Strike Debt: Rolling Jubilee

[Cowman]

One year later, Occupy has a brilliant new plan: A people’s bailout | Death and Taxes

It took a while, but a new offshoot group that grew out of Occupy called Strike Debt has a highly specific, highly brilliant plan for how to improve the lot of the 99%: It’s called Rolling Jubilee, and it’s basically a crowd-funding campaign to buy up big swaths of people’s debt and simply cancel it. It’s sort of like the economic equivalent of buying slaves to free them.

Here’s how it works: All kinds of debt, from student loans to credit card to mortgages, are sold by the people who originally made the loans to collectors eager for the chance to take the interest payments on those loans for years to come. Loans get bundled into big groups and sold as securities on the open market. Rolling Jubilee will raise money through crowd-funding and use that money to buy bundled loans like any other institution—but once they own the debt, rather than collecting on it they’ll simply cancel it.

You’ve probably heard of a simliar thing happening when Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae buy mortgages from banks or debt collectors buy debt from credit card companies—one day in the mail you get a notice saying, Your debt is now owned by this guy—please keep paying. In this case, however, you’d get a note saying, Your debt is now owned by Strike Debt, and they’ve voided it—your balance is now $0.

Sound too good to be true? Well, there are a couple ways this doesn’t work: First, you can’t ask the Rolling Jubilee to please personally pay off your student loan. The Jubilee will be buying securitized debt bundles just like other institutions, which means they’re not targeting individual loans. Incidentally, the individuals paying these loans have no idea that they’ve been “bundled.” So while you may choose to donate to the Rolling Jubilee there is no guarantee that it’ll personally benefit you.

I certainly know the kind of people around here that would HATE this sort of thing. They'd rather pay their debts off like honest hardworking folks.

 

[Cowman]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

 

[MeBelle]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

Geezz!

Could you give a person a few moments to read, follow the link and digest the info? Perhaps think on it for a few??

 

[occupied]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

I like it, bundled debt is often sold off for far less than it is worth individually, especially if it is risky. I hope it goes far.

 

[Cowman]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

Geezz!

Could you give a person a few moments to read, follow the link and digest the info? Perhaps think on it for a few??

Been 24 hours.

 

[KissMy]

Eliminating someones debt completly is not the best use of their money. They should either analyze each case & only eliminate it down to a level the person can maintain, like 66% of income, or they could just erase 20% of everyones debt.

 

[Cowman]

Eliminating someones debt is not the best use of their money. They should either analyze each case & only eliminate it down to a level the person can maintain, like 66% of income, or they could just erase 20% of everyones debt.

Why not all of it? They're buying bulk debt.

 

[KissMy]

Eliminating someones debt is not the best use of their money. They should either analyze each case & only eliminate it down to a level the person can maintain, like 66% of income, or they could just erase 20% of everyones debt.

Why not all of it? They're buying bulk debt.

They can't afford all of it. Helping more people is better than overhelping a few. Enough to get the person or family stable will do the economy just as well as erasing all of it.

 

[Cowman]

Eliminating someones debt is not the best use of their money. They should either analyze each case & only eliminate it down to a level the person can maintain, like 66% of income, or they could just erase 20% of everyones debt.

Why not all of it? They're buying bulk debt.

They can't afford all of it. Helping more people is better than overhelping a few. Enough to get the person or family stable will do the economy just as well as erasing all of it.

It doesn't work that way. They buy all of the debt. They can't just buy a portion of the debt. Why buy all of the debt and only erase some of it?

 

[MeBelle]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

Geezz!

Could you give a person a few moments to read, follow the link and digest the info? Perhaps think on it for a few??

Been 24 hours.

Well you just bumped the post for me then...

 

[Cowman]

Geezz!

Could you give a person a few moments to read, follow the link and digest the info? Perhaps think on it for a few??

Been 24 hours.

Well you just bumped the post for me then...

That's why I bumped it. Because it's been 24 hours without a response.

 

[occupied]

They are also destroying the worst kind of money, cheap, if they spend say a million dollars to buy up several million dollars of debt and cancel it, they are doing what banks do in reverse by creating money out thin air. The more I think about it the better I like it.

 

[MeBelle]

Why not all of it? They're buying bulk debt.

They can't afford all of it. Helping more people is better than overhelping a few. Enough to get the person or family stable will do the economy just as well as erasing all of it.

It doesn't work that way. They buy all of the debt. They can't just buy a portion of the debt. Why buy all of the debt and only erase some of it?

The comments are revealing;
Regarding momentum, tax consequences, re-treads getting into more debt because "Jubilee will pay it off for me".

I think for it to be successful, it does need to be looked at case by case.
And then Jubilee should pay only a portion of the debt, not all of it.

Indeed, charity does begin at home though.

 

[MeBelle]

Been 24 hours.

Well you just bumped the post for me then...

That's why I bumped it. Because it's been 24 hours without a response.

And just for me!

 

[KissMy]

Why not all of it? They're buying bulk debt.

They can't afford all of it. Helping more people is better than overhelping a few. Enough to get the person or family stable will do the economy just as well as erasing all of it.

It doesn't work that way. They buy all of the debt. They can't just buy a portion of the debt. Why buy all of the debt and only erase some of it?

You could buy an entire toxic CDO & cancel just enough debt to get the 1,000 loans in that CDO stable, current & paying on time. Then the rating on it goes from toxic junk back to AAA. Then re-sell that nice shiny new AAA asset to get money back & do this again over & over to help the most people for the greater good instead of the very lucky few.

Flip that CDO like a rolling-jubilee!!!

 

[occupied]

They can't afford all of it. Helping more people is better than overhelping a few. Enough to get the person or family stable will do the economy just as well as erasing all of it.

It doesn't work that way. They buy all of the debt. They can't just buy a portion of the debt. Why buy all of the debt and only erase some of it?

You could buy an entire toxic CDO & cancel just enough debt to get the 1,000 loans in that CDO stable, current & paying on time. Then the rating on it goes from toxic junk back to AAA. Then re-sell that nice shiny new AAA asset to get money back & do this again over & over to help the most people for the greater good instead of the very lucky few.

I was thinking the same thing and I suspect that it may morph into that very thing with the side effect of strengthening the dollar by absorbing some of the bad debt drag. In fact if the banks see them coming and dump off their worst performing loans for pennies on the dollar, so much the better.

 

[SixtyOne]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

Coming fron a pussy ass racist bitch that don't mean a dam! thing.You motherfucking racist bitch... DIE!

 

[KissMy]

Isn't this what Ben Bernanke is already having the Fed do. They are printing $40 billion a month, open-ended, bond purchasing program of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). I don't exactly know what they do with those mortgage-backed securities after they buy them. Maybe they sell the foreclosed homes to HUD at a huge loss. Then HUD resells the homes back to us at a 75% discount.

 

[Cowman]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

Coming fron a pussy ass racist bitch that don't mean a dam! thing.You motherfucking racist bitch... DIE!

You're pathetic.

 

[The Rabbi]

Nobody likes or hates this idea?

Shocking!

As long as they are raising the money by contributions I don't care. It's a voluntary thing and if people want to give their money for it, more power to them.
But if we look at the history of debt cancellation for countries in, e.g. Africa, we find the debt is not the problem. The spending patterns are. And when you cancel someone's debt, they are likely to incur more. It certainly creates moral hazard.