Student loans....

There is much to say about the debate/discussion currently taking place regarding student loan debt.  I'll say more in a later post, but for now, let's take a look at some data Mike Konczal has over at his new blog (see here).

So the first fact that we should recognize is this:  students are borrowing a much higher percentage of the total cost of college as a result of the significant reduction in state and federal support (read grants!).  I'm making no evaluation of this fact yet, but it needs to be recognized by anyone engaged in a discussion about student loan debt.

Info from the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta

Philadelphia Fed sees state economies improving

The Philadelphia Fed's (see here) February 2012 leading economic indicators shows improving economies in most states (see map below).

The housing problem continues

The housing problem continues to haunt the economy (see graph below from CoreLogic).  Jared Bernstein notes the following (see here):

A key variable here is the share of total sales that are distressed.  As the figure below shows, that share was falling a few months ago, but it’s started growing again, and as long as a) it’s growing and b) the price of distressed sales is falling, the national price will continue to fall and we’ll be doing slightly worse than bumping along the bottom.

Chart that should make parents nervous

Phil Izzo at the Wall Street Journal (here) has a chart that should make all parents nervous:

College aid just keeps on ....

I've written before about the increasing cost of college and the increasing contribution of government loans, etc.  Below is an interest graphic from the Wall Street Journal (see here).

And if you want some sense of what all that extra spending and debt means, see this piece (here).

Friedman gets it just about right

I'm not a big fan of the work of Thomas Friedman, but I think he gets it just about right when he says (here);

But we don’t tell Pakistan the truth because it has nukes. We don’t tell the Saudis the truth because we’re addicted to their oil. We don’t tell Bahrain the truth because we need its naval base. We don’t tell Egypt the truth because we’re afraid it will walk from Camp David. We don’t tell Israel the truth because it has votes. And we don’t tell Karzai the truth because Obama is afraid John McCain will call him a wimp.