Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., listens to a witness at a Senate Banking Committee hearing (AP/Cliff Owen)
Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grass-roots funded campaign -- I regret not contributing more -- is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.
That's how I was reminded this week that Congress is about to let the interest rate charged for new
The student loan interest rate that had been temporarily cut in half back in 2007 was once again set to double, but instead of pushing for the status quo as Congress did last year, Warren has upped the ante with legislation that would cut the student loan rate way down to the near zero that the big banks enjoy. As Warren put it in her characteristically no-bull style:
"The federal government is profiting off loans to our young people while giving a far better deal to the same Wall Street banks that crashed our economy and destroyed millions of jobs. That's why I've introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act as my first bill in the Senate: To allow students to borrow money at the same rate as the biggest banks." ... Why should the big banks get a nearly-free ride while people trying to get an education pay nine times more? It isn't right."
The justification of near-zero rates of interest for the banks is that they will make loans available that will stoke the economy, but quite the opposite has happened. The banks have been slow to make housing and