Weekly Round Up – December 27, 2013

Before we get to the good reads!

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A Few Good Reads

Here are a few of my favorite reads from the past week.

1. Democrats Miss Again on Student Debt Fix:

Currently, institutions are kicked out of the federal loan program if their two-year default rates are 25 percent or higher for three years or exceed 40 percent in any single year. The most recent national two-year cohort default rate across all sectors of higher education was 10.0 – the highest since 1995. The department is transitioning to a three-year default rate for the upcoming year.

Under the new proposal, a college whose student loan default rate reaches 15 percent or higher in a single year would have to begin to pay a penalty of 5 percent of the value of the outstanding defaulted debt. As an institution’s default rate increased, it would have to pay increasingly larger penalties, with a maximum repayment of 20 percent of defaulted debt for colleges whose default rates exceed 30 percent. Open this article

2. Federal Reserve System CAUSES unpayable debt, unemployment, inflation, high interest rates:

The Federal Reserve System’s mechanics cause ever-increasing and unpayable debt, unemployment, inflation, and high interest rates. Ellen Brown is right: it’s time to transform the Fed into a public utility. This shift from the Fed being a privately-owned business to maximize its owners’ profits to a public service would end the national debt, provide full-employment, end inflation, and have interest rates as a tool to manage money supply and/or pay taxes. Of course, this would require transparency and accountability unimaginable under current conditions. Open this article

3. Record dow on news fed will keep buying debt:

The stock market rallied on Wednesday afternoon, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing at a new all-time high of 16167.97, registering a gain of 292.71 points.

The spike followed a decision by the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee to continue buying U.S. government debt at the rate of $75 billion a month, compared to the $85 billion a month maintained throughout this year.

Wall Street had been concerned the Fed might “taper off” to a much larger extent buying U.S. government debt – known as “quantitative easing,” triggering fears that the stock market could drop precipitously. Open this article

4. Budget Battle Done, Debt Ceiling On Deck:

And then there was one. The U.S. Senate’s approval last week of a two-year budget deal that passed the House of Representatives Dec. 12 means investors can set aside worries that the government will shut down again in January, when a continuing resolution to fund operations was due to expire. But they need only turn the calendar one page to find a replacement concern: Feb. 7 is the day the debt ceiling will go back into effect, after having been temporarily lifted in October as part of the compromise that ended the 16-day shutdown. While Congress may yet agree to raise the country’s borrowing limit before then, the countdown to a potential default has nevertheless begun again, and for the third time in as many years. Open this article

5. Mississippi sues Chase Bank over debt collection:

Mississippi’s attorney general has sued Chase Bank for slipshod documentation of debt collection cases it pursued against credit card customers.

In a complaint filed in state court Dec. 17, Attorney General Jim Hood accused the bank of making false demands for debt, filing unverified documents in court and selling debt to others backed by false affidavits. “Chase pursued Mississippi consumers for debt that they had paid or settled, they did not owe, or that they had discharged in bankruptcy,” Hood said in a statement. Open this article