By Alex Tanzi
From Bloomberg News
A majority of borrowers who together hold about $400 billion in federal student debt made no payment on their loans in the pandemic era, taking full advantage of a freeze put in place at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.
Data from the Federal Reserve show that 60 percent of borrowers who qualified for forbearance didn’t make a single payment from August 2020 through December 2021. The U.S. central bank, in a paper published in May, suggested that some of these 11.5 million borrowers may not be able to resume paying once the freeze is lifted.
The forbearance on payments and interests is set to end on Aug. 31 after being extended multiple times by the Trump and Biden administrations….