Interesting tidbit here is that half (yes, half) of the US government's financial assets are student loans.
It was discussed here previously -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16136330.
Something I find very hard to comprehend, tbh.
Fannie Mae is a publicly-traded, privately-owned corporation, despite being federally chartered for a public mission.
So, yes, their holdings are not counted in government holdings, because they aren't the government.
Which is why, their stock is worth a lot less than even their own book value.
My (possibly inaccurate) summary is that they can be discharged if it would be impossible to live with a minimal standard of living while still paying off the loan.
More realistically you're going to get one of the other two options.
> Your loan may be partially discharged, and you will still be required to repay some portion of your loan.
> You may be required to repay your loan, but with different terms, such as a lower interest rate.
They can, it just has a higher bar of unaffordability before it can be discharged even in bankruptcy. OTOH, the higher the ratio of student loan debt to income becomes for typical borrowers, the more likely it is that there would be a wave of discharges.
Even without discharges, though, you can have an escalating problem of loans becoming worthless to those with the right to collect them; that the loan isn't legally discharged doesn't mean that the borrower isn't practically judgement-proof.
> The whole notion of bursting is people collectively realizing their folly and everyone scrambling as quickly as possible to make out with whatever they've got left - like a run on a bank.
No, not like a run on a bank, more like a panic sale of a marketable asset class, in this case student loan assets (or student loan asset backed securities, just like the mortgage-backed securities that went through the same thing around 2008.)
OTOH, this is really only likely to be a big issue with private, non-government-backed student loans, which exist and have high per-borrower balances, but are a minority of student loan debt.
On the federal side, increasing defaults mostly reduce the difference between loans and grants and probably push public policy away from generally-offered loans to more targeted (by some mix of need, individual merit, and social desirability of course of study) grants. (These also are marketed and privately collectable after the government originates them, but the government guarantee limits the risk of value crash.)