Free Republic

Clinton Portis made enough money during his NFL career in Denver and Washington that he should be set for life: In nine NFL seasons, Portis made more than $40 million. But Portis isn’t just not set for life, he’s broke. Portis filed for bankruptcy this week, saying he has debts of more than $5 million that he can’t afford to pay.

When Health Republic came on the New York health insurance scene in 2014 it made a huge splash. Flush with Obamacare cash they offered bargain basement rates which attracted customers away from many other established insurance companies. It was simply the picture of success for the President’s new Affordable Care Act and the people rejoiced. (Syracuse.com) Health Republic of New York made a big splash when it debuted in 2014 with rock-bottom health insurance prices that undercut its competitors across the state.Its premium rates were 30 percent below average in Onondaga County. The new company, backed with $265 million...

On Thursday November 12, 2015 America's national debt hit the staggering total combined amount of $18.65 trillion. Since President Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated into office a little less than seven years ago, the democrats, and a few spineless republican "leaders" in congress have increased the total combined national debt by more than $8 trillion: Date                 Debt Held by the Public         Intragovernmental Holdings   Total Public Debt Outstanding 01/20/2009       6,307,310,739,681.66           4,319,566,309,231.42              10,626,877,048,913.08 11/12/2015       13,422,684,032,364.47         5,226,340,763,474.31 ...

Freedom Communications Inc., owner of the Orange County Register, filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday, and its chief executive said he plans to lead a bid to acquire the troubled newspaper company. The Santa Ana-based newspaper firm, which also owns the Riverside Press-Enterprise, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Central District of California. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-orange-county-register-bankruptcy-20151101-story.html

I wish this headline was more surprising but these days it’s probably just another brick in a very large wall. The Daily Caller has been peeking under the covers of the Obamacare system of co-ops across the country in the wake of several of them going under recently, including outfits in Tennessee and Nevada. It turns out that, unbeknownst to both the public and Congress, nearly a dozen other co-ops have been placed on a special watch list because their future is highly uncertain and they may be at risk of folding as well. So how did nobody know...

It’s an ill financial wind that blows no one some good. A very nice and very rich old lady once explained to me that, in her view, the golden age of the American economy happened in the first years of the Reagan administration. This puzzled me: The United States had dipped into recession in 1980, and Paul Volcker was standing on the economic brakes to wring the Carter-era inflation out of the economy, jacking the federal-funds target rate up to damned near 20 percent. People were paying 18.5 percent on their mortgages. But, of course, usurious interest rates are pretty...

Mark Twain famously said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” That observation could easily be applied to the situation facing students who have amassed large college debt burdens: they think they know that those debts cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. But that just ain’t so. The “undue hardship” provision in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code says that student loans cannot be discharged unless “excepting such debt … would impose an undue hardship on the debtor and the debtor’s dependents….” Just how difficult is it for a...

The town where my parents grew up and where my grandparents lived no longer exists. Phillips, Texas, is a ghost town. Before that it was a company town, a more or less wholly owned subsidiary of the Phillips Petroleum Company. Phillips had already lost a great deal of its population as highway improvements sent residents off to the relative urban sophistication of Borger, and there were fewer than 2,000 people living there in 1980 when an explosion at the refinery destroyed practically all of the town’s economic infrastructure, along with a fair number of houses. Phillips, Inc., in the end...

Millions of indebted Russians will gain the right to file for bankruptcy for the first time ever on Thursday, as the country's authorities try to ease people's debt burdens as they struggle amid a deep recession. From October 1, a new law in Russia will allows citizens with total debt of more than 500,000 rubles ($7,600) and over three months of missed payments to file for bankruptcy. In addition, penalties can be imposed on debtors who fail to register as bankrupt if they cannot fulfil loan repayments.

Chicago’s Loop hums with life and commerce today. A parade of companies, including Kraft and Motorola, has moved from the suburbs into the central business district. The greater downtown apartment market is booming, with thousands of new units being constructed. Chicago hotels will add 2,200 new hotel rooms this year to accommodate throngs of tourists. The city has rolled out new amenities and attractions, including an enhanced Riverwalk along the once-polluted Chicago River, and Maggie Daley Park, a fantasy-like playground that replaced the forlorn Daley Bicentennial Plaza section of Grant Park. Also opening this year: a long-anticipated elevated rail trail...

