to give millions of federal borrowers financial relief.which codified the end of the student-loan payment pause
— the White House made clear another extension is not in the cards. Both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley highlighted in recent notes that resuming payments won't be easy for the majority of borrowers, with some at risk of falling behind. "If payments were to resume in full, we think it is reasonable to assume that serious delinquencies would return to at least pre-Covid levels, since the share of seriously delinquent student loan balances was little changed between 2012 and 2019," Bank of America's Ethan Harris, head of global economics, wrote in a"In dollar terms, such an increase would amount to $167 billion of new seriously delinquent balances, which would raise total serious delinquencies across all...
. Marshall Steinbaum, senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute and economics professor at the University of Utah, told Insider that if the government starts trying to collect on loans borrowers are unable to repay,"it's just a more onerous way of operating a lending portfolio of trying to collect debt that fundamentally can't be collected and trying to squeeze the borrowers as much as possible in order to make that debt collectible. And that's very bad for the macroeconomy.