May 9 2024
The elixir of life
1 “Buy now, pay later” debt boosts consumer spending but risky
2 Schools undergoing post-pandemic truancy crisis
3 ELECTION 2024 Biden heralds data center investment as he campaigns in Wisconsin
4 Spoonful of Olive Oil a Day Could Lower Risk of Dementia-Related Death
5 Israel faces conflicting pressures on war in Gaza
5/9/1960 FDA approves first birth control pill
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1 “Buy now, pay later” debt boosts consumer spending but risky
It's hard enough for central bankers and Wall Street traders to make sense of the post-pandemic economy with the data available to them. At Wells Fargo & Co., senior economist Tim Quinlan is particularly spooked by the “phantom debt” that he can't see. That specter lurks behind buzzy “Buy Now, Pay Later” platforms, which allow consumers to split purchases into smaller installments. The major companies that provide these so called “pay in four” products, such as Affirm Holdings Inc., Klarna Bank AB and Block Inc.’s Afterpay, don’t report those loans to credit agencies. Time and again, they’ve resisted calls for greater disclosure, even as the market has grown each year since at least 2020 and is projected to reach almost $700 billion globally by 2028. That’s masking a complete picture of the financial health of American households, which is crucial for everyone from global central banks to US regional lenders and multinational businesses. Consumer spending in the world’s largest economy has been so resilient in the face of stubbornly high inflation that economists and traders have had to repeatedly rip up their forecasts for slowing growth and interest-rate cuts. Still, cracks are starting to form. First it was Americans falling behind on auto loans. Then credit-card delinquency rates reached the highest since at least 2012, with the share of debts 30, 60 and 90 days late all on the upswing.
Bloomberg
2 Schools undergoing post-pandemic truancy crisis
The pandemic dealt a blow to school attendance. Many schools stayed closed too long, but even among those that reopened relatively quickly, student absence soared. Even now, years after resuming in-class instruction, most school systems are seeing high levels of student absences. About 15% of students nationwide in 2019 were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of the school year, or about 18 days, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Full data aren’t yet available from the 2023-24 school year, but fragmentary statistics from local jurisdictions aren’t encouraging. Students from poorer families are more likely to be chronically absent from school, but even in the nation’s richest districts, chronic absenteeism was nearly twice as high in 2023 as in 2019. Surprisingly, the length of time a school was closed isn’t a reliable predictor of absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism in 2023 stood at 28% of students for districts that remained closed the longest, not far ahead of 25% of students for districts that reopened the fastest.
WSJ
3 ELECTION 2024 Biden heralds data center investment as he campaigns in Wisconsin
President Biden on Wednesday announced the creation of an artificial intelligence data center in Wisconsin, highlighting one of his administration’s biggest economic accomplishments in a crucial battleground state — and pointing to a significant failure by his predecessor and 2024 challenger. At the Gateway Technical College in Racine, Mr. Biden said the $3 billion project, which will be built by Microsoft, was an example of how he has delivered on promises that former President Donald J. Trump did not. The Microsoft data center will be built on grounds where Mr. Trump, as president, announced in 2017 that Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, would build a $10 billion factory for making LCD panels. Mr. Trump promised that it would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” and visited the site with elected officials and golden shovels. But the project never materialized as expected.
The Microsoft project is part of Mr. Biden’s “Investing in America” agenda, which has focused on bringing billions of private-sector dollars into manufacturing and industries such as clean energy and artificial intelligence. Microsoft expects that the new data center will create 2,300 union construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs.
NYT
4 Spoonful of Olive Oil a Day Could Lower Risk of Dementia-Related Death
Mounting evidence suggests adding just a spoonful of olive oil to your diet each day can have powerful health benefits. A new study from the US suggests this includes protection against dementia.
Tessier and colleagues combined the results of surveys on nurses and health professionals conducted from the 1970s and 1980s. All were free of heart disease and cancer when the surveys first introduced questions on olive oil consumption in 1990. In the years that followed, 4,751 of the 92,383 selected participants died from dementia-related causes. The researchers found adults who regularly consumed more than 7 grams of olive oil a day (a little over a teaspoon, or about half a tablespoon) were 28 percent less likely to die of dementia-related diseases compared to those who never or rarely consumed olive oil. Olive oil may exert anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects due to its high content of monounsaturated fatty acids and other compounds with antioxidant properties such as vitamin E and polyphenols," Tessier and team explain in their paper.
Science Alert
5 Israel faces conflicting pressures on war in Gaza
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is known as a man who likes to play for time and postpone big decisions. But he may not be able to do that much longer. Domestically, his coalition partners on the far right threaten to break up the government if he agrees to a cease-fire and does not try to clear Hamas out of Rafah, in southern Gaza. Militarily, the strategic logic is to complete the dismantling of Hamas by taking Rafah and controlling the border with Egypt. But diplomatically, his allies, especially the United States, are pushing him to agree on a cease-fire, and skip Rafah and the potential civilian casualties a large-scale operation would cause. So Mr. Netanyahu is now negotiating and maneuvering on several fronts at once, all of which have a significant effect on the conduct of the war and his own future as prime minister.
“Netanyahu is being pulled in various directions,” with pressure mounting on him to respond, said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel now at Princeton. Foremost is Mr. Netanyahu’s desire to avoid new elections, which could mean loss of power and a renewal of the various court cases against him. “Political survival always ranks first in Netanyahu’s calculations,” Mr. Kurtzer said. Then there are the competing pressures on him from “extremists in his own coalition who want to continue the war,” he said, and from the hostage families, who want the government to prioritize a cease-fire and a release of more people seized in Israel during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. Externally, the pressure comes from Biden administration officials and some in Congress “who are losing patience over the humanitarian situation,” he noted. They want a cease-fire and oppose a major onslaught on Rafah. Finally there is “the real, continuing threat of escalation, especially from Hezbollah,” he said.
NYT
5/9/1960 FDA approves first birth control pill
Sources
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/politics/biden-data-center-wisconsin.html
[5]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/world/europe/netanyahu-israel-gaza-ceasefire.html
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