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• Biden announced another $7.4 billion in student-debt relief for 277,000 borrowers.
• It impacts borrowers on the SAVE plan, along with others on income-driven repayment plans and PSLF.
• The new relief comes just after Biden released new details for his broader student-debt relief plan.

Another batch of student-loan borrowers has been approved for debt cancellation.

On Friday, President Joe Biden and the Education Department announced that 277,000 more borrowers will get $7.4 billion in debt relief. It results from a new provision in the SAVE income-driven repayment plan that allows for a shorter timeline to loan forgiveness for some borrowers, along with ongoing fixes to other income-driven repayment plans and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

"Today we are helping 277,000 borrowers who have been making payments on their student loans for at least a decade," Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said in a statement. "They have paid what they can afford, and they have earned loan forgiveness for the balance of their loan."

Specifically, according to the Education Department's press release, $3.6 billion of the relief will go to 206,800 borrowers enrolled in SAVE. The provision allows relief for borrowers who originally borrowed $12,000 or less and have made as few as 10 years of qualifying payments, contrasting the 20-year threshold for other income-driven repayment plans.

Additionally, the rest of the relief is going to borrowers on income-driven repayment plans or PSLF as a result of the one-time account adjustments and administrative fixes to the plans to bring borrowers' payment counts up to date.

According to the Education Department, impacted borrowers will begin receiving emails on Friday informing them of their relief, and their servicers will process the relief in the coming weeks.

This latest batch of debt relief approvals comes just days after Biden announced new details for his broader attempt at student-loan forgiveness using the Higher Education Act of 1965. While the plan is still subject to change, the latest details outline relief intended to benefit over 30 million borrowers, including those whose balances have grown due to unpaid interest and those who have made at least 20 years of payments but have yet to receive relief.

The regulatory text for that broader plan is set to be published in the coming months, after which there will be a period for public comment. Biden's administration expects to implement the plan as early as this fall — but it faces uncertainty due to the possibility of legal challenges that could block the relief, as they did with Biden's first attempt at loan forgiveness.

Two groups of GOP state attorneys general have also filed separate lawsuits over the past few weeks to block the SAVE plan, calling the shortened timeline to relief unconstitutional.

Still, the administration is moving forward with more targeted efforts for debt cancellation through its fixes to repayment plans, recently announcing $1.2 billion in relief for 153,000 borrowers through the SAVE plan.

"From day one of my Administration, I promised to fight to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity," Biden said in a statement. "I will never stop working to cancel student debt — no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us."

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• Nvidia is in a bubble, stocks will falter, and a recession will hit this year, Jesse Felder said.
• The markets guru said the microchip frenzy would fade, and stock-market returns would drop off.
• Prepare for slower growth, higher unemployment, and sticky inflation and interest rates, he said.

Nvidia hype is a bubble that will burst, stocks will disappoint for the next decade or longer, and a recession will strike this year, Jesse Felder said.

The veteran analyst behind "The Felder Report" made his case on the latest "Thoughtful Money" podcast episode.

He warned the microchip buying frenzy wouldn't last, the market's outsize returns would dry up, and the economy might sink into stagflation.

Living in a fantasy

Stocks have surged to record highs this year as investors wager that AI, rate cuts, and steady economic growth will bolster corporate profits.

Felder, who managed money for around two decades before launching his market research firm, cautioned that stocks have become so expensive that their future returns are bound to be underwhelming.

"Prices of financial assets are going to perform a lot worse than they have over the last 10, 15 years," he said.

Hoping for further outperformance is "extrapolating the unsustainable — it's the definition of a bubble," he said.

"That's exactly what's going on with the stock prices of Nvidia and Micron," he continued, warning it can be "extraordinarily painful" to buy high-flying stocks as they can suffer massive crashes.

The semiconductor industry is cyclical, meaning it swings from boom to bust over time, he said. Overexcited AI companies have ordered double or triple the amount of chips they need from suppliers like Nvidia in their rush to secure them, meaning the market will be flooded, he continued.

"Everything goes in the toilet, that's the history of these companies," Felder said.

Chipmakers like Nvidia could even swing from explosive growth in revenues and profits to declines, which could mean "some real pain for a lot of these stock prices that have discounted a fantastical future," Felder said.

