usrname42

The president then has the authority to cancel the student debt using quantitative easing the same way the debt was canceled for Wall Street. If we bailed out the crooks on Wall Street who crashed the economy, it's about time to bail out the students, who are the victims of that waste, fraud and abuse. Because the students are left holding the debt after Wall Street destroyed the jobs to pay back that debt.

This seems incoherent to me.

• QE is undertaken by the Federal Reserve, which is independent - the president does not have the power to force the Fed to undertake it, as far as I know, in the same way that she couldn't just instruct the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United.

• Quantitative easing does not cancel any debt; it just involves the Fed purchasing government (and some other) bonds from banks and other institutions in the open market using newly created money. It doesn't do anything to cancel debt, as it doesn't change banks' net assets at all, it just swaps one type of asset (bonds) for another (money).

• No debt was cancelled for Wall Street. Federal bailouts under TARP involved temporarily purchasing toxic assets from banks and other firms. They purchased them at above the price the assets could have been sold on the open market at that time, which is what makes it a bailout. But between the sale of these assets and the interest paid on them, the Treasury has currently made a profit on the bailout.

• The Federal Reserve also made substantial short-term loans to Wall Street to promote liquidity, these were also all collateralised and have been repaid by Wall Street. The Fed has sent hundreds of billions of dollars more to the Treasury than it usually does since the financial crisis (it sends all profit it makes to the Treasury).

• One of the main reasons the Great Depression was so terrible was that the government and Federal Reserve allowed thousands of American banks to fail, crippling the US financial system. (This is the subject of much of Ben Bernanke's academic research - we are incredibly lucky that we had him in the right place at the right time to prevent it happening again). The reason Wall Street was bailed out was to save the economy and prevent mass unemployment at the levels of the Great Depression, not to make sure that the crooks and fat cats got their bonuses. (Making bankers' pay higher was an unavoidable side-effect of bailing out the banks, but I'd rather have a few people undeservingly stay rich if it means millions of ordinary Americans keep their jobs.) Yes, we should have had regulation to stop the crisis happening in the first place, but once the crisis had happened bailing out the banks was the only sane option. If you're concerned about destroying jobs you should be praising the bailout to the skies, because millions more would have been destroyed without it.

Why is the secret negotiating process a problem when the treaty has now been published in full, well before Congress has to ratify it, giving organisations like yours sufficient opportunity to lobby against it? What more information do you want published beyond the entire text of the treaty?

On the UKIP point: do you think there's any conflict between free movement of labour in the EU and basic income? Will new migrants immediately start receiving basic income, or will there be additional qualifications? I broadly support both basic income and free movement, but it seems like the system might be overwhelmed by migrants if it isn't introduced across the whole of the EU, unless there are some limitations on the ability of immigrants to receive it.

Thanks for doing this AMA. Why do you think that on issues like trade, where there's a fairly overwhelming consensus among economists, the message doesn't seem to get through to the public? What can economists do to better communicate the economic issues that affect how people vote? Do you think economists lack credibility as a result of the financial crisis and other perceived failures of prediction, and if so, how can they get that credibility back?

From what I understand, ISDS allows companies to challenge government decisions only if they believe they are being unfairly discriminated against by the local government, because they're foreign firms - or because their property has been confiscated by the government without compensation. Is that not accurate?