more relief now.  Question is: Does the fact that its debt contracts are almost all governed by local Puerto Rican civil law embed a source of temporary relief for it?

My casual impression is that the leading common law jurisdictions for contract law, such as New York and England, would be reluctant to find an implied force majeure term in contracts among sophisticated parties.  By contrast, civil law jurisdictions such as France, the Netherlands and Spain, sometimes have such a clause baked into the civil law and also appear more willing to find such a provision implicit (for discussions of the common law v. civil law approaches, see these memos from White & Case and Cleary Gottlieb memos, here and here).

Particularly intriguing in the context of a sovereign or quasi sovereign debt, is the possibility that an implication of the civil law jurisdiction in question having force majeure as part of the civil code means that the relevant government can, through legislation, make it clear that a particular event (Coronavirus) satisfies the conditions for force majeure (here).  China has apparently done just that, even issuing force majeure certificates in some cases (here and here).

A reason I’ve been thinking about implied force majeure clauses is that my seminar with Guy Charles has been discussing Puerto Rico’s debt crisis.  (Two of our recent guests to the seminar were David Skeel and Sam Erman, both of whom had fascinating papers on the topic of Puerto Rico).  Puerto Rico is, unlike most of the US,  a civil law jurisdiction.  Better still, almost all of its debt is under local Puerto Rican law (now, in the case of anything redone under PROMESA, with an overlay of that federal law). 

One has to concede up front that the Puerto Rican debt crisis is not the product of some exogenous event such as a hurricane or the coronavirus.  But surely everyone would agree that the virus has the potential to push Puerto Rico (back) over the financial brink, just as its seems to be getting back its sea legs (see here). And, so the question is, does Puerto Rico, as part of the implicit terms of any debt contract made locally, have the right to temporary relief from having to perform as a result of the enormous economic slowdown that the virus is already causing.  I haven’t been able to track down anything specific in the Puerto Rican civil code, but the Puerto Rican code has its origins in the Spanish civil code. And the Spanish code has force majeure baked in (for discussions, see here and here).

Hmmm . . . Some years ago, a wonderful group of students did find some promising avenues for Puerto Rican debt relief buried deep in its civil code (here).

*Note (in response to the first few email comments - that I'm most grateful for):  The question of what precise law the new agreements are governed by is thorny.  Best I can tell, it seems to be PROMESA and, to the extent not inconsistent with PROMESA, Puerto Rican law. But what in the world does that mean with respect to what we care about: force majeure for pandemics such as coronavirus?  I don't think there is any federal contract law on that matter; and, if so, that strikes me as pointing to Puerto Rican local law, which in turn might point us to the Spanish civil code. But maybe there is an argument there about how federal law has something to say about force majeure in the context of a pandemic that is escaping me. The actual language of the new governing law clauses is fascinating if you are as obsessed with governing law provisions as Mark W and I have been as of late.  John Coyle of UNC is the leading scholar of governing law clauses in the whole wide world (see here). And he is a contracts guru as well.  Maybe I can get him to opine.  I will try to do so and report back.

COVID-19 Response: The Need for Speed

While Congress struggles to figure out the best way to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, it is very apparent that immediate relief measures are necessary, if only to buy time for a more comprehensive approach. Layoffs are already happening and with they continue, it will result in more economic disruption from diminished consumption.

1. Sending out checks isn't fast enough (and can't happen in two weeks)

There is, fortunately, some recognition of that speed is imperative, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way is what the Trump administration is proposing, namely sending everyone a check. Besides being poorly tailored—$1,000 isn't enough for those who really need help and is wasted on many other folks—the problem is it just cannot happen fast enough. No one is being honest about the operational problems. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is going around saying that he wants to get checks for $1,000 to every American within two weeks. That's just not possible, and Mnuchin should stop overpromising. 

Here's why it won't work fast enough: for Treasury to send everyone a check, it would need to know where to send the checks. It doesn't. Treasury knows where to send checks to individuals who are receiving Social Security and Disability Insurance (actually, it would be electronic transfers in almost all such cases). But what about everyone else? Treasury doesn't know (a) who is still alive, and (b) where they live. The first problem might mean sending out some checks that shouldn't happen, but the second problem is more serious, as it means that checks won't get where they need to go. Treasury is able to send me a tax refund because I give an address with my tax return. At best Treasury has year-old information, which will be wrong for many people. Those people who most need the money are the people who are most likely to have moved in the last year—economically insecure renters (see Matthew Desmond's Evicted on this). Sending everyone a check really isn't a very good solution. 

