As I said above I am oversimplifying the statement. I have read a lot recently about hedge fun and derivative traders setting up shell companies so if they take losses they can walk away from them. I also read a story (probably about a year ago) about a couple that started a restaurant. They invest $50K of their own money, found a great location and the building already had a full stocked professional kitchen.They were able to use that equipment and the building as collateral for the loan. They get the money, start the place up and for about 2 years it did pretty well. It started slowly, but they began making a profit and were paying back the loan. All looked well. Then they failed a sanitation check and were shut down for a week by the state. They fixed the problem, passed the re-inspection and opened back up. But the damage was done and they never recovered. Business slowed down and they eventually had to close up.

The reason the story was in the news is that they owed all of their employees about 1 month worth of pay. They declared bankruptcy and the court liquidated all the assets of the company. They had an insurance policy that paid some of the other debt including the back pay for the employees, but they still owed about $75K in random debt to different vendors and creditors most of whom said they held out little hope of ever getting that money because the owners blamed the downfall of the company on the manager that they hired and said he was negligent. They were actually suing the manager because they said he was the reason they failed the inspection.

I don't know what ever became of it all. As far as I know there was no follow-up story. It looks to me like the couple will walk away owing about $75K to random people and may never have to pay it. Perhaps, in the end, they will, but from the sound of it those owed the money were not very confident.

There is also a book called Boo Hoo which is about the rise and fall of the website Boo.com . The people that started that site got a ton of investment money (around $135 million all told) and eventually ran the company into the ground and killed it before it ever really had a chance to get started. The owner/CEO to this day owes a ton of vendors and contract workers money and he hasn't paid them a dime. He claims the company failed, it went bankrupt, they liquidated the assets and that is all he can do. He is sorry if they are upset. Meanwhile he never lost his personal assets including a decent amount of money he made from a previous online venture.

So I'm not saying it is the norm and clearly there are people who risk everything to start a business and can lose everything if it fails, but it appears that isn't always the case.

wow fuck that! forgive student loan payments? thats part of the process of going to school. so down the road taxes payers will have to pay for this one way or another, but this is bullshit IMO.

so what about people like me who paid by working to go to college? if they are going to forgive student loans, then they should pay me back my money then :2 cents: