The last few recessions/big market declines had "shots across the bow", warning that the bull market was about to end. The dot-com boom had the AOL-Time Warner merger in Jan 2000, and the MicroStrategy miss in Feb 2000 as shots across the bow before the big initial drops in March and April. The markets attempted to resume the bull market during the summer. Attempts to take out the January AT high in the Dow failed. The real decline began with the Intel and Nortel misses around Labor Day 2000. The shots across the bow for 2008-09 crisis was the July 2007 collapse of two Bear Stearns' hedge funds due to CDO losses. Buildup to this collapse were the massively increasing failures of sub-prime mortgage originators starting in the summer of 2006, accompanied by the peaking of the home builders in the same time frame. November 2006 saw the AT high in the Dow taken out. The market briefly panicked in July-August of 2007 before resuming its ascent, culminating in a new AT high in Oct 2007. The crash began afterwards, slowly trending down before accelerating in March 2008 due to the Bear Stearns collapse. I'm not too concerned about the trees. Interested in the forest. Details/timelines may be incorrect. Causation/correlation ideas may be faulty. But we can't disregard the forest despite it's fuzzy boundaries. What are the potential harbingers for the next collapse? Two possibilities - (1) the lengthy bull market in bonds and (2) the student loan market. Correlating factors I see in the 2 previous crashes: (1) Rumors and news articles detailing trouble in the particular market/sector, well before the public starts paying attention. (2) Stock market crashes only occur when the public is heavily involved and the market/sector caters to the general public. (3) Wall St. knows where the bodies are (soon to be) buried, particularly the (un)hedge(d) funds with long overexposure. I'm inclined to think the next crisis is going to be in the student loan market, as I believe that a crash that's caused by the public (i.e loan defaults) is the one that hurts/panics the market the most. After all, the public's money is finite. Once it's gone, the party's over. Plus, there exists a guarantor of last resort (US gov't via the Dept of Education) that potentially offers bailout opportunities. In contrast, bond defaults are such that they almost always can be refinanced (i.e. why would the I-bank pass up the chance to earn more fees?). Example headline: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-04/the-student-debt-collection-mess?cmpid=yhoo Questions I'm wondering: (1) Are there packagers for student loan market? (2) If so, who are they? Who are the dominant players? (3) Who are the buyers? (i.e. who's long?) (4) Are there CDO-like derivatives for the student loan market? If so, who are the issuers? (5) Have there been any collapses in loan originators or funds? (6) Where is the time bomb? Who uses VaR or some other tool that ignores/deemphasizes tail risk? (7) What is the current default rate? At what rate does the whole thing start imploding?