Hacker News Reader

Comment by metaphorm | Hacker News Reader

the combined assets of the entire class of student debtors is probably NEGATIVE (they are debtors, remember) whereas the assets of even a single major shareholder (Carl Icahn as a benchmark) are in the billions of dollars and outweigh the rest of it combined.

this is one of the side effects of the massive income and wealth inequality American style capitalism causes.

View on HN

>>the combined assets of the entire class of student debtors is probably NEGATIVE

Doesn't matter. As the saying goes: if you owe the bank $1,000, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100,000,000, the bank has a problem.

Debtors as a group probably would have a great deal of collective bargaining power.

If debtors could get organized and all stopped paying at once, it seems likely that Navient would run out of money before they got the spigot turned back on.

The consequence of course would be that student loans would cease being made, or be made much less frequently. This would have effects, some good, some bad.

US has never had problems with putting 1% of their population in jail. If every student, even the children of billionaires, massively refuse to pay back as a group, the banks would be too happy to strike a deal with the children of billionaires in order to put the 99% others in jail.

"US has never had problems with putting 1% of their population in jail." {Citation needed}

This is a pretty interesting idea. I have never heard of debtors banding together to negotiate lower debts before.

I'm not sure what you hope to get from it.

We need to be a little more clear: Carl Icahn's asset is the students' debts. That is what his wealth is made out of, in the way that soda is made out of corn syrup and water. No student debt would mean Carl Icahn would have to make an honest living, and he's not gonna go quietly.

Present assests- probably, but when taken over a longer time scale this makes increasing sense. many folks with >100k debt usually have several grad degrees , medical, engineering, law, etc, & whether annualized or summed, their future earnings may be productively invested into an advocacy campaign which would not only benefit them but others who have less natural income cushion and thus less of a parachute.

Individual mega-investors are no doubt powerful, but what about investor collectives. if a single company and/or entity can take on even 1/10th the power of Icahn collectively, it is something worth considering.

there is asymmetry of purpose as well as asymmetry of net worth. an individual mega investor spends as much as he (or she, but lets be honest, its almost always he) wants on anything at all. a class of several tens of thousands of investors in a collective will struggle with their decision making in all the expected ways.

That's why people put pressure on the administrators of pension funds to invest or divest in accordance with political goals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com