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Biden administration forgives $4.5 million in student debt for 60,000 borrowers

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Borrowers who serve in the public service sector and government are eligible for this forgiveness.  (iStock )

Another 60,000 student loan borrowers will receive student loan relief in the coming weeks. The Biden Administration announced $4.5 billion in relief for public service workers such as nurses, teachers and social workers.

The relief comes as a fix to the original Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The program was initially signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007 to give non-profit and government employees loan forgiveness after 10 years in the workforce.

“Before President Biden and Vice President Harris entered the White House, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was so riddled by dysfunction that just 7,000 Americans ever qualified,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the Education Department’s press release.

The new relief intends to pay down the loans of borrowers who were originally denied acceptance or who have still not received relief after making the 120 required monthly payments.

“Today’s announcement comes on top of the significant progress we’ve made for students and borrowers over the past three years,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

“That includes approving debt cancelation for nearly 5 million Americans across all our various debt relief actions; providing the largest increases to the maximum Pell Grant award in over a decade; fixing Income-Driven Repayment so borrowers get the relief they earned; and holding colleges accountable for taking advantage of students and families,” Biden said.

If you have private student loans, federal relief doesn’t apply to you, unfortunately. If you’re looking to lower monthly payments and ease the burden of student loan debt, consider refinancing. See what your interest rate could be via the online marketplace Credible.

IS COLLEGE DEBT WORTH IT?

Resources available for students affected by the recent hurricanes

Hurricanes Helene and Milton have wreaked havoc on many communities in the south, causing serious physical damage and severely disrupting educational services. In response, the U.S. Department of Education released resources to help students and institutions of higher education recover.

“I have directed our team at the Department of Education to leverage every possible resource available to meet the needs of impacted students, families and school communities,” Cardona said.

The new resources include support for recovery needs like mental health care for students and educators, technical assistance and flexible financial aid policies at affected universities. Many students are also automatically being enrolled in natural disaster forbearance, so they don’t have to worry about their loans while recovering from the hurricanes.

Most of these resources will be concentrated on Georgia, which has seen a substantial amount of damage. The Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools Technical Assistance Center is a specific program Georgians have access to. It helps education agencies manage their safety, security and emergency management programs.

The Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center is another option that offers resources and links from organizations that help families and children, including those with disabilities, cope with disasters. 

If you don’t have federal student loans that qualify for assistance, refinancing could cut your monthly payment. You can use Credible to compare student loan refinancing rates from multiple private lenders all at once without affecting your credit score.

STUDENT LOAN DEBT HAS INCREASED BY 430% SINCE 2003 – HERE’S HOW TO LOWER YOUR DEBT

$70 million in federal funding going to schools for additional mental health services

Along with aid to student loan borrowers and students affected by natural disasters, the Biden administration is also directing federal funding towards mental health services in K-12 schools. The administration announced a $70 million investment that will expand students’ access to mental health support.

“We know that students are more likely to access mental health support if it’s offered in schools, and our educators and school communities are on the front lines when a student is struggling,” Cardona said in the announcement.

“The need for mental health support in our schools remains high,” Cardona said. “Today’s announcement of an additional $70 million will allow more institutions and schools to train and hire mental health professionals – especially in underserved communities – ensuring that every student has access to the care they need to thrive.”

The new funding, combined with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) investments, will go to 333 grantees across 48 states. It will help communities train and hire 4,000 more mental health professionals across the country.

To see what you’d pay on a private student loan, you can visit Credible today to view a rates table that allows you to compare fixed and variable rates from multiple lenders.

LESS THAN A THIRD OF AMERICANS APPROVE OF HOW BIDEN HAS HANDLED STUDENT LOAN DEBT

Have a finance-related question, but don’t know who to ask? Email The Credible Money Expert at [email protected] and your question might be answered by Credible in our Money Expert column.

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: TSLA, DJT, AMZN, RIVN

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