Sale of Student Loans Bill
10:44 am
Bill Rammell: I will make some comments and Mike might wish to follow up. Certainly, this is a different type of sale to the 1998 sale, which had an ongoing discount arrangement. That is built into the sale price with these sales and that, in part, is because the rules governing the accounting for Government debt have changed. If we conducted this sale on the basis of the 1998 sale, we would not demonstrate that we were transferring the debt from the public to the private sector, so that is certainly different from what happened in 1998.
With regard to international comparisons, it is difficult to draw analogies. There are few examples of countries that have gone down the road that we have taken, where the student finance system is derived from the public sector. Obviously, there is a huge amount of student debt in the United States, but that tends to be private debt, so I am not sure that there are easily comparable international examples.