Comments for Student Loan Bubble Nonsense: Peter Peterson and the Washington Post Mess Up on the Economy Yet Again at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 14 out of 14 comments http://www.cepr.net Wed, 22 May 2013 19:33:13 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15347 WaPo may have trouble with numbers, but the future for young students is sure worth discussing. Unless they join the military, which young people do en mass here, few jobs have fixed pensions. Few jobs have a career ladder. And there are few jobs. Add in student debt and it is a huge economic story. - Carol Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:35:57 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15330 In the original (cached) March 1st Fiscal Times story, the sentence read: The amount of student borrowing skyrocketed from $100 billion in 2010 to more than $1 trillion last year – or more than all the outstanding U.S. credit card debt. The corrected sentence in Fiscal Times reads: The amount of student borrowing skyrocketed from $830 billion in 2010 to $867 billion last year – or more than the $704 billion in outstanding U.S. credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A rise from 830 to 867 billion is not exactly skyrocketing! So WaPo changed it to say “student loan debt has skyrocketed in recent years to a total of $867 billion last year." Clearly a deliberate attempt to misinform, rather than change the tone of the article to fit the actual data. - JRR Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:02:51 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15329 Dean, the correction they have made to the sentence in the article on the web shows that the "100 billion" error was not a mistake but a deliberate attempt to propagandize over the issue: Rather than put in the correct figure (830 billion), the sentence now reads: "The amount of student loan debt has skyrocketed in recent years to a total of $867 billion last year." Note that instead of simply inserting the correct amount, they simply omitted including any data at all, and just stated “student loan debt has skyrocketed in recent years”. Actually including the data would show that the debt had not “skyrockeketd” at all (showing that the very premise of the story was incorrect), but rather had increased moderately. The fact that they chose to change the meaning of the sentence in order to maintain the false premise of the story rather than simply issue the correction of the "mistaken data" shows that they are deliberately engaging in propaganda. It reminds me of their claim that Mexico's economy grew by 800% since NAFTA! which they refused to correct! - JRR Wed, 14 Mar 2012 07:27:29 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15319 The numbers have been updated, but there is no note from the editor indicating as much. Courtesy of Google's cache, on March 9, the Fiscal Times article said: "The amount of student borrowing skyrocketed from $100 billion in 2010 to more than $1 trillion last year." It currently says: "The amount of student borrowing skyrocketed from $830 billion in 2010 to $867 billion last year." (Were they horribly wrong in both directions?) The article was originally published on March 1, so it went at least 8 days with made-up numbers. - Adam Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:25:32 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15298 [quote]None of this should be taken as minimizing the plight of recent college graduates who face a serious debt burden in an economy offering few jobs and even fewer good paying jobs.[/quote] Plenty of older graduates (and dropouts) who've been forced to default on their loans and parents who've co-signed loans (like the Minnesota man in the article) have a big stake in student debt reform. It's not just underemployed and underpaid Millennials. Interestingly the [i]Post[/i] article declined to publish the NY Fed's researchers' conclusion that once you exclude loans in deferment or forbearance, the percent of borrowers with "past due" student loans shoots up to 27 percent. - LSTB Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:05:13 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15296 You actually are too kind to the Post article. In the paragraph after the one where they point out that "The amount of student borrowing skyrocketed from $100 billion in 2010 to $867 billion last year.", they say students borrowed ~ $100 billion last year. If only the author had read his own article... Of course, it's highly ironic for the Post to be concerned about student debt. Their sister company, Kaplan U., along with other for-profit universities encourage students to borrow large sums for questionable degrees. - JD Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:31:59 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15294 I thought that was "editors...if they have any" - FRauncher Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:03:43 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15284 @kharris: what?? Make sense, dude. I expect an economics reporter from one of the top papers in the country to have some expertise in their beat. Why my plumber or hair dresser would be experts on bubbles, rather than plumbing or styling, is just a plain weird or stupid thing to say. Kharris essentially defends incompetence on the part of reporters from supposedly a top-ranked media and opinion former, by essentially saying Dean is expecting too much of them. Then he compares Dean with Rush, who libelled a young woman whereas Dean points out the truth about WaPo reporting, with well-deserved sarcasm. Huh? Is there any sense in this post by kharris? No. Anger? Yes. Faulty logic? Yes. Meaningless rhetoric? Yes. Whose credibility do I question after kharris's rant? Kharris's. BTW, lovely bit, Dean, about the "raised eyebrows ... if they have any." - David Mon, 12 Mar 2012 03:29:26 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15283 Some light is shed here. