Debt | featured news

I will never forget the moment that my soon-to-be ex-husband and I sat in our mediator’s office as he illustrated our finances on a chalkboard. “There really aren’t any assets,” he told us. But there was $4 million of debt—from bad investments, lawsuits and failed business deals that I knew nothing about.

Days after one high-stakes standoff over finances was resolved, the two sides are getting ready for another as Congress prepares to address the nation’s borrowing limit.

It's the latest snapshot of the growing burden of student debt and it's another discouraging one: Two-thirds of the national college class of 2011 finished school with loan debt, and those who borrowed walked off the graduation stage owing on average $26,600 - up about 5 percent from the class before....

After a long period of consumer retrenchment, U.S. families have cut their once-out-of-control debt loads down to pre-recession levels, largely removing one major obstacle to a faster economic recovery.

Russia and North Korea have signed a deal to write off nearly all of the isolated Asian country's $11 billion Soviet-era debt.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble questioned on Tuesday how the United States could deal with its high levels of government debt after November's presidential election.

Contec Holdings Ltd., the cable-box repair company owned by Bain Capital Partners, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Wednesday with a plan in hand to restructure some $360 million in debt.

According to Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, Mitt Romney made his fortune exploiting two strategies that the Republican presidential candidate now decries: creating massive amounts of debt and milking federal government handouts... "The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning."

Greece is unlikely to be able to pay what it owes and further debt restructuring is likely to be necessary, three EU officials said on Tuesday, a cost that would have to fall on the European Central Bank and euro zone governments.

At a time when much of the advanced world is unloading its debt, South Koreans are still borrowing at a feverish rate that economists say is unsustainable, and potentially dangerous.