Larry Kudlow during the 2008 collapse

President Trump named former CNBC host and news anchor Larry Kudlow as his Economic Advisor about a week ago.  Here's Larry Kudlow (clip above) during the 2008 crash saying that Congress forced banks to make the risky subprime loans to poor people.  Those loans were then sold, bundled into big investments called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO's) and sold to investors all over the world.  Most of the investors didn't really understand what they were buying.  But CDO's made a buttload of money for big banks and financiers.  So those big banks needed more and more loans to keep making CDO's to sell.  So they started buying sketchier and sketchier home loans.  So local banks made sketchier and sketchier loans, because they, too were making tons of money selling those loans.  Greed fed the whole thing, which turned into a crazy feedback loop.  Larry Kudlow knew this damn well, but his job, in the height (or depth, more precisely) of the 2008 economic collapse, was to shift blame away from Wall Street and the big banks, and blame Congress and poor people who got home loans they couldn't really afford.

Over the last ten years, there have been a relatively small number of subprime mortgage loans made.  That's because laws were passed to prevent this from happening again.  But, what has been happening is that $1.3 to $1.5 TRILLION in student loans have been made to students, many of whom can't pay those loans back.  Those student loans have been sold, bundled into investments called SLABS (Student Loan Asset Backed Securities, just like the CDO's of a decade ago), and a whole new financial house of cards has been built.  And it will collapse soon.  It could happen any time.  Maybe tomorrow.  More likely a week, a month, or maybe 3 or 4 months from now.  But it's getting close to that point.  And when it happens, Larry Kudlow, now Trump's Chief Economic Advisor, will blame Congress and average college students for this collapse.  Just watch. He's basically got the same job to do a decade later.

Meanwhile, big banks, student loan lenders, and colleges and universities themselves have made huge fortunes from all these student loans that never should have been made.  When it collapses, it will be 2008 all over again, and likely even worse.  And all of us average people will get screwed again.  Hard.  And they're not even going to spit first.  It will be tough economic times coming at a time when many parts of the U.S. have never rebuilt from the last collapse.

Confused?  Good.  You're supposed to be confused.  So here's Margot Robbie in the bubble bath scene from The Big Short movie to help explain it.  (NSFW)  Just replace the word "subprime" with "student loans," and you've got the idea of what's about to happen to our economy.  Except this time, there are a whole bunch of us who've seen this show before, and know what's about to happen.  And now you know.

"How Wall Street profits from student loan debt"  - Rolling Stone article from April 2016