How can you have any pudding, if you don't eat your meat?

When lunch is free, who cares?!

Everyone’s talking about Omicron, but this is the holiday season, so Random Walk brings cheerful tidings of student loans, crypto volatility and the Lone Star State.

Things we think

Student spendthrift

Student loans have been in forbearance since March 2020, but that is scheduled to change soon. [Update: maybe not. Updated update: definitely not, at least until May 1, 2022.] That means borrowers will (once again) have to pay money to lenders that they can no longer pay to sellers of goods and services (or save for a rainy day). That’s a non-trivial chunk of change moving from one part(s) of the economy to another. Yay, deflation!

For context, there are ~43M borrowers, carrying ~$1.75T in debt, ~90% of which is federal. That’s nearly 1 in 8 Americans with student loans. As a back-of-the-napkin category of consumer spend, student loan payments are approximately:

• ~$375/month

• ~1.75% of monthly wallet-share (across all consumers)

• ~6.75% of monthly wallet-share (for loan-repayers)

Assuming ~90% a…