Student Loans

• Only 28% of respondents knew that if student loans aren’t repaid, the U.S. government can garnish wages, withhold Social Security payments and tax refunds, and report the debt to credit bureaus.
• Even more people—35%—incorrectly thought the government couldn’t do any of those things or said they didn’t know what the government could do.
• Only 37% of those surveyed knew that students loans are extremely hard to shed in bankruptcy, a reality that differentiates student loans from other debts, such as mortgages and credit cards.
• About half of those with higher-than-average student debt didn’t have high comprehension of the issue.

Month after month, they came up with new excuses. Now they’ve used up all the good ones, but sales are still tanking.

The inevitable shuttering of at least 3 billion square feet of retail space is a certainty. The aging demographics of the U.S. population, dire economic situation of both young and old, and sheer lunacy of the retail expansion since 2000, guarantee a future of ghost malls, decaying weed infested empty parking lots, retailer bankruptcies, real estate developer bankruptcies, massive loan losses for the banking industry, and the loss of millions of retail jobs. Since we always look for a silver lining in a black cloud, we predict a bright future for the SPACE AVAILABLE and GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign making companies.

If oil is “just another commodity,” then there shouldn’t be any connection between oil prices, debt levels, interest rates, and total rates of return. But there clearly is a connection. As we have seen, rising interest rates will bring an end to our current equilibrium, by raising costs in many ways, without raising salaries. It will also reduce equity values and bond prices. A rise in the cost of extraction of oil, if it isn’t accompanied by high oil prices, will also put an end to our equilibrium, because oil producers will stop drilling the number of wells needed to keep production up.  If oil prices rise (regardless of reason), this will tend to put the economy into recession, leading to job loss and debt defaults. The only way to keep things going a bit longer might be negative interest rates. But even this seems “iffy.” We truly live in interesting times.

If you believe that the U.S. economy is heading in the right direction, you really need to read this article. As we look toward the second half of 2014, there are economic red flags all over the place.

With everyone focused on what is undisputedly the next mega credit bubble in the form of student loans, the topic of college education, and specifically its utility, has gotten much press coverage over the past month. As we summarized most recently two days ago, the key variables involved when calculating the costs and benefits revolve around whether one uses (generous amounts) of student loans and what area of specialization one picks. But according to a recent report published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research there is another, perhaps more important variable when it comes to getting the most out of one's college education: race. 

Has there been an economic recovery? The statistical data clearly shows that this has been the case. However, the 100 million Americans that currently depend on some sort of social assistance to "make ends meet" are likely to disagree with that view.

Fiat money is at base a form of indirect wealth transfer from those forced to hold the money to those issuing the money.

One of the most deplorable aspects of Greenspan’s monetary central planning was the lame proposition that financial bubbles can’t be detected, and that the job of central banks is to wait until they crash and then flood the market with liquidity to contain the damage. In short, China didn’t “save ” America into a housing crisis; the Greenspan Fed printed America into a cheap debt binge that ended up impairing the residential housing market for years to come. In any event, for those Millennials who do manage to accumulate a down payment by the time they are in their early 30s there is precious little starter home inventory available.  The Greenspan mortgage debt serfs from the previous generation are blocking the way. Monetary central banking is an economy wrecker.  Here is just one more smoking gun of proof.

The current war/civil unrest cycle is an interconnected global phenomenon. Since the parasitic Central Bank driven financial system is more or less entrenched in every country on earth, every country on earth is experiencing increased concentrations of wealth into the pockets of a handful of oligarchs. Meanwhile, those nations which heretofore had a middle class are finding that this entire socio-economic class is disappearing into the dustbin of history via a variety of methods, not the least of which is criminal quantities of student loans. These loans are pushing an entire generation into inescapable serfdom, while many university administrators are enriching themselves at their expense. So it appears student loan based debt serfdom is also a major issue in Chile, and one activist, known as “Papas Fritas,” decided to take matters into his own hands. During a takeover at Universidad del Mar, he was able to get his hands on $500 million of student debt, which he subsequently torched.

The core dynamic in our state-corporate system is a status Quo that suppresses competition (few other stores are allowed in town), usually by indirect means: high land leases, high fees for doing business in town, mountains of absurd regulations no small businesses can afford to meet, etc. In state-corporate capitalism, small business thus poses a threat to the monopolistic partnership of the government and dominant corporations. Small businesses that try to meet all the regulations and pay all the fees and taxes are either marginalized or driven out of business by the high overhead. Truth is the first victim of the Company Store's dominance.

Yesterday we provided a detailed breakdown of the cost aspect of a college education, particularly for young people who have no choice but to fund their education with student debt, a key part of the equation that the San Fran Fed in its particular cost-benefit "analysis" of college education avoided. There is much information in the post, but one particular aspect of the Pew analysis that the article was based on bears repeating and highlighting for all those less than "1%" young Americans debating whether a college education is worth the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans: the median net worth of "young" households, those where the head is younger than 40 years old, is $8,700, or 20% less than not college educated households with no student debt.

Since the Fed can't be bothered with an objective analysis covering both sides the most important debt issue for America, we go to Pew which recently concluded an analysis on the impact of student debt and found that "Student debt burdens are weighing on the economic fortunes of younger Americans, as households headed by young adults owing student debt lag far behind their peers in terms of wealth accumulation." 

We have covered the topic of the student loan bubble extensively in the past so we won't waste more digital ink on where it comes from or what it means for the troubled US consumer, suffice to report that according to the Fed, in Q1 total Federal student loans rose by another $31 billion to a record $1.11 trillion, and up a whopping $125 billion, or 12% from this time last year.

The solution to the erosion of the middle class lifestyle is to destroy debt and other fixed costs and eliminate self-sabotaging discretionary consumption.