Elizabeth Warren, a Great Investment

Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grass-roots funded campaign -- I regret not contributing more -- is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.

That's how I was reminded this week that Congress is about to let the interest rate charged for new student loans double to 6.8 percent at a time when the too-big-to-fail banks that caused the Great Recession continue to be bailed out at the rate of 0.75 percent. Yes, the banks pay less than 1 percent for money that we the taxpayers lend them. I know that such statistics are thought to be boring, but as Warren explained, the rate that students will have to pay "is nine times higher than the rate at which the government loans money to the big banks."

The student loan interest rate that had been temporarily cut in half back in 2007 was once again set to double, but instead of pushing for the status quo as Congress did last year, Warren has upped the ante with legislation that would cut the student loan rate way down to the near zero that the big banks enjoy. As Warren put it in her characteristically no-bull style:

"The federal government is profiting off loans to our young people while giving a far better deal to the same Wall Street banks that crashed our economy and destroyed millions of jobs. That's why I've introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act as my first bill in the Senate: To allow students to borrow money at the same rate as the biggest banks.

" ... Why should the big banks get a nearly-free ride while people trying to get an education pay nine times more? It isn't right."

The justification of near-zero rates of interest for the banks is that they will make loans available that will stoke the economy, but quite the opposite has happened. The banks have been slow to make housing and business loans while feathering their own nests with outsized executive bonuses and costly acquisitions of other financial institutions. In contrast, student loans amounting to more than $1 trillion exceed the total outstanding credit card debt in the U.S. and represent a major contributor to consumer purchasing power.

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