2. Foreclosure/eviction moratoria are equivalent to an immediate cash injection to the economy.

Fortunately, there's a better solution:  an immediate national moratorium on foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, utility disconnects, garnishments, default judgments, and negative credit reporting for all consumers and small businesses. The point of a national collection action moratorium is not to be nice to debtors. A national collection moratorium is a stimulus measure:  it has the effect of immediately injecting cash into the economy in that it allows people and businesses to shift funds from debt service obligations to other consumption. It's basically a giant forced loan from creditors to debtors. And it happens immediately, without any administrative apparatus. There's nothing else that will have such a big effect so immediately. Congress should move on moratorium legislation asap as a stand-alone bill to buy itself some more time for a longer-term fix.  

Now let's be clear—what I am talking about is not debt forgiveness. It is forced forbearance. The debts will still be owed and may accrue interest and late fees (there may be ways to limit those, but that's another matter). That's important because it substantially reduces the argument that the delay constitutes a Taking—government is always free to change how remedies operate, such as changing foreclosure timelines, etc. without the changes being a Taking.

This is exactly what a moratorium would be doing. A number of states and localities have already undertaken such moratoria, and FHFA and HUD have done so for federally or GSE insured or guarantied loans. But we've got a national crisis, so this should be done uniformly on the federal level using the Interstate Commerce power for the entire consumer and small business debt market. Given that all collection actions involve the mails or wires and that debt markets are national, this seems squarely within the scope of federal power. 

Now a collection moratorium is not a permanent fix and will cause some dislocations itself. Consumers/small businesses will eventually need to come current on their obligations, and they may need assistance to do so, but that's something that we can work on later when we're not in free fall. But right now what we need more than anything is time, and a collection moratorium can buy us some time more broadly and more immediately than any other possible step. 

The Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 and COVID-19

Professor Ted Janger of Brooklyn Law School sent me a proposal for a small change to the Bankruptcy Code that might significantly help small businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. His idea merits consideration. In Ted’s words:

Obviously, it is too early to tell how all of this will play out, but the U.S. bankruptcy system will inevitably play an important role in whether small businesses hurt by COVID-19 ultimately survive. Chapter 11 was built to help sound businesses that experience a sudden shock, but it is often too cumbersome for even medium-sized businesses. In a law that took effect in February, Congress made it easier for small businesses to benefit from chapter 11. That law is only available, however, to businesses with less than $2.7 million in debt. It will, therefore, apply to only 42% of the businesses that file. In the wake of COVID-19, Congress should raise the debt ceiling to $10 million to help more small businesses and soften the inevitable fallout that will come from COVID-19 related business disruptions.

COVID-19's Impact on Higher Education's Finances

There's a lot to say about the economic dislocation from the coronavirus and the economic policy response. But I want to focus for a moment about its impact on higher education.  Lots of schools have gone to virtual classrooms either temporarily or for the rest of the semester. It's not ideal pedagogically (and it really unsuitable for certain types of classes), but it works as a stop gap measure, especially for courses which have already been going for several weeks, in which some rapport has developed between faculty and students.  

But there's no reason to think that this disruption will be over by the end of the semester. What happens with summer courses? And most importantly, what happens in the fall? Will schools be able to enroll new cohorts of students? I suppose it's possible to teach 2Ls and 3Ls virtually all the time. But can that be done for 1Ls? Or for college freshmen? And even if it is possible to do generally, what about enrolling foreign students? To be sure, University of Phoenix and other on-line schools do this all the time, but they offer a very different kind of educational experience. Will students seek to defer for a year or simply not enroll?

This matters hugely for universities as businesses.

Federal Reserve Emergency Lending as a Coronavirus Response

Senator Elizabeth Warren has put out a plan for mitigating the economic fallout from the coronavirus. Of particular note is that she is proposing having the Federal Reserve use its emergency lending power to support businesses affected by the coronavirus in order to ensure that they are able to provide paid health care leave to affected employees and avoid mass layoffs.  

This post addresses whether the Fed has the legal authority for such lending, what precedent exists, how it differs materially from the 2008 bailouts, and why it's a good idea. (Full disclosure: I consulted with the Warren campaign on this plan.)