martinibuster - 9:33 am on Jan 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

It's just temporary. They're coming back. Walking away from debt is a big money corporate privilege. The banks paid good money a few years back to assure bankruptcy laws were tightened so it's not as easy for regular folks to do the same. Double standard and all that.

From a recent New Yorker article [newyorker.com] by James Surowiecki :

...American Airlines filed for bankruptcy, it did so deliberately. The airline had four billion dollars in the bank and could have kept paying its bills. But it has been losing money for a while, and its board decided that it was foolish to keep throwing good money after bad. Declaring bankruptcy will trim American’s debt load... so that it can slim down and cut costs. American wasn’t stigmatized for the move. Instead, analysts hailed it as “very smart.” Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are notorious for abandoning properties that no longer make economic sense. Sometimes the hypocrisy is staggering: last winter, the Mortgage Bankers Association—the very body whose president attacked defaulters for betraying their families and their communities—got its creditors to let it do a short sale of its headquarters, dumping it for thirty-four million dollars less than the value of the building’s mortgage.