Remember the bankruptcy law that lenders lobbied so hard for two years ago?  According to this article on Bloomberg it’s biting the banks in the butt:

Washington Mutual Inc. got what it
wanted in 2005: A revised bankruptcy code that no longer lets
people walk away from credit card bills.   
       
      

The largest U.S. savings and loan didn’t count on a housing
recession. The new bankruptcy laws are helping drive
foreclosures to a record as homeowners default on mortgages and
struggle to pay credit card debts that might have been wiped out
under the old code, said Jay Westbrook, a professor of business
law at the University of Texas Law School in Austin and a former
adviser to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank…

Washington Mutual, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase &
Co. and Citigroup Inc. spent $25 million in 2004 and 2005
lobbying for a legislative agenda that included changes in
bankruptcy laws to protect credit card profits, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan Washington group
that tracks political donations.   
       

      

The banks are still paying for that decision. The surge in
foreclosures has cut the value of securities backed by mortgages
and led to more than $40 billion of writedowns for U.S.
financial institutions. It also reached to the top echelons of
the financial services industry.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t pay their bills, I’m simply saying that it’s kind of ironic that the same institutions that charge high-risk debtors interest rates that can only be described as usury are being hammered by a law they lobbied for to keep those same high-risk debtors in hoc to them.