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The U.S. may or may not enter a recession this year, but if it does, housing is unlikely to be the cause, because it never really recovered in the first place, according to a New York Times commentary. The U.S. has had 11 recessions since the end of World War II, and all but two were preceded by a big decline in the housing market. “Housing is not in a position to lead this thing down,” said Edward Leamer, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. How much it can help prolong the overall recovery is another matter, according to the commentary. Home sales and prices have been sluggish in the face of rising interest rates. Still, the pace of construction, combined with pent-up demand from young adults, suggests that the sector should at least remain stable in the face of uncertainty elsewhere.

*The views expressed in this commentary are from the author/publication cited, are meant for informative purposes only, and are not an official position of ABI.

Student-loan delinquencies surged last year, hitting consecutive records of $166.3 billion in the third quarter and $166.4 billion in the fourth, Bloomberg News reported. Bloomberg calculated the dollar amounts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s quarterly household-debt report, which includes only the total owed and the percentage delinquent at least 90 days or in default. That percentage has remained around 11 percent since mid-2012, but the total increased to a record $1.46 trillion by December 2018, and unpaid student debt also rose to the highest ever. Delinquencies continued to climb even as the unemployment rate fell below 4 percent. The age group transitioning into the "serious delinquency" category at the fastest pace is 40-to-49 year olds.

An audit released by the Education Department yesterday described its slipshod oversight of federal student loan servicers that were regularly let off the hook for mistakes, driving up costs for taxpayers and for borrowers already owing more than $1 trillion in debt, the New York Times reported. The department failed to track many mistakes by servicers, the contractors hired to send out monthly bills, keep track of what borrowers owe and help them navigate repayment options. And when serious problems were discovered, the department rarely invoked its contractual right to dock servicers’ pay, the department’s inspector general said in its report. Student loan servicers and Education Department officials pushed back against the audit’s findings. In a written response included in the report, James F. Manning, the acting chief operating officer of the agency’s Federal Student Aid office, said his department was dedicated to giving borrowers “world-class service” and strongly disagreed with the report’s conclusion. The audit said that more than 60 percent of the agency’s oversight reports from 2015 to late 2017 contained examples of servicers acting improperly.

Credit-card companies are hiking a range of fees that U.S. merchants will pay to process transactions, a move likely to inflame already fractious relations between many businesses and card networks, the Wall Street Journal reported. Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., the two biggest U.S. card networks, are preparing increases to certain existing fees that will kick in this April. Some of the changes relate to so-called interchange fees. Card networks set the price of these fees, which merchants pay to banks when consumers shop with the cards they issue. Also due to rise are fees that card networks charge financial institutions for processing card payments on behalf of merchants. Merchants often increase the prices consumers pay following such fee increases, in an attempt to protect their own profits. Roughly 1 percent to 2.5 percent of prices for goods and services go to cover card fees.