When most people think of shady, predatory "debt collectors," they probably imagine a dingy, smoke-filled boiler room with workers haranguing hapless victims on the phone. In fact, there are law firms that are every bit as perfidious.

College these days is expensive as hell. ($57K for "Pitzer?" Is that even accredited?) Everyone is drowning in student debt. But! There is good news on the college cost front. Also, there is bad news.

A woman in Pennsylvania was imprisoned for failing to pay a debt to the state. And then she died in her cell.

Here is something that may come as a surprise: the U.S. government can—and will!—confiscate your tax refund or Social Security money because of overpayments that it made to your parents decades ago.

George Soros, one of history's most successful investors, has wagered $1.3 billion that the U.S. stock market is going to crash soon. The average American is wagering the opposite.

Those precious Scandinavians, with their reputations for probity and craftsmanship and good working order. Do not be fooled. Behind the veil of Scandinavian tidiness lies a region rife with DEBT ADDICTS.

Student debt in America has been a runaway train to hell for some time now. No wonder young people are so terrified of it. It's getting worse.

Thanks to some misguided moral philosophy and some excellent lobbying work, it is now almost impossible to discharge your student loans in bankruptcy. They haunt you forever, like the souls of those you've killed. As our national student loan debt balloons further into crisis territory, it become ever clearer that we…

In 2010, the federal government stopped guaranteeing private student loans and started issuing student loans directly. This policy change was designed to, in some way, help alleviate the student loan crisis. How's that going?

An unexpected ring on my doorbell awoke me early one Sunday morning and I stumbled bleary-eyed to my front door and was greeted by a tall, strapping, sunglasses-wearing sheriff with an incongruously chipper expression clutching a sheath of papers.

Besides forcing young college graduates into a decades-long penurious existence as veritable indentured servants to institutions of higher learning, there's another downside to our nation's $1 trillion student debt: it's stopping young people from starting business. Businesses! The lifeblood of Republicanism!

Those who enjoy slow-motion disasters have spent years watching the travails of the gallant United States Postal Service, which is kind of like FedEx if it was run by the Three Stooges. Just how existentially challenged is our nation's mail service?

The latest Fed report on student loan debt includes some neat-o maps showing how all of America's student debt is distributed geographically. Washington DC sure is smart, and broke!

A new study reveals that one of the most cited economic principles regarding GDP and debt is most likely based on a "sloppy Excel coding error." According to a 2009 book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time It's Different, countries with a high debt to GDP ratio have slow economic growth. But three…

What have you not done for four years? Exercise? Visit your great-aunt? Pay taxes?