LARES, Puerto Rico – Ismael Rodriguez looked out on a nearly empty plaza from the clothing store he opened in 1960, now hemmed in by padlocked businesses in this mountain town in northwestern Puerto Rico... experiencing the deepest malaise of just about any community on this island in the depths of an economic crisis. "I have seen the destruction of a town," Rodriguez, 67, said as he gestured toward the plaza. "Look at all the shuttered stores." Lares has become emblematic of the economic stagnation that is overwhelming Puerto Rico, and those who live here believe it is a warning...

Donald Trump has never declared bankruptcy, but his businesses have -- four times. The real estate mogul, television star and Republican presidential frontrunner filed for corporate bankruptcy in 1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009. Three of the cases were related to his casino and hotel properties in Atlantic City, N.J. And even though more than six years have passed since Trump had his last run-in with Chapter 11, it remains a touchy subject. Trump was quick to clarify at the Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News in August that he had never filed for personal bankruptcy. Instead, he cast his...

A comparison of the tenures is a battle of bad vs. worse. It’s well known by now that GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina has never held political office and is running on her business record. As many commentators have pointed out, that’s a dicey proposition since her highest-profile job as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005 was sort of a disaster.But in an interview with Fortune contributor and Yale School of Management professor Jeffery Sonnenfeld, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump—who has made a habit of criticizing Fiorina—took aim at a different stage of her career.When asked about what he thought...

Fiorina was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Tech30) during a tumultuous time for the Silicon Valley legend. She joined the company in July 1999 after a successful stint at AT&T (T, Tech30) and its networking equipment spinoff Lucent. But the tech bubble burst only a few months after she took the HP job. Fiorina tried to jump start the company's growth in the PC market by acquiring rival Compaq in 2002 for $19 billion. That deal is now considered one of the worst in the history of the tech sector. And HP wound up laying off 30,000 workers during her...

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico owes more than $70 billion—about $19,729.43 per resident—in debt to creditors and investors. First to note the territory’s fiscal problems were the credit rating agencies, which downgraded the territory’s bond status to “speculative,” the first of three steps along the junk-bond path to loan default. Over the summer, about a year and a half after insiders warned of the territory’s looming problems, Gov. García Padilla (PPD) announced, “[T]he debt is not payable.” “My administration is doing everything not to default,” Garcia Padilla said in an interview with The New York Times. “But we have...

New Zealand's First Booze-Free Bar Flops The first alcohol-free bar in New Zealand has been forced to permanently close after just five weeks of trading after “no one showed up”. Situated in Auckland, Tap Bar – which stands for The After Party – charged NZ$15 for entry and non-alcoholic drinks started from NZ$5. The venue opened at midnight in the hope it would be a hot spot for customers rolling out of local nightclubs at 4am, but those revellers who did frequent the bar drank only water. “We gave it a shot and Auckland drinking culture just didn’t tie in...

Real-estate mogul Donald Trump shot back during Fox News' Republican presidential debate on Thursday night and said he was "very proud" of his business record after he was asked whether his company's bankruptcies disqualified him for the presidency. "I have never gone bankrupt, by the way," Trump said. "I have never." Moderator Chris Wallace questioned whether Trump could be trusted to handle the American economy in light of the fact Trump-related businesses have filed for corporate bankruptcy four times since 1991. The most recent of these incidents occurred in 2009 when Trump Entertainment Resorts declared Chapter 11. "In 2011, you...

Puerto Rico is $72 billion in debt, and it will take a painful process to bring the island's finances back from the brink. It's a massive debt load for such a small territory, and the problem can really be traced to one issue — bad tax policy. After Puerto Rico let one tax break for manufacturers expire almost a decade ago, manufacturers started shutting down operations on the island. That caused a spike in unemployment. On top of that, business-friendly tax policies for some of the companies that remained allowed multinational giants to pay tax rates of little more than...

There’s two interesting little stories in this idea that Saudi Arabia is going to go bust in a couple of years as a result of the sagging oil price. Both are more general economic ideas than just the story of that oil price. The first is that mono-anything in economics is something we don’t really like. We certainly don’t like either monopolies or monopsonies, but we should also be very careful of an economy that relies on any one product or even supplier. The perils of resting an entire economy on the production of just the one commodity should be...

Roman Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee Jerome E. Listecki, seen here in 2011, announced the archdiocese reached a $21 million settlement with 330 victims of sexual abuse by clergy members. Photo by Amg910/CC MILWAUKEE, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee announced Tuesday it has agreed to pay $21 million to hundreds of victims of childhood sexual abuse by clergy, clearing the way for the archdiocese to emerge from its five-year bankruptcy. Under the agreement, 330 of the 570 who filed sexual abuse claims in the bankruptcy will get financial settlements of varying amounts determined by a court-ordered...