Savannah Britt owes about $27,000 on loans she took out to attend college at Rutgers University, a debt she was hoping to see reduced by President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness  efforts.

Her payments are currently on hold while courts untangle challenges to the loan forgiveness program. But as the weeks tick down on Biden’s time in office, she could soon face a monthly payment of up to $250.

“With this new administration , the dream is gone. It’s shot,” said Britt, 30, who runs her own communications agency. “I was hopeful before Tuesday. I was waiting out the process. Even my mom has a loan that she took out to support me. She owes about $18,000, and she was in the process of it being forgiven, but it’s at a standstill.”

President-elect Donald Trump  and his fellow Republicans have criticized Biden’s loan forgiveness efforts, and lawsuits by GOP-led states have held up plans for widespread debt cancellation. Trump has not said what he would do on loan forgiveness, leaving millions of borrowers facing uncertainty over their personal finances.

The economy  was an important issue in the election, helping to propel Trump to victory. But for borrowers, concerns about their finances extend beyond inflation to include their student debt, said Persis Yu, managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center.

“That’s a big part of what is making life unaffordable for them is this burden of expenses that they can’t seem to get out from under,” Yu said.

Student loan cancellation was not a focus of the campaign for either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris , who steered clear of the issue at her political events. The issue came up just once in the September presidential debate, when Trump hammered Harris and Biden for failing to deliver their promise of widespread forgiveness. Trump called it a “total catastrophe” that “taunted young people.”

Biden promised the student loan cancellation program during his run for the presidency. From its launch, Biden’s loan forgiveness faced relentless pushback from opponents who said it heaped advantage on elites and came at the expense of those who repaid their loans or did not attend college.

Biden’s first plan to cancel up to $20,000 for millions of people was blocked by the Supreme Court  last year. A second, narrower plan  has been halted by a federal judge after Republican-led states sued. A separate policy intended to lower loan payments for struggling borrowers has been paused by a judge, also after Republican-controlled states challenged it.

Overall, Biden’s efforts were relatively unpopular, even among those with student loans. Three in 10 U.S. adults said they approved of how Biden had handled student loan debt, according to a poll  this spring from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research . Four in 10 disapproved. The others were neutral or didn’t know enough to say.

Project 2025, the blueprint for a hard-right turn  in American government that aligns with some Trump priorities , calls for getting the federal government out of the student loan business and doing away with repayment plans that pre-date the Biden administration.

Even without directly addressing student loans, Trump has made promises that would affect them. He has pledged to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which manages the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. It’s unclear which entity would take that responsibility if the department were eliminated, which would require approval from Congress.

Yu noted the Biden administration managed to cancel student loans for about 5 million borrowers , even though the signature forgiveness effort has been blocked. The administration did it by leaning into loan cancellation programs already in effect. For example, an existing student loan forgiveness program  for public service workers has granted relief to more than 1 million Americans, up from just 7,000 who were approved before it was updated by the Biden administration two years ago.

“A lot of the cancellation that we saw in the last couple of years was because the Biden administration was committed to making the programs that are actually enshrined in law work for people,” Yu said.

The challenge of repaying the $23,000 she has borrowed to study education policy at Columbia University weighs on 23-year-old Zaakirah Rahman, but she said she did not see an alternative to pursing an advanced degree.

“It feels like the threshold for things is getting higher and suddenly getting a bachelor’s degree isn’t enough,” she said. “It’s expensive. It’s super expensive. But it seems like you don’t really have a choice.”

Sabrina Calazans, 27, owes about $30,000 on federal student loans from her college days at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. Her payments also have been on hold, but she could soon face a monthly payment of over $300.

“As a first-generation American, I live at home with my family, I contribute to our household finances, and that payment is a lot for me and so many others like me,” said Calazans, who is originally from Brazil.

In her role as managing director for Student Debt Crisis Center, Calazans said she has been telling people to stay up to date on developments by using the loan simulator on the Federal Student Aid website  and reading updated information on forgiveness qualifications and repayment programs.

“There’s a lot of confusion about student loans,” Calazans said, and not just among young people. “We’re seeing a lot of parents take out more debt for their children to be able to go to school. We’re seeing older folks go back to school and having to take out loans as well.”

SOURCE: AP NEWS

 U.S. stocks are rallying Tuesday as voters head to the polls on the last day of the presidential election  and as more data piles up showing the economy remains solid.

The S&P 500 was up 1.2% in afternoon trading, rising closer to its record set last month . The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 431 points, or 1%, as of 12:50 p.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.5% higher.

Treasury yields also rallied after a report showed growth for retailers, transportation companies and other businesses in the U.S. services industries accelerated last month. That was despite economists’ expectations for a slowdown, and the Institute for Supply Management  said it was the strongest growth since July 2022.

The strong data offered more hope that the U.S. economy will remain solid  and avoid a long-feared recession  following the worst inflation in generations .

Excitement about the artificial-intelligence boom also helped lift the stock market, as it has for much of the last year. Software company Palantir Technologies jumped 23% after delivering bigger profit and revenue than analysts expected for the latest quarter. It’s an industry known for thinking and talking big, and CEO Alexander Karp said, “We absolutely eviscerated this quarter, driven by unrelenting AI demand that won’t slow down.”

It helped offset a 6.3% drop for NXP Semiconductors. The Dutch company fell to one of the largest losses in the S&P 500 after warning that weakness it saw in the industrial and other markets during the latest quarter is spreading to Europe and the Americas.

The market’s main event, though, is the election, even if the result may not be known for days, weeks or months as officials count all the votes. Such uncertainty could upset markets, along with an upcoming meeting by the Federal Reserve on interest rates  later this week. The widespread expectation is for it to cut its main interest rate for a second straight time, as it widens its focus to keeping the job market solid in addition to getting inflation under control.

Despite all the uncertainty heading into the final day of voting, many professional investors suggest keeping the focus on the long term and what corporate profits will do over the next few years and a decade. The broad U.S. stock market has historically tended to rise regardless of which party wins the White House, even if each party’s policies help and hurt different industries’ profits underneath the surface.

Since 1945, the S&P 500 has risen in 73% of the years where a Democrat was president and 70% of the years when a Republican was the nation’s chief executive, according to Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

The U.S. stock market has tended to rise more in magnitude when Democrats have been president, in part because a loss under George W. Bush’s term hurt the Republican’s average. Bush took over as the dot-com bubble was deflating and exited office when the 2008 global financial crisis and Great Recession were devastating markets.

The S&P 500 ended up rising 69.6% from that Election Day in 2020 through Monday, following President Joe Biden’s win. It set its latest all-time high on Oct. 18, as the U.S. economy bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic and managed to avoid a recession despite a jump in inflation.

In the prior four years, the S&P 500 rose 57.5% from Election Day 2016 through Election Day 2020, in part because of cuts to tax rates signed by Trump.

Investors have already made moves in anticipation of a win by either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The value of the Mexican peso might fall if Trump’s tariffs on Mexico come to fruition, for example.

But Paul Christopher, head of global investment strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, suggests not getting caught up in the pre-election moves, or even those immediately after the polls close, “which we believe will face inevitable tempering, if not outright reversals, either before or after Inauguration Day.”

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.34% following Tuesday morning’s strong report on U.S services businesses from 4.29% late Monday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe and Asia. The moves were mostly modest outside of jumps of 2.3% in Shanghai and 2.1% in Hong Kong.

SOURCE: AP NEWS