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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-31/meet-rolling-jubilee-group-buying-tearing-student-loans


An offshoot of 'Occupy Wall Street' is taking the $1.2 trillion student loan bubble, debt servitude dilemma of America's youth into its own hands... bit by tiny bit. As The BBC reports, activist group 'Rolling Jubilee' wants to "liberate debtors" by buying student-debt-bundled ABS on the secondary market (where they trade at significant discounts) and writing off the underlying loans. As Rolling Jubilee notes,

An activist group in the United States has been carrying out deeds that some might think the stuff of dreams - buying and cancelling other people's student debts.

Rolling Jubilee has purchased and abolished $3.8m (£2.35m) of debt owed by 2,700 students, paying just over $100,000 (£62,000), or as it says, "pennies on the dollar".

 

http://rollingjubilee.org/

http://strikedebt.org/

http://strikedebt.org/caq-buy-my-debt/

http://strikedebt.org/act/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Strike-Debt/244850825627699

https://rally.org/strikedebt

Absolutely brilliant and awesome.  ;D

The group is basically saying that I am an idiot for paying off my student loans.

Boy is my face red.

Not to worry...credit card debt here I come. Maybe they will buy that some day.

That is very interesting, I do not have any debt. But this is a very interesting concept.

It really pisses me off that in 2008 and 2009 American Tax payers, paid several billion dollars to bail out the banks "too big to fail" blah blah blah and yet loose their homes to banking shenanigans and the next generation are starting off indebted to the same banks the tax payers already bailed out and they use this to enslave the next generation.

Of course the high cost of education does not let the Universities off the hook either, they are also responsible for much of the cost inflation applied to these debts.

I really hope these guys can succeed in what they are doing!

The high cost of education is directly related to the government subsidies the students receive. This buying of debt contributes to that high cost.

The Uk arguably had it right in the 1960's

1960s

Just over one in 10 (12%) went to university. Sixties students included Charles Clarke, now education secretary but then a maths student at King's College, Cambridge. There were no student loans, fees were paid in full by local education authorities and there was a means-tested annual grant up of to £340 to cover living costs.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/23/uk.education

I know even though I am an American, my son is in London School of Economics working on his Masters in Economics... trust me I know about those expenses  :'(  My back pocket is the bank and owner of his debt  ::)

I think they are actually only buying up debt of people who are behind on their payments. This allows them to buy the debt "cheaply" for only pennies on the dollar. The thing is that the chances of further recovery on such debt is actually very small, so the net effect on the borrower of the debt being forgiven is actually nothing most of the time.

This is true. However the high cost of secondary education is not limited to the easy access to student loans, things like pell grants, huge tax breaks and the like also add to the increasing cost of education

It removes the debt from their credit score, that is major for a lot of people especially if it was a 40,000$ debt and they were making 25k / year or less, like so many 18-25s these days. Credit score is just another form of indentured servitude, as close to slavery as the banksters can comfortably get us these days.

Why would they do this? does the group get anything in return besides publicity or is the publicity they get worth it to them?

Aren't they rewarding people with low financial intelligence though? Some might have chosen a different path other than getting a huge student loan for a worthless degree and repaying it their whole life

The credit report will still show the previously missed payments for the same amount of time as it would otherwise be there, the only difference is that the balance would no longer show up as an amount owed. IMO this would probably not allow a deadbeat to go from not qualifying for a loan to qualifying for a loan as the creditor would need to accurately need to reflect that the debt was "settled" or "forgiven" not "paid as agreed"