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In a move that will wipe out $1.1 billion in debt owed by 115,000 borrowers, the Education Department said yesterday that it would forgive the federal loans of students who attended ITT Technical Institute but left after March 2008 without completing a degree, the New York Times reported. The decision is the latest action by the agency to use relief programs that languished during the Trump administration to eliminate the student loans of some of the country’s most distressed borrowers. ITT, a large for-profit chain accused by federal and state officials of fraudulently luring students with inflated claims about its graduates’ earnings and career prospects, collapsed in 2016. Around 43 percent of those now eligible to have their debt eliminated had defaulted on their loans, the agency said. “Today’s action continues the department’s efforts to improve and use its targeted loan relief authorities to deliver meaningful help to student borrowers,” the education secretary, Miguel A. Cardona, said. “At the same time, the continued cost of addressing the wrongdoing of ITT and other predatory institutions yet again highlights the need for stronger and faster accountability.” Because ITT went bankrupt, the cost of the forgiven debt will largely fall on American taxpayers. Cardona announced the forgiveness under a provision known as closed school discharge, which allows those left stranded by an abrupt closure to have their federal student loans wiped out. The discharge had previously been offered to ITT students who were enrolled when the school shut down, but the announcement yesterday significantly expands the pool of borrowers who will benefit from it. The March 2008 date was chosen, the Education Department said, because that was when ITT’s executives engaged in a scheme to disguise the company’s true financial condition, which drove up costs for students and reduced the quality of the education ITT provided.

States and localities have only distributed 11% of the tens of billions of dollars in federal rental assistance, the Treasury Department said yesterday, the latest sign the program is struggling to reach the millions of tenants at risk of eviction, the Associated Press reported. The latest data shows that the pace of distribution increased in July over June and that nearly a million households have been helped. But with the Supreme Court considering a challenge to the federal eviction moratorium, the concern is that a wave of evictions will happen before much of the assistance has been distributed. Some 3.5 million people in the U.S. as of Aug. 16 said they face eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Lawmakers approved $46.5 billion in rental assistance earlier this year and most states are distributing the first tranche of $25 billion. According to the Treasury Department, $5.1 billion in Emergency Rental Assistance has been distributed by states and localities through July, up from $3 billion at the end of June and only $1.5 billion by May 31. Several states, including Virginia and Texas, have been praised for moving quickly to get the federal money out. But many others have still only distributed a small percentage of the rental help.

An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to white people with similar financial characteristics — even when we controlled for newly available financial factors the mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending, the Associated Press reported. Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than 2 million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40% more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50% more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70% more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar white applicants. Lenders were 80% more likely to reject Black applicants than similar white applicants. These are national rates. In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the white applicants, except for their race. The industry had criticized previous similar analyses for not including financial factors they said would explain disparities in lending rates but were not public at the time: debts as a percentage of income, how much of the property’s assessed worth the person is asking to borrow, and the applicant’s credit score.

Louisiana State University announced it will use federal coronavirus aid to forgive more than $7 million in student debt for about 4,000 students, the Associated Press reported. “In an effort to continue providing access to an LSU education, we have made the decision to clear all unpaid prior tuition and fee balances for LSU students who enrolled at any point during the COVID-19 pandemic period,” LSU Vice President for Enrollment Management Jose Aviles said in a statement Monday. “We are committed to ensuring that students have every opportunity to continue their educational pursuits.” The Advocate reports the debt forgiveness will apply from the spring of 2020 to the present for students with balances owed directly to LSU. Those debts could include an outstanding balance on tuition, fees, housing, meal plans or parking, according to university spokesperson Ernie Ballard. The average amount of debt wiped away per student is $1,816, Ballard said. A variety of schools around the country have announced student debt forgiveness programs financed with federal coronavirus dollars, including Baton Rouge Community College, Grambling State University and Southern University in Shreveport.

President Joe Biden's administration yesterday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to leave in place a COVID-19 pandemic-related federal ban on residential evictions while the justices consider a challenge by landlord groups to the ban's legality, Reuters reported. In a court filing, U.S. Justice Department lawyers said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acted within its lawful authority this month when it renewed the moratorium through Oct. 3 after it had lapsed at the end of July. Groups representing landlords have sought to lift the moratorium, pointing out that even Biden administration officials have conceded it may not be lawful. The CDC first issued an eviction moratorium in September 2020, with agency officials saying the policy was needed to combat the spread of COVID-19 and prevent homelessness during the pandemic. Realtor groups in Alabama and Georgia were among those challenging the moratorium. Under heavy political pressure from Biden's fellow Democrats, his administration on Aug. 3 issued a slightly narrower eviction moratorium three days after the prior one expired. Biden initially had said that congressional action was needed to renew the moratorium, but his administration reversed course. The current moratorium, due to expire in October, covers nearly 92% of U.S. counties, but that could change based on COVID-19 conditions.

Most evictions for unpaid rent have been halted since the early days of the pandemic and there are now more than 15 million people living in households that owe as much as $20 billion in back rent, according to the Aspen Institute, the Associated Press reported. A majority of single-family rental home owners have been impacted, according to a survey from the National Rental Home Council, and 50% say they have tenants who have missed rent during the pandemic. Smaller landlords with fewer than four units, who often don’t have the financing of larger property owners, were hit especially hard, with as many as 58% having tenants behind on rent, according to the National Association of Realtors. More than half of back rent is owed to smaller landlords. Many landlords are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in lost rent — money that was meant for retirement, a college fund or for their investors, who themselves had sought a safe investment. They are maxing out credit cards or dipping into savings to pay property taxes, staff salaries, insurance, water bills and maintenance. Landlords, big and small, are most angry about the moratoriums, which they consider illegal. Many believe some tenants could have paid rent, if not for the moratorium. And the $47 billion in federal rental assistance that was supposed to make landlords whole has been slow to materialize. By July, only $3 billion of the first tranche of $25 billion had been distributed. Many landlords are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in lost rent — money that was meant for retirement, a college fund or for their investors, who themselves had sought a safe investment. They are maxing out credit cards or dipping into savings to pay property taxes, staff salaries, insurance, water bills and maintenance.

More small businesses — and even some larger ones — are charging shoppers a fee for credit-card purchases or offering them discounts when they pay with debit cards, cash or checks, the Wall Street Journal reported. The moves are meant to offset the various fees businesses pay on credit-card transactions, costs that have grown alongside generous cash-back and travel rewards. Data on cash discounting is hard to come by, and less than 5% of 8 million card-accepting small businesses in the U.S. charge fees for credit-card payments, according to estimates from payments consultancy the Strawhecker Group. But that share has risen steadily in recent years. Five years ago, an estimated 2% or less of businesses charged fees on credit-card purchases. The coronavirus accelerated the shift, sending businesses in search of revenue to make up for sales lost in the pandemic’s early months. CardX LLC said more than 6,400 merchants — most of them online businesses — use its surcharge-calculating software, up from 4,030 a year ago and 2,380 in 2019.