Bad Debt (Opinion)

There’s always a lot to digest at the annual Business Forecast luncheon, and the latest — and 19th overall — was no exception.

The Feb. 8 event was presented by the Center for Business and Economic Research, which is part of the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business. It was attended as usual, we were reminded after entering, by many of the same people we here at the Business Journal have honored and/or covered over the years.

Perhaps like you, we were encouraged to hear slow, steady growth is what the economists are predicting for the rest of 2013. You only have to think back a few years, after all, to know slow and steady beats the pants off the alternative.

One of the most striking comments we heard, though, came during the Q-and-A session with the panelists. Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist and managing director at Chicago-based Mesirow Financial, mentioned in almost casual fashion the amount of debt Americans owe on student loans is higher than the amount they owe on credit cards.

Maybe we missed that news flash when it first broke, but it’s nonetheless scary now. Even scarier is the fact student loan delinquency also has surpassed credit card delinquency.

It doesn’t taken an economist to figure out we taxpayers will be the ones to suffer the consequences if the manner in which student loans are issued isn’t overhauled sometime soon.