You are going to need to sit down for this one. If you have any heart conditions you may want to stop reading at this point. Many of you recall that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had their caps raised in January during the great Wal-Mart voucher experiment. It was sneaked into [...] Related Posts: ■ A Trip down the Housing Graveyard: The Casualties of the Housing Bear Market. ■ What really goes on with Black-matter SIVs. A Micro-case study. My Experience with Prosper and how it is Similar to the Current Mortgage Debacle. ■ Wrong and Wronger: Compounding the Mortgage Mess with Bigger Mortgages. ■ Two Faces of Housing Panic: Schadenfreude and the Lender of Last Resort. ■ War of the Housing Worlds: 3 Reasons why the Bubble Spread; War of the Worlds, Orson Welles, and Mass Media?

Has the U.S. created an ''education bubble'' fueled by easy money and overborrowing by families desperate to pay tuition? Expect a hastily sputtered ''no way'' from economists, university officials and student-lending specialists. They attach a high monetary value to academic degrees, no matter how fast tuition costs rise. As proof, they cite the big and growing income gap between college ...

I f your federal student loan doesn't cover all your expenses and banks are making it harder to get private loans, who can you turn to?

When college alumni show up for homecoming weekend and hold forth about how much better things were when they were in school, it's usually the beer talking. But graduates who boast about the great deals they got on their federal student loans probably aren't exaggerating.

An astute reader pointed out that when mortgages get reworked to prevent foreclosures, this hides true price declines, because the real lower value is not reported as a sale, so Case-Shiller and the MLS cannot pick up the lower price: Hi, I just read an article about PennyMac buying up mortgages for pennies on the dollar and [...]