U.S. personal bankruptcy growing

WASHINGTON, May 28 (UPI) -- Personal bankruptcies in the United States are rising, despite tighter restrictions passed in 2005, court documents show.

Personal bankruptcy filings peaked at 2.04 million just before Congress raised income limits and made it more expensive to file, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

But filings for Chapter 7 and Chapter 13, which dropped in 2006, rose 38 percent in 2007 to 822,590, the Post reported.

A Chapter 7 filing cancels debt, while a Chapter 13 filing allows those filing to re-structure payments.

The filings are personal, but also involve basic economics, experts said.

"The rise in bankruptcies is not about something that happened last week or last month," said Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren. "It's about declining wages, rising costs, inadequate health insurance, job instability," she said.

"It is pretty widespread because there are widespread problems in the economy," said economics professor Peter Morici of the University of Maryland.

"Americans have been spending 105 percent of their income for the last three or four years. That's not sustainable," he said.