Bond Buyers Beware: Student Loans Mirror Mortgage Meltdown

Mar 6, 2013

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Editor’s Comments: Close your eyes. Imagine an upside down world in which the borrowers are having the most trouble keeping their loans current are the very same loans that investors can’t get enough of. Sound like the mortgage meltdown? That is because Wall Street is using the same business model. “Demand for the riskiest bunch—those that will lose money first if the loans go bad—was 15 times greater than the supply, people familiar with the deal said.”

So why would fund managers intentionally invest money in which they are most likely to lose money and their jobs? Answer: they wouldn’t. Somehow wall Street has again convinced or coerced fund managers to buy bogus bonds backed by student loans that are spiraling down the toilet even as we speak.

The “experts” attribute the surge to investor demand. I would scratch the surface and see why investor demand was so high, besides the obvious need to increase yield at a time when yields have never been lower.

The problem is that there is still no accountability for these loans or bonds. A young student asks for a loan and the bank showers him with “extra” amounts beyond what he requested. The payment is zero, so it is like free money and the novice financial victim doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to understand the flaws in what is being proposed to him or her.

Before you know it, the $25,000 loan he asked for is now $50,000 to take care of incidentals and living expenses, and the real amount borrowed will go up by anywhere from 6%-15% as interest accumulates is added to the principal. Once out of school, the interest rates shoots up and the next he or she knows, she now has around a $60,000 loan (despite asking for $25,000) with an interest rate of 8%, which means that interest alone is $4800 per year or $400 per month — the payment for a small car and insurance.

The mystery of why demand is so high when on the last round there was such a disaster can only be explained by reference to the sales talk given to fund managers and perhaps some overlapping or conflicting areas of interest.

This is not rocket science. The number of student loans failing is spiking and getting worse every day. Any asset backed security using student loans is depreciated worse than a new car driving off the show room floor. And listening to the bankers selling this stuff is like getting medical advice from a crack dealer.

So why are they putting pension fund money into an obviously failing investment? That is my quest. When I have the answer i will probably be able to further unravel the mortgage backed bonds a little further as well.

I keep wondering if the bankers are actually doing the same thing they did with the mortgage backed bonds — tell the investor the investment is triple A rated, insured and hedged with credit default swaps. And I wonder if the fund managers understand that the triple A rating is subject to revision down to unrated, and that the insurance and hedges are payable not to the investors but to the investment bankers.

I also wonder if the notes will again disappear because of misrepresentations as to their content, and if the intermediary banks will again retain control over the collection process, create fabricated forged documents and offer of perjured testimony and affidavits from incompetent witnesses?

And I wonder if once again we have a stream of money coming from an unidentified funding source whose name is not included in the closing documents, and who agreed to repayment terms different than those set forth on the promissory note signed by the borrower.

This is why I am including Student Loans as an area of concentration on this blog and I will include other subjects as well that inform and assist those “in trouble” due to the greed and predatory lending tactics used by private bankers. It is worth mentioning that the private banking loans are in the process of being phased out for precisely the reasons stated above.

Now SOMEBODY must be making money on these bad loans and the good loans far in excess of the basis points usually applicable to lending. Where is that profit coming from? It can only come from the investors since they are the only ones who are putting their money at risk.

So to recap, after the mortgage meltdown we have what appears to be a repeat situation going on with student loans. The investment bankers are skimming deeply into investor money before they lend out anything. The loans were mostly bad loans that will eventually fail. The bankers will collect insurance, credit default swaps and potentially another federal bailout. Nobody ends up with what they wanted except the investment bankers, of course.