Student Loans

You know your true level of inflation. You know it’s not 0.1%. You know it’s somewhere between 4% and 10%. You know your government is lying to you. You know the captured corporate media perpetuates the lies. You know those in control of the government must lie to keep their Ponzi scheme going. You know they are just following the Edward Bernays playbook: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." They want you to believe it’s for your own good. Do you think it’s for your own good?

Last week, former Secretary of Education and US Senator Lamar Alexander wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a college degree is both affordable and an excellent investment. He repeated the usual talking point about how a college degree increases lifetime earnings by a million dollars, “on average.” That part about averages is perhaps the most important part, since all college degrees are certainly not created equal. In fact, once we start to look at the details, we find that a degree may not be the great deal many higher-education boosters seem to think it is.

Amid record auto loan ABS issuance, record loan terms, and record high average payments, it's no secret that the market for auto loans in the US has become dangerously stretched. Now, the NY Fed is out with what is perhaps the most shocking statistic yet on just how "darn easy" it is to get a car loan

Moody's and Fitch are taking a hard look at student loan-backed ABS and they don't necessarily like what they see. Fortunately, Citi has some pointers on how the ratings agencies might go about avoiding downgrades.

Something's profoundly wrong with our global financial system. Pope Francis is only the latest to raise the alarm...What the Pope calls “an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules” is widely evident. What is not so clear is how we got into this situation, and what to do about it.

America is better off when President Obama is out on the stump bloviating and boasting rather than in Washington actively doing harm. But the whoppers he just told the students at the University of Wisconsin are beyond the pale. Said our spinmeister-in-chief: "And the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3 percent. (Applause.) Keep in mind, when I came into office it was hovering around 10 percent. All told, we’ve now seen 64 straight months of private sector job growth, which is a new record — (applause) — new record — 12.8 million new jobs all told." That’s a pack of context-free factoids.

This wasn't supposed to happen...

"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus."

The fact that Moody's and Fitch are beginning to reevaluate student loan ABS is indicative of an underlying shift in the market. Between the proliferation of IBR and the Department of Education's recent move to open the door for debt forgiveness in the wake of the Corinthian collapse, financial markets are beginning to see the writing on the wall. Perhaps Bill Ackman said it best: "there's no way students are going to pay it all back."

"Of the subprime vehicle loans bundled into securities, 73 percent now exceed five years, up from 64 percent during the first three months of 2014. 'Because cars depreciate quickly, a borrower is typically upside down or underwater toward the end of a long loan term.' 'The risk is that you extend a loan that a borrower cannot afford over its term schedule. Inching out to 75 and 84 months, I don’t think that has been tested yet.'"

The fox is guarding the henhouse at America's colleges and universities as accreditors slap a seal of approval on schools with subpar graduation rates, clearing the way for government aid to flow where it shoudln't and further imperiling the US taxpayer in the process.

"Over the last couple of decades, we have been engaged in an enormous national experiment, taking impressionable and often ignorant teenagers and young adults and seeing just how much student loan debt they can handle.There is a practical question at hand for people who feel as if they are in over their heads: Is it ever a good idea to try to beat the system by openly defying it and refusing to repay the debt that you willingly took on?"

In what looks like the latest threat to the US taxpayer stemming from the government's trillion-dollar student loan portfolio, VC-backed tech startups are using attractive refi offers to siphon off the best loans, leaving taxpayers with a book full of IBR enrollees and severely delinquent borrowers who aren't even thinking about making payments.

It just blows our mind, that in the face of almost every indicator having collapsed over the first 6 months of this year, market ‘pros’ just act as though it isn’t happening!  It’s impressive to watch the insanity, the denial, the delusion, that has become the basis of the steady state market. What is continuing is us extending ourselves again on the very assumption that the American Consumer will rebound to its peak strength.  Because there are those few all powerful economic cannibals that profit on policy rather than economics, we will continue down this flawed path until the legend of the Almighty American Consumer succumbs to reality.  And that day my friends will be an ugly one for the record books.