We were there recently on behalf of a client that needed to liquidate the company to properly close things and end a litigation matter that has been ongoing for them at the same time. Our client was the only non-individual matter being heard at the US Trustee office in Manhattan. At one point the trustee yelled at a woman along the lines of, "You had no job but you took out $87,000 in debt?! How did you ever plan on paying that off?" I also wonder who was stupid enough to lend the woman that much. I suspect there was fraud involved in her credit applications, but the trustee wasn't concerned about that.

An interesting side note: all of the individuals (and I mean all 30 or so of them) were Hispanic or black. I was trying to objectively quantify why that was the case. Was it because they were fired first in a form of "hidden discrimination" and so more likely to end up with no money? Was it because those two groups do not have a history of having wealth and so tend not to learn how to properly manage money? Was it just a simple expression of the statistical likelihood that blacks and Hispanics are poor? Did all of these factors go hand in hand? The people were expressing a negative stereotype, but the reason was hard to assess. I think that would make a very interesting discussion if people weren't so terrified of race-related topics.