Over-Spending is Cause for Personal Bankruptcy According to New Study

Well, I'm glad we cleared that up!  Professor Ning Zhu, Professor at University of California, Davis, has some great statistics which show what I have been saying for years: over-spending by consumers is the biggest cause for consumer bankruptcies, not medical problems, divorce and unemployment.  The article is here.  According to Zhu, the overspending makes the consumer "more susceptible to adverse events" but the spender knows that he can file bankruptcy and only partially bear the cost of the overspending. 

Having agreed with him on the cause for filing, I still have no problem with the consumer bankruptcy rules and ease of bankruptcy.  The credit card companies extend credit every day to people with marginal ability to repay and now want rules preventing bankruptcy so that the telephone collectors won't be impeded from bludgeoning these people into paying the credit card before anything else.    

Professor Zhu writes, "In terms of policy implication, our findings indicate that by imposing greater costs, the more stringent requirements for filing in the new law may deter some households from over-consumption."  I disagree with that comment completely.  With credit card issuers bombarding consumers with easy credit and ridiculously high interest rates, the only thing "greater costs" accomplishes is more and more people "going underground" after running their credit cards to unacceptable limits.  Without the bankruptcy fresh start, these consumers will work "under the table," cash their paychecks so there is no bank account to seize or simply work less or not at all so there is no paycheck to seize.   The primary accomplishment of bankruptcy is it stops that phone from ringing - the collector gorillas - and the consumer can rejoin society.   

Zhu points out that credit card debt equals almost a full year of income for "the bankrupt households" he studied.  That means something like a third of their pre-tax income goes to pay the interest alone.  How can credit card issuers extend that kind of debt to those kinds of consumers?  And now they want Congress to simply prevent the bankruptcy filing!  My vote is to rescind the 2005 Amendments.