As a recent study indicates that college and universities are giving financial aid to rich students at the expense of poor ones Senator Elizabeth Warren is offering a bill to bring student debt relief. Warren says students should get the same rates as Wall Street. Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced her first standalone piece of legislation [...]

A report by the New America Foundation details the systematic undermining of the financial aid system by colleges and universities who are using financial aid to attract wealthy students rather than open doors for poorer ones, forcing poorer students to either not attend or take on high debt burdens. Undermining Pell presents a new analysis [...]

Despite winning re-election on not cutting Social Security and Medicare and pushing back on plans for austerity President Obama still apparently wants those cuts. President Barack Obama said he wants to reach a “big deal” on the budget that will cut the nation’s deficit without slashing spending on education and research that is needed to [...]

The New York Fed released their household credit and debt report yesterday, and they show increases in student loan debt relative to other forms (mortgage, credit card, auto loan and others). To keep this in perspective, mortgage debt represents 71% of all debt, and student debt represents about 8-9%. So there’s still a wide gulf [...]

European Union finance ministers and the IMF reached another in a series of deals with Greece on long-term debt. The deal will lead to the release of another tranche of around 44 billion euros in bailout funds for the country to pay its debts to creditors, including government payroll and pensions. The deal aims to [...]

The Occupy Wall Street movement has sustained many offshoots, including the high-level wonkery of Occupy the SEC and the direct-action foreclosure defense of Occupy Our Homes. Now another offshoot will attempt an innovative solution to the private debt crisis, which has been welling up in America for decades. This campaign began back in September with [...]

When politicians and partisans talk about “the debt,” they are almost always talking about publicly held debt, the balance sheet of the US government. Yet overall debt includes a number of elements. You have state and local government debt, corporate debt, and individual private debt plays a role as well. Household balance sheets are just [...]

A new study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out today probably won’t get as much notice as their other report showing the US gained 386,000 jobs more than expected. However, this one shows a persistent problem in America, that it’s actually expensive to be poor. The average individual in the lowest 20% of the [...]

Here’s some good news in an otherwise dispiriting Congressional session. A Republican House member is trying to accumulate support for a bill that would extend the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act by three years. As I’ve been reporting, a failure to extend this law would mean that all debt forgiveness, in the form of principal [...]

My initial post of the day concerned organizing around debt resistance as the connective tissue for a new project out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. When you read about this example of corruption around debt, you understand why organizing against it is such a vital project. The letters are sent by the thousands to [...]

Today is the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and FDL’s team of reporters and citizen journalists will have you covered with all the on-the-ground activities. I wanted to add some coverage of this new offshoot of the Occupy movement, in the vein of Occupy Our Homes, the successful effort to fight foreclosures through direct [...]