This line of thinking is so alien to me. Yes, I don't enjoy watching anyone suffer while they pay back loans that they were suckered into. But what is a business that has been kneecapped by paused debt relief supposed to do exactly? It's an ugly position to take from a PR perspective but it's the responsible thing to do for their shareholders, and that's who businesses exist to protect.
The government created this situation and is now essentially buying votes by stepping in to distort the market with this continued debt pause (which solves nothing, just kicks the can a little further down the road). No one on either side is attempting to do anything remotely rational about the situation and I'm not sure what you'd expect a company who had its business model turned on its head by questionable executive action to do except fight that executive action.
What is a company supposed to do when a market is no longer available to it? Make new products. There is nothing — nothing — saying that SoFi must offer student loans. It’s just looking at that money, and saying ‘this is easy money’. They _could_ create new financial products in an area that isn’t impacted by the repayment pause, and seek to grow that.
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's more nuanced than that.
As someone with student loans who remembers my thinking when taking them out, I can assure you that almost every 17-18 year old who is accessing a student loan meets your definition of a fool. There's simply no way for anyone to expect someone at that age to understand what they're doing, especially when there's such societal pressure to signal success in your age cohort by going to school.
The societal expectation of "successful kids go to college" mixed with the shortsighted government intervention of making these loans available to basically everyone is an absolute recipe for disaster.
I am against forgiveness of student loans but I think they should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. The idea that you can make such disastrous decisions so early in your life that you can never opt out of is patently unfair, but there needs to be a high personal cost to ejecting from the situation.
What SoFi is doing here is more like a bail bondsman suing because the government stopped having people pay bail. The government isn't stopping people from repaying SoFi, SoFi is not a party to the actual transaction.
The government created this situation and is now essentially buying votes by stepping in to distort the market with this continued debt pause (which solves nothing, just kicks the can a little further down the road). No one on either side is attempting to do anything remotely rational about the situation and I'm not sure what you'd expect a company who had its business model turned on its head by questionable executive action to do except fight that executive action.