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It’s National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW)!   Federal, state, local, and nonprofit consumer protection agencies and organizations are making extra efforts to promote consumer awareness. 
First I have to get out of my system thoughts of Tom Lehrer’s song, National Brotherhood Week:
                Step up and shake the hand/Of someone you can’t stand . . .
                It’s only for a week so have no fear/Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.
But to get back on message, of particular interest to Credit Slips readers is this part of the mission of consumer protection described on the NCPW website:
    "Financial Fraud Scams: American consumers owe a whopping $11.31 trillion dollars in debt and are behind on paying about $1.01 trillion of that amount. Mortgages, student loans, and credit cards account for a large portion of that debt. Consumers are often haunted with huge monthly payments, and fraudsters take advantage of that with debt relief scams, tax scams, and other financial fraud scams. Scams target individuals who are in financial distress, but they fail to fulfill their promises, and typically leave consumers worse off than when they started."

Apparently part of the bank flaks' talking points regarding the foreclosure reviews is that to the extent homeowners harmed by wrongful foreclosures, they were actually drug dealers. The message: we didn't foreclose on anyone who didn't deserve it. We were just foreclosing on some scumbags and doing you all a favor by getting the meth lab out of the neighborhood before it blew up. We're part of the war on drugs. 
This talking point is particularly revealing, I think, both about how seriously our largest financial institutions take sanctity of contract, and about the nature of the whole independent foreclosure review sham.  

Mark makes an immensely important point in his post on the latest in NML v. Argentina; it merits emphasis and perhaps an extension. The fact that a U.S. federal court proposed departing from sovereign bond contract terms is a big deal--even if the range of acceptable departures turns out to be small (de-acceleration?), and even if Argentina declines the invitation. A regime where a court enforces involuntarily modified contracts looks like sovereign bankruptcy, achieved here using the court's equitable powers against the background of the debtor's immunity. 
This echoes the idea that Marcus Miller and Dania Thomas proposed some years ago, when they interpreted the totality of Judge Griesa's rulings as proto-bankruptcy. Of course that was before Judge Griesa got fed up. 
I am not exactly holding my breath for a constructive response from Argentina, or acquiescence from Elliott. But even if nothing happens, my sense is that we have crossed a sovereign bankruptcy milestone. And markets rallied. 

One major benefit of being a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute is a nice rundown of daily bankruptcy-related headlines delivered by email daily. Today's list included a combination of headlines that made me smile ...
"Girls Gone Wild Files for Bankruptcy" was an interesting enough headline, but immediately following it was this: "Grupo Bimbo Wins Hostess Beefsteak Auction." Nice.