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Creditors owed identical amounts under identical defaulted Argentine bonds, including identical pari passu clauses, could get very different recoveries under the plaintiffs' theory of ratable payment--unless all such creditors are corralled into a mandatory class action that divvies up Argentina's surplus among them under equitable supervision of the courts.

Unequal recovery under identical instruments could happen if, for example, Argentina ran out of money after paying the first wave of pari passu litigants. The result seems out of whack with the original "Tom, Dick, and Harry" theory of the pari passu clause in sovereign debt instruments, as famously articulated by Professor Lowenfeld beginning in 1997 (this version 2000):
Suppose, for example, the total debt is $50,000 and the borrower has only $30,000 available. Tom lent $20,000 and Dick and Harry lent $15,000 each. The borrower must pay three fifths of the amount owed to each one -- i.e., $12,000 to Tom, and $9,000 each to Dick and Harry. Of course the reamaining sums would remain as obligations of the  borrower. But if the borrwer proposed to pay Tom $20,000 in full satisfaction, Dick $10,000 and Harry nothing, a court could and should issue an injunction at the behest of Harry. The injunction would run in the first instance against the borrower, but I  believe ... to Tom and Dick as well.

Remember the $3.6 billion settlement the government made with huge lenders accused of wrongful evictions and other abuses? Wronged homeowners are beginning to get their settlement checks in the mail, only to find that some of them bounce. That’s right. After more than two years of waiting for the checks, the first round of checks arrived last week, but the company chosen to distribute the checks, Rust Consulting, failed to fortify the account upon which the checks were written, Huntington National Bank in Ohio. Read the dealbook story by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess here.

In the fictional worlds of Charles Yu, George Saunders, or Etgar Keret, a person's accumulated life stories and thoughts when she files for bankruptcy might be withdrawn, like blood, then filtered for marketability. In such a world, a debtor might be required to spin her tale for the sole benefit of creditors, or forever silenced. Planning to give a five-minute anecdote about your childhood at The Moth? Don't even think about it.

A remarkable tabulation of the more than 3 million homeowners found to have been victims of mortgage servicing errors or fraud was released last week by the Fed and other bank regulators.  About 25,000 foreclosures were started while homeowners were in bankruptcy, nearly 200,000 foreclosures were completed on homeowners in approved modification plans, and another 168,000 foreclosures sales were conducted while modification requests were pending. 
Recall that these wrongful foreclosure tallies include only servicing in 2009 and 2010, and that the 3 million estimated violations by 11 banks are out of a nationwide total of about 50 million mortgages outstanding, about 7 million of which were delinquent at any given time in that period.