EZ READING MONEY MATTERS: Loans For College Collapse And Vanish

March 31, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Banks have ceased to lend money to students. Even with government guarantees. This will have a very vile ripple effect. Many colleges will go bankrupt this year if their incoming student body vanishes. Meanwhile, Congress will debate yet another $100 billion emergency spending bill for the hyper-expensive war in Iraq that is costing us trillions of dollars. Congress also must debate the 200 page reoranization bill handed over by the right wing neo cons who plan to destroy America. Anyone who OKs anything this gang does is insane or a traitor. Arrest the neo cons for wrecking our nation. Treason can be the charge.

US credit crunch hits education as banks abandon student loans

One of America’s leading banking associations has given warning that the United States faces a growing educational apartheid as some lenders withdraw from student loans amid new evidence that the credit crisis has spread across all types of borrowing.

In the past fortnight, some banks, including HSBC, have pulled out of the $85 billion (£42 billion) a year US student loans market, fuelling anxiety that the turmoil that hit debt markets on Wall Street last summer is spilling over into the wider economy and making credit more difficult to secure for ordinary American households.

In the US, many undergraduates take out a federal guaranteed loan and top up their financial needs with a private loan from lenders such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citi-group. In the academic year 2005-06, $17 billion in private student loans was used to finance higher education.

Banks have become reluctant to offer private student loans because worsening credit conditions have meant that they cannot package up the loans and sell them on.

All over the mainstream media, I read stories about the hopes of the investment community that the collapse of the US banking/economic system is finished and life will return to 'normal'. 'Normal' being 'continuous financial overruns, oceans of red ink' status quo normalcy. When any great economic system finally collapses, there is this raging desire to regain the worse aspects of the previous system. This desire is tremendously strong in empires. Since they are accustomed to ignoring reality, they figure, why not ignore it forever? In normal downturns, the investing classes constantly chatter about how things are turning around rapidly. When it takes longer than a year, they grow glum and then angry. But the first year of any collapse, they love to pretend this time will be short and the pain, a mere pin prick.

History, on the other hand, views this with her usual grim amusement and the picks up her bloody pen to scratch more painful news into the unscrolling parchment of Reality Biting. The news at the top of the story today infuriates me [how UNUSUAL!!! HEH.] Here we are, Congress is going to begin 'debating' the latest spending bill for IRAQ. The bill for this misbegotten, miserable war, is heading towards the trillions of dollars. The price of oil before this invasion was less than $50 a barrel. The collapse of our 'in the red' economy has gone off the cliff thanks to the high cost of oil and war spending. Every time Congress has to consider shutting the public purse to this wild, useless spending, they do the opposite.

They are afraid of being called 'traitors'. Well, I have something to say about that: they are ALL TRAITORS if they stupidly vote to keep on this useless, wild spending! Instead of educating our youth, we are spending hideous sums to kill Iraqis. Public education post high-school is now going to collapse due to the inability to spend public money on important things like the education of our youth. My own family is being hammered by this. The availability of government loans to students has collapsed in the last 7 years. As inflation has eaten away at these funds ability to cover 4 years of college, students had to go to banks for supplementary loans. Now, these are vanishing! Poof!

This directly hits my own children. Now, colleges will see registrations vanish next fall as even more students cannot get loans. This collapse is EASY TO FIX. All we have to do is have Congress decide to vote for the AMERICAN PEOPLE and FUND the education of OUR CHILDREN. And they can easily do this by cutting totally, every penny going to the misbegotten Iraq war! Sadr just called a ceasefire which was brokered by Iran. Iran has won this war. Iran can do what Iranians love to do: make fun of us as they chase us out of Shi'a lands. But what else do we expect? We want the Chinese chased out of Tibet, after all!

So we can go! Goodbye! The Shi'ites are perfectly capable of running their own affairs. Perhaps, if our collective brains kick in, we can realize doing business with the Persians has an upside: both we and they will do much better. Eh?

Instead, our educational system will now collapse. The loss of these loans will HAMMER our educational system ferociously. The wave of cut backs in colleges will be disastrous and deep. And what was all that garbage from those flat earth flat worms like Friedman and his six months, all will be well in Iraq?

Stomp on them! Feed them to robins. Robins came to my mountain looking for worms. I will send them to the New York Times to eat.

