This chapter introduces the concept of insurance as a product and explores why people want to purchase insurance in general (and health insurance in particular). The main discussion centers around explaining that health insurance (and all insurance) is primarily financial protection: health insurance does not protect your health but instead protects your wealth from health-related risk. The chapter then moves on to discuss the operations of an insurance company: how premiums are set, the difference between correlated and uncorrelated risk, group insurance, and experience rating. The chapter ends by discussion moral hazard in the context of an individual with insurance coverage. The end of chapter supplement provides a mathematical example of why someone who is risk averse would want to purchase insurance.

This essay explores the relationship of literature and perversity in Roberto’s Bolaño’s short fictions “The Secret of Evil,” “The Insufferable Gaucho,” and Distant Star. While literature within the history of Latin American letters often provides a critique of or antidote to political and economic atrocities, in Bolaño’s texts literature is complicit in the very horrors it depicts. In Bolaño’s view, any effort to pit fiction and social actuality against each other in the interest of rescuing either represents a means to avoid the disturbance that, for Bolaño, defines contemporary existence.

Chapter 21 covers the effect of bankruptcy and insovency laws on IP licensing transactions. It covers the automatic stay of proceedings (US v. Inslaw), what is included in the bankruptcy estate, the effect of bankruptcy on executory contracts, including Lubrizol and Section 365(n) of the Bankruptcy Code (Prize Frize), the assignment by the bankruptcy estate (Pioneer Ford), the ban on ipso facto clauses and the use of technology escrow agreements to avoid some of these issues.

This chapter compares the U.K. and U.S. approaches to fiduciary duty and clawback as they relate to transactions when the firm is in the vicinity of insolvency. Historically the U.S. and the U.K. have balanced directors’ duties and trustee’s avoidance powers in opposite ways. In the U.K., officers and directors have a duty of fairness to creditors in the vicinity of insolvency; in Delaware no such duty to creditors arises. The U.S. takes a strict approach to avoidance of preferential and fraudulent transfers; the U.K. requires culpability. This chapter suggests that, on both sides of the pond, the duty and clawback regimes are under stress due to their failure to appreciate the importance of equitable treatment in the vicinity of insolvency and that the current emphasis on insolvency and pre-insolvency regimes oriented toward “rescue” highlights this shortcoming. The chapter concludes, that both jurisdictions fail to appreciate that duty and clawback serve complementary functions in the vicinity of insolvency—equitable treatment of creditors; and that a more balanced approach would be better than either of the lopsided approaches taken by the U.S. and the U.K.

In this Chapter, we survey the common law’s adventures with creditor protection over the course of American history with a special focus on Delaware. We examine the evolution of the equitable doctrines that judges have used to answer a question that arises time and again: What help, if any, should the common law be to creditors that suffer losses due to the purported carelessness or disloyalty of corporate directors and officers? Judges have struggled to answer that question, first deploying Judge Story’s “trust fund doctrine” and then molding fiduciary duty law to fashion a remedy for creditors. This reached a high point in the early 2000s as judges flirted with recognizing a “deepening insolvency.” Delaware’s judges effectively abandoned this project in a series of important decisions around the time of the financial crisis. In this “third generation,” judges told creditors to look to other areas of law to protect themselves from opportunistic misconduct, such as bankruptcy law, fraudulent transfer law, and their loan contracts. The question has arisen time and again and today’s “settled” law is unlikely to represent the end of history in creditor protection.

Data about consumers has long been a prized asset of organizations. As Paul Schwartz has observed, the “monetary value” of consumer data continues to grow significantly and companies eagerly profit from consumer data.1 The IoT will foster an exponential growth in the volume, quality, and variety of consumer-generated data. As a result, there will be more of our data available for companies to analyze, exploit, and extract value from. As we have seen in previous chapters, several legal scholars have highlighted the limits of companies’ privacy policies and conditions of use, and the role of these documents in enabling data disclosures.

As we have seen, the law wields considerable influence over the rights and remedies available to us as consumers. Several areas of commercial law are ill-equipped to sufficiently protect our consumer interests in the IoT age. This is because various legal frameworks governing commercial practices have not been sufficiently reformulated to account for the growing connections between the world of privacy and the world of commercial law. As earlier sections of this book have demonstrated, there are multiple legal frameworks impacting commercial practices at the federal and state level that are ripe for significant legal reform. These sources of law include contract law, the FAA, products liability law, the CDA, debt collection law, the Bankruptcy Code, and secured financing laws.

This chapter focuses on credit as a bounded social investment in light of financial shortfalls that arise during the life course. The Danish welfare state provides strong financial support, particularly for low-income households, through comprehensive family and educational policies such as childcare services and other in-kind benefits that limit families’ financial exposures and lower households’ opportunity costs for taking time off work, sending children to childcare, and pursuing education and training programs. Middle- and high-income households are the ones that draw on credit to smooth income losses when a spouse temporarily leaves work, for example to care for children or to get training. This "investment borrowing" is more prevalent than "consumption borrowing" to cope with labor market-related risks. By contrast, many more American households, including low- and middle-income ones, borrow money to cope with the financial consequence that arise throughout the life course, including income losses due to parental leave or expenses for childcare, education, and training–which would be covered or subsidized by most European welfare states. As life course trajectories have become more fluid and flexible and the traditional single-breadwinner model has declined, Germany’s restrictive credit regime continues to make it hard for households to borrow money.

Since the profits from pawnbrokers’ loans fell into relatively few hands, many Huizhou merchants came to rely on commercial partnerships, the formal and informal, to expand their pool of investment capital and the operation of their businesses. Chapter 5 investigates in detail the development of three distinct varieties of these partnerships for both Ming and Qing merchants in general and for Huizhou merchants in particular. Attention is paid to the distinctive principles of each of these types of commercial partnership, which seem to have grown out of specific regional conditions in China and the commercial needs of its itinerant merchants both before and during the Ming. In addition, this chapter explains the Huizhou merchants’ solutions to such common problems of business governance as bankruptcy and a merchant’s access to his committed investments during the contracted period of investment

Insolvencies are a consequence of capitalist economies and the market factors that underpin and drive them, including competitive behaviours, and the appetite for and bias towards risk, limited social and material resources (among them, credit), and the asymmetrical relationship of expectation to capacity. Insolvency always has some – and may have vast – private, public, institutional and systemic consequences. The distinction between insolvency as it relates to corporations, and bankruptcy in relation to persons, is made in the Australian Constitution. Insolvency and bankruptcy occur when corporations, businesses or persons are unable to pay their debts when and as they fall due. The term 'bankruptcy' is applicable to personal insolvency, while insolvent corporations or businesses go into liquidation. Bankruptcy laws provide the framework within and procedures by which the failure of debtors to pay their debts can be handled in an organised and efficient manner, making similar provisions for corporations, businesses and persons, while at the same time recognising the differences between the subjects of the processes.

In addition to being a writer, Mark Twain was a businessman, although almost always a failure. He was an inventor who tried to market his ideas, with mixed results. He founded his own publishing company when he grew tired of dealing with publishers, and for a time he was successful, although that too ended in bankruptcy. Like others in the Gilded Age, which he named, he was an investor, again with mixed and finally disastrous results. Although he criticized his age as one of monetary grasping, he himself was fully inculcated in his age. He lived in an age of great economic change, and his works reflect a tortured relationship with money and economics.