Is The Bubble About To Burst? Student-Loan Delinquency Rates Rise For First Time In Years

Since the financial crisis, most market observers and economists have cheerfully ignored the aggregate student-debt load in the US, which recently swelled to an economy-threatening $1.4 trillion. Even as student-debt, which can't be discharged in bankruptcy, grew to represent 10% of the total US debt burden, defenders of the status quo pointed to declining default rates as evidence that the government-backed student loan industry wasn’t in danger of imploding.

But that may soon change.

As Bloomberg reports, the student-loan default rate in the US ticked higher during the second quarter for the first time since 2013. While it’s only one quarter of data, it should send a chill down the spine of government and private lenders, who have every reason to worry that this could be more than a temporary blip.

To wit, the share of Americans at least 31 days late on loans from the U.S. Department of Education ticked up to 18.8% as of June 30, up from 18.6% during the same period a year ago, according to new federal data. Meanwhile, about 3.3 million Americans have gone more than a month without making a required payment on their Education Department loans—up about 320,000 borrowers.

The rise interrupts a period of 12 straight quarters of declines in delinquency rates, according to numbers dating to 2013. It also comes at a time when US economic growth is nominally expanding (the BEA announced earlier today that the US economy expanded by 3.1% during the second quarter, an improvement over its previous estimate).

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