G7 to press big banks to reveal extent of credit crunch losses

The world’s big banks are to face stronger demands from finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven (G7) leading economies to declare the full scale of their exposure to losses from the US housing market slump and the global credit crunch.

The G7 move comes after the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), the policy group of leading economies’ finance ministries, regulators and central banks, said at the weekend that lack of clarity over the extent of banks’ losses is worsening the credit crunch.
*snip*
The warning from G7 meanwhile came as the Basle-based FSF finalised a report to G7 finance ministers on responding to the credit crisis, including recommendations for toughening regulation and scrutiny of financial institutions and markets.

The banking collapse continues. This isn't due to some small problem. It is a systematic failure that can't be fixed by some simple jiggering of interest rates. Since the ultimate reason is a lack of savings coupled with wild spending and irresponsible debt creation in order to fund imperial adventures, fixing this collapse is no easy thing. When banks issue too many debts to kings and emperors, when those guys default and they always do, the banking system collapses. From the earliest days in history to modern times, these collapses are as inevitable as the sun rising or setting.

This 'lack of clarity' isn't a symptom. It is a cause. And the way to tackle this issue is easy: you arrest the people who devised financial systems and instruments that are concealing the truth. We call people who make such things 'con men' or 'rip off artists.' And the sole reason for making anything impossible to trace, explain or understand is simple: it is to hide frauds. In the case of the explosion in new instruments that were made of bad debts, the opacity was to hide the TRUTH about the quality of these underlying loans. And the people engineering this knew this perfectly well. They thought, no one would figure out that these tricks we are playing have diluted the true value of these things we are selling.

Note that Goldman Sachs even boasted about betting that these instruments would fail even as they sold them to outsiders who had no idea that a ton of pure junk, utter garbage, had been parked inside of AAA rated instruments! So I say, arrest these guys. The top ones have many millions in profits from this fraud. Governments can use these profits to fund education for our youth.

Trichet, King May Support Fed as Ammunition Runs Low

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has so far shouldered most of the burden of saving the global economy and financial markets. He may be about to get more help.

With the credit crisis entering its ninth month, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet are on the verge of new steps to spur lending and increase liquidity, say economists at Lloyds TSB Group Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Interest-rate cuts may be next if the crisis persists.

``We're inching closer to the great global monetary easing,'' says Joachim Fels, co-chief economist at Morgan Stanley in London.

Lloyds predicts King's next step will be to accept more types of collateral for loans. Trichet will pump more money into banks, RBS forecasts. Such measures would take Europe's two biggest central banks further down the path laid out by Bernanke this month.

To save this corrupt banking/investing system set into motion by con artists, the central banks will now drop interest rates to 0%. But they will not be funding student's loans at that rate! Which is why I am calling for no loans but rather, GRANTS to our young people. Education is supposed to pull us out of our post-industrial wasteland and into intellectual pursuits. And note how this article talks about BERNANKE 'shouldering the burden.' This idiot isn't shouldering anything. He is imitating the Bank of Japan. Super-cheap loans to governments and exporters, no money for the working classes. Note that this hasn't helped the lower classes of Japan! And in the US, wages are dropping, access to higher education is being strangled, we have no idea how to deal with all this!

One thing is certain: imitating Japan will put the entire planet into a depression. As I often point out. Japan has the 0% regime, super-low import regime down pat. If everyone locks out the import of high-value materials like Japan has, we will have no world trade except in commodities. If that! But the G7 nations focus only on China with fatal results to world trade. Europe and Japan wanted the US to drop interest rates so America can buy more of their exports. The US can't afford to do this. In Japan, I read yesterday that a Japanese airline is going to start buying only planes from Mitsubishi who is going back into the business. Japan bought American and European planes for many years as a counterbalance to the car trade which is totally one way from Japan to the outside world.

Now that they rule the roost internationally, they are now going to rebuild their aviation industry. They US trade statistics with Japan would be near $0 going to Japan while Japan exports $30 billion to the US. We have to deal with this one-way trade just as we have to cease our imperial overreach and wasteful wars. Our G7 buddies want us to continue all this. They are our TRADE RIVALS and they are BEATING US UP.

Stock Markets Call Bluff of Asian `Decoupling': Andy Mukherjee

The four best-performing Asian markets have been Taiwan, Pakistan, Thailand and Sri Lanka, posting modest gains of between 2 percent and 8 percent in U.S. dollar terms.

