Here’s an essay of mine in the new issue of National Affairs that tries to chronicle and assess the Detroit bankruptcy now that it’s over.

In my most recent “Money” column for World Magazine, I wrote about the takeover battle for Family Dollar, which is still very much unresolved.

Unlike Detroit, municipalities in Puerto Rico currently cannot file for bankruptcy.  Here is a little op-ed on the question whether Congress should amend the bankruptcy laws to permit Puerto Rico’s municipalities, and perhaps Puerto Rico itself and states like Illinois, to file for bankruptcy.

Here is a little column on the question whether the dollar will continue to be the world’s de facto reserve currency, despite the a series of recent events that have called the dollar’s preeminence into question.

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s book tour promoting Stress Test, his memoir of the 2008-9 crisis, has gotten eclipsed by Hillary Clinton’s book tour.  But the questions his apologia raises about if and when bailouts are appropriate, and whether our largest financial institutions are still “too big to fail,” still have not been resolved.  My instincts tend to be completely different than Geithner’s (no doubt one of the many, many reasons he’s the one who was Treasury Secretary), as reflected in this little column.

As goats graze (temporarily) in Detroit neighborhoods, an enormous number of objections have been filed to Detroit’s plan for adjusting its debts, and Detroit has responded with a two hundred plus page reply defending the art-for-pensions deal (aka the Grand Bargain) and the plan.

One of Detroit’s main defenses for the dramatically higher payout to pension beneficiaries than to several classes of bondholders (13% or less for bondholders vs. 59% or much more for pensions, depending on how the claims are calculated) is that payments coming from outside sources like the state of Michigan or the foundations that are ponying up $366 million to protect Detroit’s art shouldn’t count for the purposes of the comparison.  I’m surprised that Detroit puts so much weight on this argument, which seems deeply and transparently flawed.  To the extent the payments are for the art, which is an asset of Detroit, they should benefit all of Detroit’s creditors, not just one group of them.

Since I’ve been very critical of the Grand Bargain, at least in its current form, I should note that many of the details of Detroit’s plan strike me as admirable.  Detroit has been careful to minimize the cuts to the most vulnerable pension beneficiaries, for instance, and the city has made adjustments to the claims of pensioners who benefitted from indefensibly generous annuities and gratuitous payments by the pension funds.

One of the most interesting questions now is whether Detroit will attempt to settle with either of the two classes of bonds that have been offered the stingiest payouts under the plan.  If Detroit settled with both classes, the “unfair discrimination” argument would disappear, because it is available only to a class of creditors that votes against the plan.  My prediction, which is of course worth every penny you’re paying to read this post, is that Detroit will try to settle with one group of bondholders—the limited tax general obligation bondholders (LTGOs)—but not the other—the holders of certificates of participation (COPs).  The COP funding was used to plug a hole in Detroit’s pensions, and the bankruptcy judge has hinted that he thinks the funding arrangement was illegal.   This gives Detroit a better defense against an “unfair discrimination” objection with the COPs than with the LTGOs.  It isn’t unfair discrimination to give the COPs a pittance, the reasoning would go, if there’s a plausible argument the COPs aren’t entitled to anything.

The latest debate over Thomas Piketty’s book on income inequality (a battle of statistics between Piketty and the Financial Times) reminded me that I’ve neglected to post a little column I wrote on the book a few weeks ago. The column, which speculates about the reasons  Capital in the Twenty-First Century has gotten so much attention, is here.