The growing debacle that is the US student loan bubble - nearly the same size and severity [9]as the Subprime crisis at its peak- has been painfully dissected [9]on these pages in the past, so at this point the only thing remaining is to keep track of the bubble growing exponentially in real time as it hits all time records, and eventually pops. Helping us to track the realtime growth is the latest data from Equifax, via Reuters, which confirms what everyone knows: things in student bubble land are getting worse by the minute. Much worse, because in just the first two months of 2013, banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recover.
From Reuters [10]:
The credit reporting agency also said Monday that student lending has grown from last year because more people are going back to school and the cost of higher education has risen.
"Continued weakness in labor markets is limiting work options once people graduate or quit their programs, leading to a steady rise in delinquencies and loan write-offs," Equifax Chief Economist Amy Crews Cutts said in a statement.
The cost of earning a 4-year undergraduate degree has gone up by 5.2 percent per year in the last decade, according to the CFPB, forcing more students to take out loans. While other forms of debt went down, student loan debt continued to rise through the economic crisis.
Delinquencies have spiked in the last eight years, with about 17 percent of the nearly 40 million student loan borrowers at least 90 days past due on their repayments, a February report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank showed.
Er.... BTFD in the S&P (if there is a D of course - the way Kevin Henry is buying everything these days who knows)?
What else did you expect us to conclude here? It is painfully obvious by now that the farce will not end until the second coming of the stock, tech, housing, bond and, new entrant, student bubbles all pop spectacularly and at the same time, in the most epic Ben Bernanke organized New Normal credit supernova ever to be seen.