Good morning everyone. The visualization above shows market odds from Kalshi (a prediction market) on possible outcomes for the ongoing supreme court case Biden v. Nebraska. SCOTUS is currently deciding whether or not to permit Biden’s student debt relief, which has been contested by several states.

The probabilities shown reflect the odds at which market participants are currently willing to enter a trade. For example, if the visualization shows that a particular outcome has 80%, it means that there are some traders willing to take 1:5 odds ($0.20 reward per $0.80 invested) that outcome will happen, and that there are are other traders willing to take 5:1 odds that the outcome will not happen (there’s no “house” in these prediction markets - they function like an exchange where participants match with each other). As these markets are public, the theory of the “wisdom of the crowds” is that more accurate predictors will be more confident and thus move the price towards the true probability.

I’d love to hear what you all think, and your feedback on the illustration. Also, I wanted to give enormous credit to my friend Osub - he’s the designer who made this.–Disclaimer: I am a prediction markets enthusiast and an engineer who works at Kalshi on these forecasts. If you have any technical questions about how these figures were computed, please feel free to ask.

Data

Kalshi markets' price history, accessible through their api

Washington Post

Tools

Figma, copy.ai

Edit: Apologies for the typo, Prelogar is not a supreme court justice - she is the Solicitor General.

If this happens, I'm guessing the Biden Administration will find another way to find debt relief for students. It could be just a procedural matter that needs to be done differently.

I am excited to not pay my student loans back, regardless of what SCOTUS votes

Oh that's really interesting - do you know what other mechanisms are at the administration's disposal?

Haha :) Depending on where you live, you might be saved by a partial injunction (just affecting a few states). Hopefully you're not in Nebraska? :)

No, I don't. I've just seen this happen in other court cases that were decided based on some kind of procedural problem.

Like...."OK, if you don't like us doing it THIS way, we will do it THAT way."

It may turn out that if the Court blocks the current student debt relief, it will say........ "... because something something something" and the Biden Administration can overcome that objection just by doing it a different way.

Hey OP, have you used Kalshi to trade contracts before?

I find this interesting and was thinking about trying it

Ah, that makes sense.

Haha I'm kind of biased here because I'm a software engineer at Kalshi :) Don't want to plug haha, but if you have any questions about it just LMK!

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Probably making it a central campaign issue and driving youth turnout to return Biden to the White House and Congress to the Democrats.

"We did it, they stopped it"

>Justice Prelogar

Hmm, going to take a pass on this particular site

Have fun with your garnished wages

Oh yeah, I apologize for that typo.

It happens, sorry if I sounded harsh there

No worries - thanks for pointing out the error! Made some changes before posting and I think the pattern from the first two quotes got into my head :/

I added an edit to my OP correcting the mistake.

Or they will consider it a political win for trying and say you’ve had 3.5 years of 0% interest and deferred payments; time to start paying it back.

This is speculation, not data and doesn't belong here IMO.

If it gets blocked, the reasoning will likely include that something of this magnitude will have to be approved by congress, which would prevent basically anything Biden/executive branch can do unilaterally. It's also going to turn this into an election issue for the next election and considering it massively affects around 40 million people from across the political spectrum, which doesn't bode well for republican party that is increasingly catering to their most extreme members and alienating the moderates and centrists they NEED to win even moderately contested races.

Good. Make them go get it. I’ve had my wages garnished before for a few unpaid tickets. I have excellent credit, it had zero impact and all they got was the couple hundred dollars owed.

You want it? Come get it.

That's all it's ever been anyway. Biden was instrumental in making student loans unforgivable through bankruptcy, drug his feet on the issue, and finally proposed what most progressives would consider to be woefully inadequate forgiveness.

Honestly I bet Joe and old guard Dems are probably jumping for joy because they still have political level to pull in 2024.

They will. There’s really no difference in voluntarily paying the loans and letting them deduct it for you. I’m not sure why people are so opposed to paying it

Because it’s extra work for them. Fuck em.

Yeah, doesn't make up for the initially huge unemployment, now high inflation, and the childcare disaster that weirdly gets so little attention given the scope of the problem. Careers and lives were on hold or set back for 3.5 years.

The administration is redefining the AGI calculation used to calculate income driven repayment plans and on top of that a new plan that reduces % of the new AGI is coming out. I figure it'll cost me about the same as my car payment instead of double my car payment based on the last numbers I saw. That's their backup plan.

Hey u/Eascen, yeah you're totally right, this is data from speculation - I thought it was beautiful but of course that's subjective. I'm always fascinated by this stuff because I think it's interesting that non-experts can collectively produce more accurate predictions than any one individual, and just how that pattern seems to hold across a wide range of fields. Has some philosophical implications :)

Politically, this seems like the best case scenario. Biden gets all the brownie points from trying to relieve student debt, the conservatives get blamed for stopping it, everybody gets reminded that the court is political, and there is no risk of economic impacts from spending 2 trillion dollars

In theory, they could change some wording so that the debt doesn’t actually go away, but can’t be collected, so it technically isn’t debt relief, but that isn’t likely to work

Realistically, the only way this will happen is if dems get another trifecta, and with Manchin, they would probably need 51 senators. The court will say that only congress has the power to forgive debts of this magnitude and Republicans will never in a million years support this

The longer you wait, the more interest is gonna accrue though

Data regarding people’s perceptions is data none the less. OP even gave us a good explanation of what the data means, which I appreciate.

Bitches be gambling on court rulings? I love the US

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It's never going to happen. I never expected that it would.

The smart political move would be to keep them paused in the event of an adverse ruling by SCOTUS and tell Congress to address the issue. From my understanding the Supreme Court is only ruling on the cancellation of student loans not the pause in payments.

