Category: Business & Economy

While US consumers may have stepped back from a credit-card funded splurge in the last month of 2016, the far more troubling trend in student and auto loans remains, and as the following chart shows, as of Q4, both car and student debt hit all time highs of $1.407 trillion and $1.11 trillion, respectively.

Iran says that, due to the added sanctions, they will no longer utilize the dollar for transactions. Here is what that means for the dollar and you.

The popularity of protectionist trade policy is growing and is being actively promoted by President Trump. The appeal is clear and understandable: protectionism does save and protect some American jobs in protected industries, and those jobs are easily visible, identifiable, and measurable. But the one group of Americans we never hear about from Trump when he discusses international trade are the most important group of Americans – the American consumers who are the group that have the most to gain from international trade and the group that has the most to lose from trade barriers.

To economists, free trade means the absence of government interference with trade: no tariffs, quotas, subsidies, or other interventions, explicit or implicit. To politicians, “free-trade” means a complex set of managed trade policies. So, is all that extra government “coordination” necessary?

The US government, either on purpose or due to honest miscalculation, has been fabricating student loan default data, making it appear far lower than it was. The Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers. A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a “technical programming error.” How bad was the data fabrication? When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country. In other words, virtually every single number was made to appear better than it was.