KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday March 27 Housing and Economic stories

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Friday March 27 Housing and Economic stories

ECB Prepares For Grexit, Anticipates 95% Loss On Greek Debt - (www.zerohedge.com) Dear Greek readers: the writing is now on the wall, and it is in very clear 48-point, double bold, and underlined font: when the ECB "leaks" that it is modelling a Grexit, something Draghi lied about over and over in 2012 and directly in our face too, take it seriously, because it is time to start planning about what happens on "the day after." And incidentally to all those curious what the fair value of peripheral European bonds is excluding ECB backstops, the ECB has a handy back of the envelope calculation: a 95% loss. Which also is the punchline, because while the ECB is making it very clear what happens next in the case of a "Graccident", it has yet to provide an explanation how it will resolve the billions of Greek debt held on its own balance sheet which are about to be "marked-to-default"...

IMF Considers Greece Its Most Unhelpful Client Ever - (www.bloomberg.com) International Monetary Fund officials told their euro-area colleagues that Greece is the most unhelpful country the organization has dealt with in its 70-year history, according to two people familiar with the talks. In a short and bad-tempered conference call on Tuesday, officials from the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission complained that Greek officials aren’t adhering to a bailout extension deal reached in February or cooperating with creditors, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the call was private. The IMF’s press office had no immediate comment on the discussions. German finance officials said trying to persuade the Greek government to draw up a rigorous economic policy program is like riding a dead horse, the people said, while the IMF team said Greece’s attitude to its official creditors was unacceptable. The German Finance Ministry didn’t respond to multiple requests seeking comment.

ECB's Celebration of Its New $1.4 Billion Tower Is Spoiled by Protesters - (www.bloomberg.com) Anti-austerity protesters seeking to spoil the inauguration of the European Central Bank’s new headquarters in Frankfurt’s east end set vehicles alight, erected barricades and left a trail of destruction across the city. Police deployed water cannons to restore calm and keep the demonstrators at bay in the area surrounding the 1.3 billion-euro ($1.4 billion) tower, after setting up barbed wire and road blocks. “European unity is being strained,” ECB President Mario Draghi said at the inauguration ceremony on Wednesday. “The ECB has become a focal point for those frustrated with this situation. This may not be a fair charge -- our action has been aimed precisely at cushioning the shocks suffered by the economy -- but as the central bank of the whole euro area, we must listen very carefully.”

A 21-year-old who's refusing to pay back her student loans compares her cause to Rosa Parks' fight - (www.businessinsider.com) Mallory Heiney, a 21-year-old former student of the now-defunct Everest College, is part of a group of students refusing to pay back their student loans. Heiney wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which she described the lies Everest allegedly told her as well as the insufficient education she says she received. Heiney called Everest a "debt trap." When she explained to her adviser that she couldn't afford student-loan payments while in school, she was assured she could defer the payments on her $24,000 in student loans until post-graduation, according to her article. That ended up being untrue, she said. Heiney said she was on the hook to start paying interest payments on her loans two months into her program.

MARK CUBAN: Forgiving $1 trillion in student debt is 'the worst thing we could do' - (www.businessinsider.com) While the closing of Sweet Briar College last week caught many people in higher education by surprise, some saw it as a sign of an inevitable college implosion. For years, entrepreneur and billionaire investor Mark Cuban has warned of a "student-loan bubble" created by skyrocketing tuition and fueled by an endless supply of student loans. A radical solution to the student-loan problem would be to forgive all student debt, as a viral essay by Robert Applebaum proposed six years ago. However, Cuban thinks massive student-loan forgiveness would just make the bubble keep expanding. "Forgiving the debt is the worst thing you can do, because all it does is bail out the universities," Cuban said.

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