The markets guru also called out the recent surge in insiders selling their companies' stock as a red flag, pointing to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon as examples.

"This is a very, very dangerous equity environment," he said.

Economic trouble

Many on Wall Street expect the US economy to escape a recession, inflation and interest rates to drop this year, and unemployment to remain near historic lows.

However, Felder expects "much more of a stagflationary type of a scenario than a soft-landing or even a no-landing scenario."

The ex-trader and former hedge fund boss said the economy probably wouldn't be "trashed" like it was during the pandemic or Great Recession.

There's likely to be more of a "slow burn" than a "real painful dip" in growth, he said. Joblessness might tick higher, and the economy might only shrink in real terms as inflation more than offsets nominal growth, he noted.

Felder pointed to ageing populations in many Western countries, and deglobalization trends like reshoring, as two structural forces that will likely stop inflation from falling too far.

He also cited vast amounts of government spending, the rising cost of servicing the national debt, and the Fed potentially relaxing its 2% inflation target as other inflation drivers.

"It's overwhelming evidence that inflation's going to remain elevated relative to recent history," Felder said.

If he's right, that's likely to mean interest rates stay higher for longer, the economy grows slower and might even contract, and assets like stocks perform worse than many experts predict.

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• A former LinkedIn engineering manager recounts the company's shift in performance evaluation.
• He said he had to identify underperforming employees to put on performance improvement plans (PIPs.) 
• LinkedIn then laid off more than 1,400 workers in two rounds of job cuts last year. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with a former senior engineering manager at LinkedIn. Business Insider has verified his former employment. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I transitioned into a management role at LinkedIn, it was with the goal of helping people become the best engineers and teammates possible.

For several years, I had the pleasure of being able to do just that, and with the full support and encouragement of my company. Then, all that changed when I was asked early last year to identify 10% of my team who were not meeting expectations, even if they were.

It made me feel very frustrated and sad that it had gotten to that point. Before that point, LinkedIn was a company that lived its values even in challenging times. Being asked to do that wasn't just wrong — it went against the company's values, which was very hard to accept.

It was contrary to the way we were encouraged to manage people in the years before. It was sort of wrapped in "it's not that we want you to misidentify people," but we had to stack-rank our team.

LinkedIn has a one to five tier system to rate workers' performance. A five means they are exceeding expectations, while a one or a two means they are underperforming and at risk of being put on a PIP. 

I know some managers felt the pressure to find "twos" and give them to people who they felt didn't deserve it.

During the pandemic, we sort of lowered the bar of performance expectations. We had this concept of "soft threes", where maybe there are good reasons people aren't performing well because of mental health or things of that nature, and the sentiment among higher-ups was that "you're putting them on a 3 rating because you're trying to take care of them" and that we should stop doing that in 2023.

There's a 3-step process before a PIP

The first step was that I had to identify some of the underperformers on my team. Then, you put those employees on a 30-day plan to improve. If they don't, we move them to an "improvement goal," or IG, which is a slightly more formal 30-day improvement plan. If they're still not meeting expectations at the end of that, then they're placed on an official performance improvement plan.

My manager told me to identify people who I truly believed met that criteria. At first, I couldn't identify anyone who did, but after a director's meeting, my manager said I really needed to find somebody. It sort of felt like the rug was pulled out from under me in the sense that I had to find someone.

Performance was assessed using a quantifiable score, something called the CPP, which is a "Career Performance Profile." It's like a checklist of behaviors and evidence indicators that they want to see from you. It's what we use to determine that somebody is ready for promotion. You would assess somebody as an engineer in three primary areas: leadership, execution, and craftsmanship.

I identified one person on my team who was not fully meeting expectations. They could've got a three rating in years past, but if looking at the CPP guidelines, they were not, so I accepted that one person was an underperformer. But that person managed to exit the process in the 30-day stage and was able to improve, so they didn't get as far as being put on a PIP.

Herculean effort to come back from a PIP

Some people survived the PIPs as the idea is to coach them out of it. But once you get put on a PIP, it is very challenging to come back from because of the three-stage process that comes before that. It was pretty rare for people to successfully get out of a PIP, because in a manager's mind, they were given opportunities to improve in the steps before that.

