"Bankruptcy courts see business boom in â08 As the national economy declines, bankruptcy filings in Kansas City are soaring, with double-digit increases compared with last year. Bankruptcy lawyers said the worst is still to come. âWeâve got a lot of people who can barely pay for gas and their food, much less pay the rest of their bills,â said Berry Laws, a lawyer with Martin Leigh Laws & Fritzlen PC and a U.S. trustee for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Missouri. âI would hazard to guess thereâs going to be a dramatic increase in the bankruptcies filed.â" http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/2008/08/04/story5.html "Bankruptcy cases increase as economy falters ALBANY -- The number of bankruptcy filings in the region continued to climb in the second quarter amid an economy troubled by a mortgage crisis and rising gasoline and food costs. The numbers mirror a national trend in which experts expect filings to climb this year by more than 250,000 over 2007's results. Local lawyers say they are increasingly busy as the number of filings approach the levels seen before Congress changed the rules governing bankruptcy three years ago. The change was meant to discourage the filing of Chapter 7 petitions that liquidated debt in favor of Chapter 13 filings under which debtors restructured their finances to pay off what they owed. "I worked all Saturday just to try to keep up," said Richard Croak, a bankruptcy attorney in Albany." http://timesunion.com/ASPStories/Story.asp?storyID=700272&newsdate=8/6/2008&BCCode=MBTA http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2008/07/revisiting-incr.html
Chapter 7 filings are good in that the liquidation of assets can allow the economy to heal. Sounds cruel, but zombie banks, and other entities are not healthy, they are just hanging on.