![]()
- White House Plans to Freeze Spending to Cut Deficit
- Week Ahead: Investors Go for Quality, Assess Recovery
- Hedge Fund Billionaire Paulson Reports New Citi Stake
- Cramer: 5 Earnings Reports to Watch Next Week
- Court Rejects 'Clawbacks' for Alleged Stanford Victims
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- Tax Credit Sparking First-Time Home Sales: Realtors
- Investors Cut Back US Stocks for Bigger Growth Abroad
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- U.S. Stocks Rally for the Second Straight Week
- Dollar is Not Plunging—So 'Calm Down': Market Strategist
- Strategists Say Markets Have More Upside — But How Much?
- Hirschhorn: Risk-Averse Traders
- Roginsky: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Financial Reform
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- TV Series Inks Unique Deal For Fight
- First Time Buyers Rescue Housing: Realtors
- Dollar General Trades Higher After Its IPO
MOST SHARED
- Today's Market Action
- CNBC Video: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping American Great
- Microsoft's Bill Gates Praises Apple's Steve Jobs For 'Saving the Company'
- Has Twitter's Finest Hours (Seconds) Come and Gone?
- Israel Going Green
- Low Interest Rate Investing
- CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping America Great
- Inside Wal-Mart's Acai Berry Juice Maker
- China's Role as Lender Alters Dynamics for United States
U.S. consumer bankruptcy filings soared 40 percent in October as home values sank and individual debts ballooned, the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) said Tuesday.
U.S. consumers filed some 106,266 bankruptcies in October, up 40 percent from a year ago and up 20 percent from September.
So far this year, consumers have filed more than 880,000 bankruptcy petitions, eclipsing 822,000, the total for all of last year, the ABI said.
"October's sharp spike in new consumer bankruptcies confirms the severe financial stress on household budgets caused by high debts, flat incomes, and declining home values," ABI Executive Director Samuel Gerdano said in a statement. "We expect the 2008 numbers to be the highest since the new bankruptcy law went into effect in 2005."
This is the first time that individual filings have topped 100,000 in a month since the U.S. Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act took effect.
The law makes it more difficult for an individual to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection that allows most debts to be forgiven. Under the law, individuals must undergo a review to determine whether they have enough income to pay some portion of their debts.
The ABI used data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center in its report.
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates spoke to Columbia students, and Buffett made the students a startling offer.
- For the chief of cable company Comcast, growth has been about making deals – generally very large deals.
- Some companies may start using insurance to shift carbon risk from their balance sheets to maybe... yours?
- The president and founder of Genesis Today wants to improve America’s health, and thinks Wal-Mart can help.
- Switzerland's privacy watchdog is taking legal action to force Google to make changes to its Street View service.
- A wealthy, distracted Texas driver crashed his million-dollar Bugatti Veyron sports car into a salt marsh, say police.