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/21/the-murky-world-of-student-loan-statistics/ I don't think student debt has the same potential for a negative feedback loop like mortgage debt. (Lower prices cause foreclosures which cause lower prices) Besides a large portion of that debt is owed to the Federal government. If increased losses cause the Federal to tighten future loans, then that just makes education scarcer and more valuable. You can't foreclose on knowledge or training. You could be scared about the short term nature of U.S. debt as the WSJ says: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203458604577263390952748580.html Borrowing short term to meet long term obligations has always been a risky approach, although chart 2 shows that the interest burden has not climbed. - AndrewDover Mon, 12 Mar 2012 03:24:32 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15282 William Faulkner has some advise for Dean. He urged writers to "kill your darlings" and Dean needs to listen. "It continues to obsess on the budget deficit, relying almost exclusively for sources on "experts" who were unable to recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble." One of Dean's darlings is holding analysts responsible for their views on the housing bubble prior to the mortgage collapse. It has become a pat bit in much of Dean's writing - a "darling" if ever there was one. Holding "experts" on the budget (whatever and "expert" may be) responsible for knowing that there was a housing bubble is odd. Yes, some of them do pretend to expertise in both subjects, but some don't. I don't hold the family pediatrician responsible for the housing bubble just because she claims some form of expertise. Nor do I ask my plumber whether he saw the bubble before the NAR did before allowing him access to my pipes. Dean's goal is to question the credibility of people whose views differ from his own. In some cases, that's legit. In others, not so much. Trashing the credibility of an opponent can be rather like Rush Limbaugh calling a young woman a slut when she took a view that differed from his. In such case, we would need to question Dean's credibility. - kharris Mon, 12 Mar 2012 02:44:13 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15280 At the WAPO, there were most likely many individuals who benefitted from rising home prices. Therefore, they had an interest in not calling attention to the housing bubble and risking it to pop. Journalists were on the bubble's payroll, so to speak. In regards to student debt, it is important to point out tuition costs have increased directly as a result of reduced spending by state governments. States attempt to balance their budgets by passing the costs along to college students. These are the proverbial children that deficit hawks refer to, who they do not want to burden with debt in the future. - David B. Schuster Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:08:09 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15275 yet another attempt by the dutiful stenographers at WAPO to demonize the 99%--how irresponsible, lazy, un-American, etc., these students are, i.e., playing fast and loose with the economic well-being of this extraordinary light unto the world, this moral beacon, the City on the Hill: Empire! And by so doing--i.e., by engaging in this "journalistic" (NB: scare quotes) sleight-of-hand--the MSM removes the focus of ignominy from where it rightly belongs: upon the money-obsessed piglets on Wall Street, the Fortune 500 CEOs and their major stockholders, and that bastion of integrity, the American banks...all underwritten by the State, its war juggernaut, and our metropolitan gendarmes--who terrorize both the citizenry as well as their own (q.v., Adrian Schoolcraft)! - Dean Taylor Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:09:30 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15274 This is a really funny post. Does the WAPO seriously not have any editors who are able to catch such a ridiculous error? So the amount of student loan debt increased 767% last year? Maybe this is the WAPO's logic: If we assume that the amount of student loan debt outstanding continues to grow at the rate of 767% per year, then in 2012 there will be $7.5 trillion in student loan debt outstanding. Then in 2013, the amount of student loan debt outstanding will explode to $65 trillion. If the student loan debt bubble then pops in 2013, the WAPO would be correct, as it would trigger an epic financial crisis 3.5x worse than the 2008 meltdown. That's really the only coherent message I can come up with to take away from this absurd article. - JSeydl Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:47:16 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/student-loan-bubble-nonsense-peter-peterson-and-the-washington-post-mess-up-on-the-economy-yet-again#comment-15272 So is there a problem with student debt? It's outpaced inflation for a very long time. Would this be a non-issue if the economy were back to normal? - Martin S. Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:16:02 +0100