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When The Student Loan Pause Ends, The Stress Shows Up
During the pandemic, payments were paused and delinquency reporting was effectively frozen. The system went quiet. When repayments restarted, the lights came back on and a lot of old stress showed up all at once. What you’re seeing now is the backlog finally being counted again.
Who’s actually falling behind
The part that surprises most people is the age breakdown. Younger borrowers don’t have the worst delinquency rates. The highest share of serious delinquency shows up among borrowers 50 and older, followed by those in their 40s and 30s. That points to something more complicated than new grads can’t pay.
For many older borrowers, this debt isn’t even theirs in the traditional sense. A lot of it comes from Parent PLUS loans or co-signing private loans for their kids. When the kid’s income stalls or disappears, the obligation lands back on the parent and often at a stage of life when expenses are already rising and income growth is limited.
Why 90+ days delinquent is a big deal
Once a loan is 90+ days past due, it stops being a warning sign and starts becoming a real financial problem. Credit scores can take a serious hit. Access to new credit tightens. Interest rates rise. Even everyday things like housing or insurance can get more expensive. And unlike credit cards or medical debt, student loans are incredibly hard to discharge in bankruptcy. For most people, there’s no clean reset button.
The bigger takeaway is that this is a household balance sheet story. Stress here tends to spill into everything else, from consumer spending to credit performance across the system. And because it’s showing up most clearly among older households, it hits right at the part of the economy people usually assume is stable.
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When The Student Loan Pause Ends, The Stress Shows Up
During the pandemic, payments were paused and delinquency reporting was effectively frozen. The system went quiet. When repayments restarted, the lights came back on and a lot of old stress showed up all at once. What you’re seeing now is the backlog finally being counted again.
Who’s actually falling behind
The part that surprises most people is the age breakdown. Younger borrowers don’t have the worst delinquency rates. The highest share of serious delinquency shows up among borrowers 50 and older, followed by those in their 40s and 30s. That points to something more complicated than new grads can’t pay.
For many older borrowers, this debt isn’t even theirs in the traditional sense. A lot of it comes from Parent PLUS loans or co-signing private loans for their kids. When the kid’s income stalls or disappears, the obligation lands back on the parent and often at a stage of life when expenses are already rising and income growth is limited.
Why 90+ days delinquent is a big deal
Once a loan is 90+ days past due, it stops being a warning sign and starts becoming a real financial problem. Credit scores can take a serious hit. Access to new credit tightens. Interest rates rise. Even everyday things like housing or insurance can get more expensive. And unlike credit cards or medical debt, student loans are incredibly hard to discharge in bankruptcy. For most people, there’s no clean reset button.
The bigger takeaway is that this is a household balance sheet story. Stress here tends to spill into everything else, from consumer spending to credit performance across the system. And because it’s showing up most clearly among older households, it hits right at the part of the economy people usually assume is stable.
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EndGame Macro
Palmer Luckey’s argument is that the hollowing out of American manufacturing wasn’t an accident or an inevitable byproduct of globalization. He’s saying it was a deliberate choice by people at the top, a strategy that prioritized profits, financial engineering, and short term gains, even though it meant gutting local industries, destabilizing entire communities, and undercutting the economic foundation of the middle class.
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Palmer Luckey’s argument is that the hollowing out of American manufacturing wasn’t an accident or an inevitable byproduct of globalization. He’s saying it was a deliberate choice by people at the top, a strategy that prioritized profits, financial engineering, and short term gains, even though it meant gutting local industries, destabilizing entire communities, and undercutting the economic foundation of the middle class.
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EndGame Macro
This looks like risk getting pulled. Bitcoin trades around the clock, so when people start cutting exposure or leaning away from leverage, it often shows up here first. Historically, BTC has been less a signal about the real economy and more a signal about risk appetite and liquidity. When money is easy, it flies; when conditions tighten, it’s one of the first things sold. It’s also worth remembering that Bitcoin has never lived through a long, credit driven recession and the closest test was 2020, which quickly turned into a liquidity flood. So in the early stages of stress, it tends to behave like a high beta risk asset, not a shelter. That’s why moves like this are often the market quietly saying it wants less risk on the books, not more.
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This looks like risk getting pulled. Bitcoin trades around the clock, so when people start cutting exposure or leaning away from leverage, it often shows up here first. Historically, BTC has been less a signal about the real economy and more a signal about risk appetite and liquidity. When money is easy, it flies; when conditions tighten, it’s one of the first things sold. It’s also worth remembering that Bitcoin has never lived through a long, credit driven recession and the closest test was 2020, which quickly turned into a liquidity flood. So in the early stages of stress, it tends to behave like a high beta risk asset, not a shelter. That’s why moves like this are often the market quietly saying it wants less risk on the books, not more.
Bitcoin $BTC getting dumped again 📉 https://t.co/1uS7uDblQu tweet
EndGame Macro
What just happened to iRobot is the end of a long unwind. The company built the category, but the moat faded, competition got brutal, and margins shrank right as borrowing costs jumped. When the Amazon deal collapsed, the last easy exit disappeared, and the balance sheet became the story. Chapter 11 doesn’t mean the business vanishes; it means control shifts to the creditors and suppliers who kept it alive, while shareholders get wiped. It’s a very late cycle lesson…in a tight money environment, even well!known brands with real products don’t survive if the capital structure stops working.
