Seems like a fairly safe investment since even bankruptcy doesn't take care of them... Until the Government will have to forgive all of those loans...
Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
231–240 of 294 posts
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#232Anytime the US wants the world to be a certain way but just can't quite get reality to conform debt is our answer. Everyone should be a homeowner but for some reason isn't? Simple, just give them cheap loans for houses. Everyone should be educated but it doesn't seem to be happening? Debt time. Why do we do this? Because it allows us to pretend that complicated long-term structural problems are simple short-term capi…
It also seems like a natural way to solve problems when your entire economy rides on a recession cycle.
Loans loans loans, recession, loans loans loans, recession.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Interesting time” as in jail time for money laundering and wilful tax fraud?
If 80% of millennials collectively decided not to repay their student loans, there would not be enough space in prison for all of them.
You can't get 80% of anyone to do anything.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#234Recent reports from the Treasury Department show that the US government owns nearly $1.5 trillion in student loans. That’s pretty sad when you think about it: the US government’s #1 financial asset is debt owed by tens of millions of its young people for university education that didn’t even necessarily qualify them for a real career. Millennials are the most educated generation in history. Yet there are record numbe…
The problem with the US Social Security trust fund is that it's misnamed. It should be called the giant equity stash that the US Government can convert to bonds and borrow against. The fund should be flush with cash, however, that'd be fibbing. It would be flush with cash, if it weren't borrowed against for other things in one form or another. For example, the GW, Reagan, and Clinton used this to their benefit. src: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/politics/at-heart-of-socia... Given that these were bonds, the payments will come due back to the trust fund in one form or another....I'd suspect financed with more debt.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#235Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're definitely doing a lot more than a lot of people are doing. I read your last line as defeatist, and probably misjudged you. I will say however that a lot of the issues you talk about are systemic and larger than what can be affected by local politics. Compositing programs won't address there are still large corporate farms out there that contribute the most to climate change. The same is true of recycling, bei…
Thanks. I agree with you about the fact that what I'm doing isn't a direct influence on the bigger issues. However, consumers play a major role in these larger issues. For example, If we as a society would stop buying cheap food, it would force the hand of these industrial operations to change their behavior. So I'm taking the time I have now to learn and improve my mentoring and educational skills when working with…
If we as a society would stop buying cheap food
While voting with your wallet and trying to be a conscientious consumer is great, the asymmetry between ad=hoc networks of consumers pursuing smarter more sustainable choices and people who are directly invested in selling crap fora quick buck is huge. Since the large industrial concerns can spend a fortune on advertising and demand creation how exactly are you going to 'force their hand'? So far evidence suggests they often just create an additional line of healthier-seeming products at a higher price point that can be marketed to your demographic segment.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#237US government backed student loans were a huge mistake. We needed something like rent control enforced on public universities, for government backed loans. But we didn't. So it created a situation that caused an enormous amount of millennials to be taken advantage of by universities and colleges. Those universities and colleges pumped full of government loan cash became increasingly predatory. They increased their ad…
>worthless degrees like gender studies Worthless eh? I bet if companies Uber hired some of these gender studies majors they might not have fucked up?
Go speak to a gender studies major and you'll find out.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#238Anytime the US wants the world to be a certain way but just can't quite get reality to conform debt is our answer. Everyone should be a homeowner but for some reason isn't? Simple, just give them cheap loans for houses. Everyone should be educated but it doesn't seem to be happening? Debt time. Why do we do this? Because it allows us to pretend that complicated long-term structural problems are simple short-term capi…
Not disagreeing with you, just adding: Debt is not inherently bad. If the concept of debt didn't exist our society would hardly have advanced in the last 2000 years. We owe a ton of our society's development to the fact that bankers exist, otherwise only a handful of people throughout history would have had the resources to build ships, open new businesses, build factories, new technologies, etc, and there would be z…
The problem is that we have been running trade deficits for decades now, mean that most of the debt is spent on imported goods. This led to businesses with high profit margins that are designed to exploit debt, and the economy ended up being based on stocks going up for things like retirement (partly because other governments ended up buying US bonds). This is the main cause of things like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech going bad.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#239That looks like just intangible assets. It doesn't seem to include land, buildings, vehicles, vessels, etc. The US Government is the largest landholder in the Western states. A single aircraft carrier is worth billions. Also, back when I took out a student loan, the government was merely a guarantor, which would be a liability. I wonder if they offset that. I think they need a more precise source citation.
Re: Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans
#240This is such a huge problem and it's so easy to see the collapse over the horizon. There are just a few small differences between education today and education 30 years ago. Off the top of my head, you can go online today and see lectures for upper level MIT courses for free... Literally, the best university in the world has lectures available for free. And instead of learning the dewey decmial system and taking 10 b…
Position Requirements * Bachelor's degree in CS As someone without a degree, there are quite a few positions unavailable to me. Some positions state a degree is required even though they would take an exceptional developer, but many others are very strict and require the degree. The pedigree of the employees can be important when the company is in the market to be bought or sold.
The bachelors isn't important for it's inherent value, only as an arbitrary way of ranking people in a rat race.