Student Loans

The Department of Education says it will forgive federal student loans made to Corinthian Colleges students who can prove they were victims of fraud. The potential cost to taxpayers: nearly $4 billion. With the precedent thus set, the question now is whether continued pressure on for-profit colleges will result in further closures and more petitions from hundreds of thousands of students with hundreds of billions of loans they now know can be legally discharged.

"I'm making a good salary and I'm doing all these things that I'm supposed to be doing. But you're just not able to save enough to get to that number. Housing is so inflated."

There are some valid points raised in Lee Siegel's 1100 word rant against college loans (if not so much against college education). There are some bad ones. But two things are is clear: the words "personal" and/or "responsibility" were used precisely zero times, and the op-ed writer, who described himself as "the author of five books who is writing a memoir about money", is hardly a glowing advertisement for an education attained (funded with either debt or equity) at one of the Ivy League's "best", Columbia University... that, or the return on money after wasting nearly a decade in university and taking out tens of thousands in loans to achieve a Master of Philosophy degree.

The Fed sees no risks of bubble trouble because they are looking at it all from the 2008 perspective. That is completely wrong-headed; if there is a “next one” it will have nothing to do with subprime mortgages, or even mortgages and real estate. Everyone seems to simply assume that the subprime problem ended in 2008, if only by crash. That is true but only of mortgages. Deleveraging is myth as debt has still expanded, and greatly, just not in the same exact places. There are certainly auto and student loans that have exploded exponentially, especially in subprime categories, but if there is another credit bubble now, the third, it is undoubtedly corporate debt.

Ali and Frazier, Laurel and Hardy, Mayweather and Pacquiao, Liesman and Santelli, and now Schiff and Maloney. Peter and Mike join clash of the titan-like to discuss their investment strategies and expose the charts the government doesn't want you to seeas "people like Bernanke are taken seriously still and the people that did predict [the crisis] are dismissed as lunatics half the time." The wide-reaching conversation covers everything from gold and stocks to The Fed and The Dollar - Bernanke "took the coward’s way out because all he did was exacerbate the problems to postpone the day of reckoning." The air is coming out of the bubble, they warn, "Bernanke and Greenspan have absolutely destroyed America. People don’t realize what is coming..."

May was a banner month for car sales and it's easy to see why. Nearly every conceivable metric for financing hit a record in Q1 according to Experian, including average loan term and average amount financed, suggesting the trillion-dollar US auto loan market has officially hit bubble territory. Meanwhile, the "cash out auto loan" is the new home equity loan.

Now what? The Fed says they are going to raise rates. The QE spigot has been turned off. The hedge funds are selling their buy and rent hovel investments, cash buyers are dwindling, the flippers who appeared in 2005 are back, Boomers are looking to sell and downsize, young people are already in debt up to their eyeballs thanks to the government doling out student loans like candy, the number of full-time good paying jobs continue to dwindle, and the rigged 37% price increase has priced millions of people out of the market.

How do you support a consumer economy with stagnant incomes for the bottom 90%, rising basic expenses and crashing employment for males ages 25-54? Answer: you don't.

Heavily-indebted millennials are quickly finding out what it means to enter the job market during the "waiter and bartender recovery" as recent graduates with advanced degrees opt for serving tables and pouring drinks thanks to poor employment prospects. “You’re like, ‘I’ll do anything and apply for everything, but usually it’s an electronic filing and you’re spending all your time on it and never hear back. So far, I have applied for around 30 jobs, if not more, and have heard back on two of them."

2015's heavily-indebted graduating class of college seniors has a lot of options. Not paying their loans is one of them. Read on...

"Right now, we’re living in a make believe world. Debt can’t be the main source of growth. Without a pick-up in final demand a lot of bad debts are out there. As long as you have excess capacity in the commodity production you have bad loans throughout the system. That means you have governments who can’t repay their debt without selling new loans and all their bad loans are funded by the central banks.... I think a global recession is inevitable...You just can’t devalue your way to prosperity. As long as the number of shares keeps declining, stock prices are going to go up and nobody cares [but] in the long term there has to be a major correction."

"The U.S. Department of Education wants to remind you that you may qualify for a repayment plan that calculates your monthly payment based on your income. You will likely qualify for an income-driven repayment plan if your total federal student loan debt exceeds your annual income. Under an income-driven plan, your initial payment could be as low as $0 per month." -- US Department of Education

The problems we’re grappling with have been building for more than 40 years. They’re not going to go away overnight, and they certainly will not be resolved by a report that instructs the police to simply adopt different tactics to accomplish the same results - i.e., maintain the government’s power, control and wealth at all costs. This is the sad reality of life in the American police state.

"More than 50 consumer and labor organizations sent a joint petition on Tuesday to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, urging him to cancel federal student loans owed by 78,000 who attended Corinthian schools," Reuters reports, confirming the notion that for-profit colleges may represent the next multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout.

Many factors combined to make it the perfect storm: the demographic rise of the millennials, easy money from the Fed, the “Chivas Regal” effect in pricing strategy that many colleges and universities adopted, and the US government virtually taking over the market for student loans. It’s a vicious circle as colleges raise prices, students take out easy loans, and the institutions raise prices again. However, it all seems to be coming to a head as several factors begin to show the chinks in the armor.