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What just happened to iRobot is the end of a long unwind. The company built the category, but the moat faded, competition got brutal, and margins shrank right as borrowing costs jumped. When the Amazon deal collapsed, the last easy exit disappeared, and the balance sheet became the story. Chapter 11 doesn’t mean the business vanishes; it means control shifts to the creditors and suppliers who kept it alive, while shareholders get wiped. It’s a very late cycle lesson…in a tight money environment, even well!known brands with real products don’t survive if the capital structure stops working.
iRobot files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after reaching a restructuring support agreement
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MacroEdge (@MacroEdgeRes) on X
iRobot files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after reaching a restructuring support agreement
#MacroEdge
#MacroEdge
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This is a clean one year view shared by @levenson_david using a simple parallel trend channel. The orange lines just map the lane the market’s been traveling in with support below, resistance above, and a midpoint where price tends to pause. Nothing fancy, just structure that helps separate trend from noise.
How policy actually lines up with the move
The top in December 2024 into January 2025 wasn’t a technical accident. It lined up with a real shift in expectations on both sides. On the U.S. side, the Fed had already begun easing in late 2024, and markets started pricing a slower growth path and a lower future Fed trajectory, narrowing the dollar’s yield advantage at the margin. On the Japanese side, the BOJ finally delivered something concrete…exiting negative rates in 2024 and following up with a meaningful hike in January 2025. That made normalization feel credible rather than theoretical.
That combination hit the carry trade. When rate differentials stop widening and expectations flip, yen funded carry doesn’t adjust gently it unwinds quickly. That’s why USD/JPY fell hard into April, bottoming in the low 140s.
One important nuance is that this wasn’t about the Fed suddenly turning easy in real terms. Quantitative tightening didn’t end in the spring. The Fed kept balance sheet runoff going until it formally ended QT on December 1st shifting to full reinvestment. Through the spring and summer, real rates stayed restrictive, which matters for understanding why the dollar eventually stabilized and regained footing.
Why the grind higher made sense
By March through May, U.S. inflation proved sticky enough that the Fed adopted a more patient stance. Cuts became gradual and conditional, not aggressive. QT was still in place, and financial conditions never truly loosened. Meanwhile, the BOJ paused after January and stayed cautious for most of the year, signaling it wasn’t about to push rates materially higher in a straight line.
That stabilized the expected rate gap. Once the panic unwind was done and expectations stopped compressing, carry didn’t rush back in, it rebuilt slowly. That’s exactly what the chart shows with higher lows, steady dip buying, no vertical spikes. From the April lows into summer and then into the fall, the move was methodical, not emotional.
Where we are now
Around 155–156, price is still inside the rising channel but closer to resistance than support. That usually reads as trend intact, but no longer cheap. As long as the channel holds, the underlying carry logic hasn’t broken. The real shift won’t come from a single headline or one policy meeting, it’ll show up as a sustained break of that structure, paired with a genuine repricing of U.S. rates lower and a belief that Japan is willing to keep tightening. Until then, this remains a market trading expectations, not a confirmed regime change.
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This is a clean one year view shared by @levenson_david using a simple parallel trend channel. The orange lines just map the lane the market’s been traveling in with support below, resistance above, and a midpoint where price tends to pause. Nothing fancy, just structure that helps separate trend from noise.
How policy actually lines up with the move
The top in December 2024 into January 2025 wasn’t a technical accident. It lined up with a real shift in expectations on both sides. On the U.S. side, the Fed had already begun easing in late 2024, and markets started pricing a slower growth path and a lower future Fed trajectory, narrowing the dollar’s yield advantage at the margin. On the Japanese side, the BOJ finally delivered something concrete…exiting negative rates in 2024 and following up with a meaningful hike in January 2025. That made normalization feel credible rather than theoretical.
That combination hit the carry trade. When rate differentials stop widening and expectations flip, yen funded carry doesn’t adjust gently it unwinds quickly. That’s why USD/JPY fell hard into April, bottoming in the low 140s.
One important nuance is that this wasn’t about the Fed suddenly turning easy in real terms. Quantitative tightening didn’t end in the spring. The Fed kept balance sheet runoff going until it formally ended QT on December 1st shifting to full reinvestment. Through the spring and summer, real rates stayed restrictive, which matters for understanding why the dollar eventually stabilized and regained footing.
Why the grind higher made sense
By March through May, U.S. inflation proved sticky enough that the Fed adopted a more patient stance. Cuts became gradual and conditional, not aggressive. QT was still in place, and financial conditions never truly loosened. Meanwhile, the BOJ paused after January and stayed cautious for most of the year, signaling it wasn’t about to push rates materially higher in a straight line.
That stabilized the expected rate gap. Once the panic unwind was done and expectations stopped compressing, carry didn’t rush back in, it rebuilt slowly. That’s exactly what the chart shows with higher lows, steady dip buying, no vertical spikes. From the April lows into summer and then into the fall, the move was methodical, not emotional.
Where we are now
Around 155–156, price is still inside the rising channel but closer to resistance than support. That usually reads as trend intact, but no longer cheap. As long as the channel holds, the underlying carry logic hasn’t broken. The real shift won’t come from a single headline or one policy meeting, it’ll show up as a sustained break of that structure, paired with a genuine repricing of U.S. rates lower and a belief that Japan is willing to keep tightening. Until then, this remains a market trading expectations, not a confirmed regime change.
Go yen go https://t.co/XCm2V15Cs1 tweet
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When you used the money to buy the dip instead of taking your girlfriend to vacation https://t.co/DTtRPJUNke
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When you used the money to buy the dip instead of taking your girlfriend to vacation https://t.co/DTtRPJUNke
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