Blog

Welcome to our blog – The Bottom Line, where you’ll find up-to-date commentary and analysis on the most important news in the fiscal world. Below is a list of our blog posts.

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Deficit and Debt Make Headlines

Public concern over the United States’ ballooning deficit and debt seems to be growing. Both the cover of this week’s Economist and the lead story on...

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One More FDIC Bank Closing

On Friday evening, the FDIC reported that it has taken over an additional bank ( Commerce Bank of Southwest Florida) for a cost to the FDIC of around...

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Recent Student Loan Actions Forgo $5 Billion in Repayments

The Department of Education announced last week a six-month extension of automatic forbearance to all borrowers enrolled in the SAVE income-driven repayment plan while it is being challenged in courts, adding that they will forgive any unpaid accrued interest during that time. We estimate that the Department of Education is forgoing roughly $500 million of repayments per month, meaning that this extension would result in $3 billion in forgone payments, bringing the total amount up to $5 billion. Importantly, much of those payments will instead be paid later, and so the net cost would be some fraction of that $5 billion.

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