The big lenders probably have a bunch of sway in the WH so your scenario is infinitely more likely.

As per her royal highness, Nancy Pelosi; only Congress has the right to forgive debt.

Inferential statistics must not be data huh? 🙄

A bunch of rich old fucks who never had to pay student loans are against hem debt relief? I’m shocked.

Supreme Court if your reading this, eat my ass

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that first part is unnecessary and ableist. being autistic is NOT derogatory and shouldn’t be used as such. -person with autism

I know, I agree it’s not?

then why the fuck would you use it in a derogatory manner?

I agree with you that the dude shouldn't have said what he said but to be clear retardation and autism are not the same thing... like at all.

tell that to the rest of society

Everything is data.

I imagine the lenders would sue the government if Biden tried to "indefinitely suspend repayments". When it is a temporary measure, the vultures lick their lips knowing things always go their way eventually. If it were effectively permanent, they'd riot. But knowing that both parties are bought and paid for it won't go that far.

>In theory, they could change some wording so that the debt doesn’t actually go away, but can’t be collected, so it technically isn’t debt relief.

Which would result in a metric F-ton of lawsuits on top of the political pressure on top of the lobbying on top of etc. etc. etc.

I hope they forgive my car loan too hehe

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This is market generated data............

They would have no reason to sue, payments can only be suspended for federal loans.

In this case she’s correct.

Aren’t they serviced by a publicly traded company? I imagine investors there aren’t too happy, but I don’t know the financial situation there.

They're federal contractors, they work for the government. If they piss off the government they can just be fired.

Thanks for the correction, I was way off base.

Even a broken clock is correct once a day.

They’d likely lose in court since it is specifically a power delegated to the Secretary of Education by an act of Congress.

It’d put pressure on the Republican candidate. Are they going to campaign on resuming payments on 40 million people?

So they wouldn’t likely having standing to sue

Nah. Lots of people will remember it as he didn't follow through on his promise and the Republicans will push the narrative down our throats the next 8 years.

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Why not forgive soldiers or veterans student loans through heros act?

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Fucking bullshit SCOTUS!

I have three degrees and paid my loans back but have no issue forgiving loans for millions of others. I think it would eventually help stimulate the economy and help millions of Americans out.

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Republicans have a message to the educated people of today, struggling to make a life in America, and that message is SCREW YOU, HA HA HA, WE GOT OURS, JACK! AH-HAH-HAH-HAHHH!!!

Doesn't both the suspension of payments and the forgiveness apply to only federal loans?

Post a screenshot of your statements! Pics or gtfo

Prediction markets are mostly nonexistent in the US, due to regulatory capture of the CFTC. They shut down most markets in exchange for bribes.

I haven't used Kalshi specifically, but I used PredictIt (a similar, competing website) during the 2020 election and made $200 off overconfident Trump supporters who kept buying his shares even when Biden was leading the polls by large margins.

Not sure how much stock I put in a site that's analyzing the arguments of "Justice Prelogar."

Yeah that was a typo :) But thankfully these probabilities are not estimated we came up with, they're the consensus of our traders, who are much smarter.

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I feel that canceling student loans is not a good play. What happens to kids going to school next year? School isn’t getting cheaper so what happens with their loans? The debt just gets propagated to the next generation. I think making all loans being paid in full at 0% interest is the way to go. This will provide a way forward for future generations and help those currently struggling with their loans. It will put an end to the debt cycle for those people that have paid more than they borrowed but haven’t made a dent on their loans due to interest. This will be unpopular for the far left and the far right, so it’s a reasonable compromise that would most likely pass.

I think it just has to stem from an emergency, not during a declared emergency. Even so, this is a power Congress delegated to the executive branch.

Why would anyone care what your traders think without any information about who they are, their qualifications, their methods, etc.?

I’ll use it if it goes through, but it’s really a bad plan… we will be in the same exact place within 4 years.

You took out the loan. Pay it back yourself 😊

Why didnt you tell that to all the businesses that got bailed out or helped?

Who said I was for the company bailouts?

Why is this guy getting down voted. Tuition and cost of living have both gone up every year. Rent went up and loans will still be there regardless of if you have to stop your job for 6 months because of the pandemic.

If anyone is mad for paying for others to live with less stress, there were WAY less people impacted and more money distributed for corporate bailouts and tax exemptions in State and Federal in the past 10 years.

I can agree with that. In the past 10 years, there have been numerous companies that were made to scam people out of their payments, acting as a middle man and never paying the balance. It was corrected but people didn't get their money back and the interest was still climbing for them. Those people are super SOL. At least taking the interest rate out and taking away the interest accrued would provide SO MUCH HELP to those people and others.

I didn't. Why aren't you fighting that? Also what is going to change if you will still pay the same tax next year? Is it actually hurting you?

To be clear, it's not spending money. It's just deciding not to collect it. That's very different.

How is giving a trillion dollars different from not receiving a trillion dollars? /gen

Apparently so. Someone corrected me on a separate comment but I didn't think to self-correct or amend my comment. Thanks for calling out my inaccuracy.

There’s direct textual authority from Congress in the statute permitting the president to do this, so if the court decides, on its own to violate the law, there will need to be more drastic measures than just a redo.

Thanks for that information! You obviously know a LOT more about it than I do!

Here's hoping for the correct outcome.

No it’s not. The authority was already passed by Congress.

Also, in case the poser above was unaware, Pelosi is no longer a congressional leader.

Yes she was correct. That’s why it’s before the SC now and why it will be struck down. This clearly in excess of the reasons the original law was passed.

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