Is this the Asian ``decoupling'' that global investors had so fondly hoped for? Weren't the larger and faster-growing economies of China and India supposed to shield investors from the mortgage- and credit-related financial crisis in the U.S.?
*snip*
The winners' story is much more remarkable, especially when you consider that the quarter began with a heightening of political risk in two out of these four markets and -- at least at the time -- a far-from-certain process of reduction of the same risk in the two remaining ones.

In other words, the biggest investing houses that fueled our financial collapse are STILL running after Miz Risky! Countries that are politically unstable, outright insurrections, even, are the 'best bets.' This is due to the higher interest rates for loans in these unstable places. So money is flowing there. Is this a good idea? Or total insanity? Obviously, anyone who screams, they want safety only to take the government-sponsored loans from the Fed Reserve window and then rush off to the most dangerous parts of the planet to watch it 'grow' is...insane.

Weird interest rates

Continuing the discussion about the weird (and worrying) state of the financial markets, here’s a picture showing just how strange things are. Normally, we just say that the Fed sets “short-term interest rates,” because all very short rates are about the same. Below is the Fed funds target rate and the one-month Treasury bill rate; they’ve always been right on top of each other.

Always, that is, until now. Treasury rates have plunged close to zero, even though Fed funds is still 2.25%. Since open-market operations take place in Treasuries, I take this to mean that the Fed may not actually be able to reduce short-term rates much from current levels — which means, in turn, that conventional monetary policy has been taken off the table. As Brad says, be afraid — be somewhat afraid.

All the charts and graphs show the same thing: off the cliff. This is scary. Because this is a sign we are going into a depression. Commodities shot up right before the Great Depression and the previous Long Depression. This is a symptom of an impending depression. Once the higher commodities eat up domestic budgets and industry struggles to pay for higher material costs by CUTTING LABOR just like they just did in Japan for 15 years, we get a dead market due to workers unable to buy anything but the barest necessities. Depressions are all about necessities. And as commerce ceases, the prices of commodities falls, of course.

As we are beginning to see, barely. The instability in the commodities markets is proof that the buying ability of billions of workers is now beginning to be sopped up and will end up eating up all the incomes of the mass of humanity. Then, money becomes precious since workers will be cut out of the money stream. money is wealth ONLY if it moves. This includes gold. If it sits in a vault or underground or in a deep cave under some Dragon, it is no longer wealth. It is a dead horde, a grave.

This process of defunding workers has been going on for a while. Workers in Asia have, outside of Japan, seen their finances going up and up. But now, all nations will see their workers lose ground. And the more they lose purchasing power, the more the depression will hammer world economies. 0% interest rates won't increase the buying power of workers seeing their wages collapse and jobs vanishing.

Long Fight Ahead for Treasury Blueprint

Lawmakers and regulators said yesterday that an ambitious plan by the Treasury Department to revamp the nation's decades-old financial regulatory structure could require congressional action stretching over several years and would not help the economy out of its current credit crisis.

Battle lines are already forming over Treasury's major proposals even though top officials have just begun to digest the 200-page regulatory blueprint, which was released to them late Friday night.

Some Democrats and consumer groups criticized the plan for serving the needs of financial markets but not consumers. Former and current regulators hinted at a likely fight over proposals to strip authority from agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the head of another imperiled body, the Office of Thrift Supervision, was dismissive of the Treasury blueprint in an e-mail Friday to his employees. Other officials worried whether the effort to streamline financial oversight would lead to a massive disruption and elimination of positions across the federal government.

The bulls and bears in Congress will tussle over this. It won't pass, of course. First of all, the power structure is in flux there. And we may have a new President soon, I hope. Clinton's candidacy is now fading fast. People realize, she can't win through hook or crook. And the flurry of negative news about Obama's pastor is fading fast, too, as the economic whirlwind rapidly destroys more sectors of our economy. People are increasingly focused on the economy. And McCain's hope to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran and Iraq is going to be shoved aside in favor of 'hell, we have to save ourselves!' just as the Vietnam war abruptly ended not due to student uprisings or our inner cities burning but due to bankruptcy. Our economy was collapsing and we had to save ourselves. Our puppets in Vietnam had to fend for themselves.

If Obama is being advised by Volker, there is some hope we will avoid the 0% deflationary trap. One can only hope.

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Comments

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