Mortgage creditors struggle to properly service mortgages in chapter 13 cases, as evidenced by numerous cases describing violations of Bankruptcy Rule 3002.1. The consumer bankruptcy system, however, is not calibrated to compel system wide compliance from these large, institutional repeat actors. This Essay argues that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is well-suited to support the consumer bankruptcy system by exercising its monitoring and enforcement powers to promote, and even compel, mortgage creditor compliance in chapter 13 cases.
American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis is a multi-method interdisciplinary team working under the Bass Connections project within Duke University. Over the past two years, this student-faculty undertaking has explored the state-level dynamics leading up to the 2008 Crisis.
Mortgage cramdown has been proposed as a mechanism to avoid mortgage foreclosures in times of crisis. In this restructuring, the underwater portion of the mortgage is treated as unsecured debt and can be discharged during Chapter 13 bankruptcy. To quantify the ex-post effects of bankruptcy discharge in cramdown courts, we use a new dataset of district courts that allowed mortgage cramdown over the period from 1989 to 1993.
