Ah yes, the student-loans. Incredible world indeed. Personal debt that enslaves people for live is okay, but writing off big bets by big banks (or entire countries!) is no problem. On a side note: the more a student can borrow, the more the cost of education rises... This is made possible by governement as well as banks by the way. I feel Iceland did it right: let the banks go bust and even write off personal debt of people's morgage.
>> the more a student can borrow, the more the cost of education rises...
Yeah, it's like house prices. Houses inflate to whatever people can afford. So when the price of houses goes out of reach of a lot of people (like here in the UK) the obvious solution is for the government to demand people get easier access to debt, and to start pumping public money into the housing market. Because that totally won't just inflate the prices further...
Oh yeah, it's the same thing overhere. I used to love watching the BBC's program where people "flipped" houses. Nowadays the reruns come with a official warning, ha ha!
I think the main reason behind this is that student loans are unsecured, and the people they are making the loans to generally have little to no collateral to put up. In order to incentivize lenders to make the loans, they need to have some sort of guarantees, otherwise there would be little incentive for everyone not to declare bankruptcy after graduation, take the hit on the credit score for a few years, and then emerge with a basically free education.
You could write off both in theory. However, writing off student loans is not profitable to the people who can write it off, whereas writing off savings accounts is.
