ECONOMY

_{Consumer debt balloons to historic high}

If you’ve been dropping plastic a lot and hoping it’ll take care of itself later, join the club. Yesterday, the New York Fed released its Q1 report on household debt: Findings include a record-high debt level of $17 trillion, persistent credit card debt, and rising delinquency rates.

A typical first quarter sees credit card balances decline as people pay off what they spent over the holidays while trying to out-gift their in-laws. But, for the first time since the New York Fed started tracking this 20 years ago, that isn’t the case, according to Bankrate’s senior industry analyst Ted Rossman. Instead, balances remained flat over Q1, suggesting that people aren’t cutting back and are probably using credit cards to finance daily spending due to the rising cost of…pretty much everything.

It’s not just that credit card balances are flat. Delinquency is rising, as is its intimidating older brother, serious delinquency, which is when a debt is 90+ days past due. The Fed’s report showed that 4.57% of credit card debt transitioned to serious delinquency last quarter, up from 3.04% in Q1 of 2022. And for credit card holders aged 18–29, 8.3% of balances were in serious delinquency.

Plastic isn’t the only thing to blame

In addition to causing lots of folks to check their credit card balance real quick, the report had a few key takeaways:

• Auto loan delinquencies are higher than they were before the pandemic for those under 40. The average monthly car payment has jumped to $729.

• Mortgage debt increased by $121 billion in the first quarter, reaching a $12.04 trillion balance even though mortgage originations were way down, likely due to the Fed’s rate increase extravaganza.

• Student debt saw a slight decrease in the rate of serious delinquency, which went down to less than 1%—but that’s probably because repayment is paused for now.

Zoom out: Debt balances are almost $3 trillion higher than pre-pandemic, but Fed analysts see one bright spot: Many households are still more financially stable than they were before, thanks to the mortgage refi boom of 2020–2021 when rates were at their lowest.

FOOD TECH

_{CRISPR lettuce for your summer salad}

Genetically edited mustard greens are coming for the salad base throne thanks to scientists who have figured out how to remove the trait that makes the nutritious vegetable taste so bitter.

The new and improved milder mustard greens from agriculture startup Pairwise will be the first food on the US market to have been tweaked using the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR. The modified greens are already being served in a few restaurants and will begin hitting grocery stores this summer.

But you probably won’t know they’re anything special from the packaging. Unlike GMO foods that bend the laws of nature by incorporating genes from other species, gene-edited foods contain modified versions of their own genes, so the USDA doesn’t require the “bioengineered” label it slaps on GMOs.

The logic is that gene-editing merely speeds up a process that can occur naturally: Rather than using the centuries-old crossbreeding methods that can take a decade to alter traits, scientists used CRISPR to directly edit the mustard greens DNA for debittered lettuce in just four years, according to Wired.

New priorities: Until recently, gene editing and genetic modification had been used mainly to boost crop yields. Mustard greens 2.0 is all about getting consumers to substitute iceberg and other nutrient-lacking lettuce for a more nutritional vegetable.

EDUCATION

^{Another company goes after FL’s ‘anti-woke’ agenda}

Publisher Penguin Random House and advocacy group PEN America sued a Florida school district yesterday over book bans, joining Disney in pushing back against the state’s “anti-woke” policies that critics say censor free speech and infringe on civil rights.

The details: PEN America, Penguin, and five authors of banned books filed a federal lawsuit against the Escambia County School District and School Board, claiming they violated the First Amendment by banning 10 books from its school libraries. The suit also alleges the school district and school board violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because most of the books targeted included themes of race, sexuality, or gender.

A number of books, including George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Judy Blume’s Forever… were challenged by one single language arts teacher, according to the suit. And it claims that despite a review committee ruling the books were OK for young readers, the school board still removed them. The lawsuit wants the banned books back in libraries. Escambia County School District has declined to comment.

It’s also in Florida…

which has been churning out laws restricting what educators can say and teach, including at the collegiate level. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president, signed four bills limiting LGBTQ+ rights yesterday, one of which expanded the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law to prohibit teachers from discussing gender or sexual orientation with students through eighth grade (up from third grade).

That’s the law at the center of the bitter dispute between Disney and DeSantis. Disney, one of the biggest private employers in Florida, criticized the legislation and has sued DeSantis over what it called an “anti-business, and patently unconstitutional” effort by the governor to punish Disney for its criticism.

Looking ahead…it remains to be seen whether DeSantis’s spat with Disney and his broader “anti-woke” agenda will be popular among voters as he gears up to run for president. He took an L this week when Jacksonville, the largest city in Florida, elected a Democrat as its next mayor over DeSantis’s candidate.

NFT LEADERBOARD: 2018 VS. 2023 📊

Check it out. I came across this interesting chart over the weekend on Twitter.

It compares the weekly NFT volume leaderboard from 2018 to 2023…

The top takeaways:

• None of the projects from 2018 are in the leaderboard now

• In fact, most of the projects from 2018 are dead (R.I.P)

• Even though it’s an NFT “bear market” right now, the weekly volume is still 30-40x more now than in 2018

It’ll be interesting to see what the 2028 leaderboard looks like... 👀

MEME

AROUND THE WEB🌐

On this day: In 1926, a wild scandal kicked off when popular evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared from LA’s Venice Beach — then turned up in Mexico with a dubious kidnapping tale.

That’s cool: An online archive of condiment packets throughout history.

That’s interesting: A thread about Martha Matilda Harper, the “mother of franchising.”

Cure boredom: This fun take on “Minesweeper” pits you against monsters of different levels, versus explosives.

Aww: And now, expert navigation.

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