Hattip to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.   As regular readers of this blog know, I am, for my sins no doubt, an attorney.  I was examining the year end stats for my practice, and I noticed that the legal fees I derived from my bankruptcy representation of creditors and debtors almost doubled in 2009 over what they were in 2008.  Therefore, I was little surprised to read that bankruptcies were up 32% in 2009. 

U.S. consumers and businesses are filing for bankruptcy at a pace that made 2009 the seventh-worst year on record, with more than 1.4 million petitions submitted, an Associated Press tally showed Monday.

The AP gathered data from the nation’s 90 bankruptcy districts and found 1.43 million filings, an increase of 32 percent from 2008. There were 116,000 recorded bankruptcies in December, up 22 percent from the same month a year before. Continue reading →