Have the new bankruptcy laws banks lobbied heavily for contributed to the credit/mortgage crisis?
Washington Mutual Inc. got what it wanted in 2005: a revised bankruptcy code that no longer lets people walk away from credit card bills.
The largest US savings and loan didn’t count on a housing recession. The new bankruptcy laws are helping drive foreclosures to a record as homeowners default on mortgages and struggle to pay credit card debts that might have been wiped out under the old code, said Jay Westbrook, a professor of business law at the University of Texas Law School in Austin and a former adviser to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2007/11/11/shift_in_bankruptcy_laws_staggers_mortgage_holders/
Absolutely. The banks and the credit card companies wrote the new bankruptcy laws that they had lobbied so long for. Now it’s helping to undermine them and the general economy.
Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren warned about this years ago but greedy neocons just don’t listen.