If you're put on a PIP, decide whether you really want to come back from this because it's going to take a lot of effort. At that point, the clock is ticking. So consider if you want to put that time and effort into starting to get your affairs in order. It's really hard to come back from a PIP, and in the tech industry, it's considered a foregone conclusion once you get to that stage.

You also have to look at the environment for what it is. Do you think you're not performing, or are you not valued by your direct manager, and are they going to give you the right support? Going into the PIP, do you get the feeling that your manager wants you to succeed? If they are already starting to be a little cold or reserved, it's unlikely you're going to change their mind.

'Kill list' leaked on Blind

LinkedIn laid off 716 sales, operations, and support workers in May 2023. Then, in October, a list of people who were going to get laid off in its second round of cuts was leaked on Blind over a weekend.

Other managers texted me and said there was a "kill list" on Blind. The list was taken down, but the people who had it said that they would check to see if my name was on the list, but I didn't want to know.

The following Monday we got an email announcing the layoffs. I saw I was one of the folks who were chosen. I was surprised because I thought I was perceived as someone who brought high value to the company.

But I was grateful that, as a leader, I didn't have to lay somebody from my team off, and I felt like I was lucky that I wouldn't have to do that to somebody else.

LinkedIn did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. A spokesperson previously told BI that it did not have a percentage mandate for performance management.

Are you a tech worker with insight to share? Contact this reporter at jmann@businessinsider.com

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• Vietnamese real-estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced to death for her role in a $12.5 billion fraud case.
• Lan's fraud case is part of Communist Party Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong's corruption crackdown.
• The anti-corruption campaign has impacted Vietnam's economy and investment climate.

A mega-fraud case has rocked Vietnam, shining a spotlight on the emerging economy that is positioning itself as an alternative to China.

On Thursday, Vietnamese real-estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced to death for her role in a $12.5 billion fraud that took place over the course of a decade — which amounts to about 3% of the country's GDP. Prosecutors allege the damage from the fraud could reach $27 billion.

Lan, the chairwoman of real-estate developer Van Thinh Phat Group, was arrested in 2022 over the fraud case. She was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery, and violating banking rules.

Lan has denied the charges and intends to appeal, according to media reports.

The high-profile fraud case has scandalized the country and is raising questions about the one-party state. Vietnam has emerged as a top location for manufacturing outside China as global companies seek to diversify their supply chains.

For context on the scale of the Vietnam fraud case, consider the 1MDB case, which rocked Malaysia and the world when it started to unravel in 2015. In that scandal, investigators estimate senior officials stole $4.5 billion from the Malaysian state fund. The Lan case is looking at figures nearly three times that size.

Foreign direct investment in Vietnam reached a record high of $36.6 billion in 2023, according to official data.

Hanoi's corruption crackdown has hit Vietnam's economy

Lan's fraud case is just one in Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong's sweeping corruption crackdown.

Notably, two Vietnamese presidents have resigned in two years amid the crackdown. The Vietnamese Communist Party did not specify the reasons for their resignations, but they have been linked to the country's anti-graft campaign.

The so-called "Blazing Furnace" corruption crackdown has hit investment and market sentiment as investors question if Hanoi can secure the integrity of its banking system, bond market, and economy amid the country's rapid economic growth. Vietnam's GDP grew 5.05% in 2023 and 8.0% in 2022.

"The government regulators are overwhelmed," Zachary Abuza, a Southeast Asian expert at the National War College in Washington DC, told Bloomberg in March. "They can't keep up with the growth of the economy. Look at the volumes of money pouring into the country. They just don't have the manpower. And they're so poorly paid."

Foreign investors have been "cautious" since news of Lan's case broke, Trang Bui, the country head of Cushman and Wakefield, a commercial real-estate services firm, said at a press conference in December, per Nikkei.

Vietnam's benchmark VN-Index tanked 33% in 2023 on the back of the anti-corruption campaign. It is up 12% this year to date.

For now, government officials are scrutinizing approvals for licenses and projects, slowing down bureaucratic processes even more.

"Especially now, everyone is scared," Bui said, per Nikkei. "It's a big cleanup."

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