Miscellaneous News

iewgnem said:

it's about have advanced technology

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More Americans are financing groceries with buy now, pay later loans — and more are paying those bills late, survey says​

A growing number of Americans are using buy now, pay later loans to buy groceries, and more people are paying those bills late, according to new Lending Tree data released Friday.

The figures are the latest indicator that some consumers are cracking under the pressure of an uncertain economy and are having trouble affording essentials such as groceries as they contend with persistent inflation, high interest rates and concerns around tariffs.

In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.

Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.

Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so.

“A lot of people are struggling and looking for ways to extend their budget,” Schulz said. “Inflation is still a problem. Interest rates are still really high. There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and other economic issues, and it’s all going to add up to a lot of people looking for ways to extend their budget however they can.”

“For an awful lot of people, that’s going to mean leaning on buy now, pay later loans, for better or for worse,” he said.

He stopped short of calling the results a recession indicator but said conditions are expected to decline further before they get better.

“I do think it’s going to get worse, at least in the short term,” said Schulz. “I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of reason to expect these numbers to get better in the near term.”

The loans, which allow consumers to split up purchases into several smaller payments, are a popular alternative to credit cards because they often don’t charge interest. But consumers can see high fees if they pay late, and they can run into problems if they stack up multiple loans. In Lending Tree’s survey, 60% of BNPL users said they’ve had multiple loans at once, with nearly a fourth saying they have held three or more at once.

“It’s just really important for people to be cautious when they use these things, because even though they can be a really good interest-free tool to help you kind of make it from one paycheck to the next, there’s also a lot of risk in mismanaging it,” said Schulz. “So people should tread lightly.”

Lending Tree’s findings come after Billboard revealed that about 60% of general admission Coachella attendees funded their concert tickets with buy now, pay later loans, sparking a debate on the state of the economy and how consumers are using debt to keep up their lifestyles. A recent announcement from DoorDash that it would begin accepting BNPL financing from Klarna for food deliveries led to widespread mockery and jokes that Americans were struggling so much that they were now being forced to finance cheeseburgers and burritos.

Over the last few years, consumers have held up relatively well, even in the face of persistent inflation and high interest rates, because the job market was strong and wage growth had kept up with inflation — at least for some workers.

Earlier this year, however, large companies including Walmart and Delta Airlines began warning that the dynamic had begun to shift and they were seeing cracks in demand, which was leading to worse-than-expected sales forecasts.

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Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.

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Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.

Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so.

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And yet, “BNPL does this in de facto stealth mode,” Tim Quinlan, senior economist at Wells Fargo, recently told CNBC. “Because no central repository exists for monitoring it, growth of this ‘phantom debt’ could imply total household debt levels are actually higher than traditional measures,” he said.

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AndrewJ said:

Meanwhile, China is building the world's first compact fusion reactor in Hefei, Anhui.

The device under construction is named BEST. After EAST, which is another experimental reactor also located in Hefei and broke lots of world records recently, the new device is expected to demonstrate electricity generation from fusion for the first time.

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StraightEdge said:

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That Is absolutely nothing to what the Stooges in the US tried to do to Chinese companies. They tried to kill Huawei by denying them access to almost 80% of their supply chain, they tried to kill SMIC, YMTC, Jinhua and the list go on. If there is a group clowns that tried to weaponize supply chains those are the stooges in US. If it weren't for China's ingenuity, Huawei would be dead, so would YTMC and SMIC revenue would had collapse. The Chinese semiconductor industry would be dead or severely restricted, we wouldn't have Deepseek and the damage to the Chinese IT industry would have been incalculable. So yes, China restricting rare earths is nothing to what the stooges had done to Chinese companies with their export controls. I am surprised that China didn't retaliated sooner.​

iewgnem said:

I find this part really funny, as firm believers in social darwinism where the weak deserves to die, they're certainly having a lot of trouble grasping a situation where China isn't interested in bargaining, China is just going to kill them.

Even by 2025 only a small number of Americans, Trump not being one of them, even understand China's rare earth dominance is about refining, not mining. It could be another 10-20 years before they even develop to the point where they're able to understand China's dominance in refining isn't about having refineries, it's about China having advanced refining technology that they never shared with anyone and takes decades of R&D to develop.

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How easy is it to scale up a pilot plant to an industrial one?

— Extraction is a very rewarding process. We went from liters per hour to 20, 30 and 50 m3 per hour, and all the indicators were confirmed, everything worked. The stage of scientific research work is over.

— It took you less than two years to do all this. How did you manage to do it so quickly?

— Firstly, continuity helped — we have employees who started at Soviet plants and brought knowledge from there. Secondly, Rusredmet itself has accumulated quite a lot of experience in separating rare-earth metals. We did not have comprehensive work on separating the entire light group, but we solved individual problems. For example, we created a technology for processing iron-borne neodymium magnets to obtain neodymium. For other companies, using other raw material sources, we worked out both chloride and nitrate separation schemes.

— You received the first products. Have potential clients tried them?

— Yes, that is the main thing. We sent neodymium, praseodymium and other REEs to Rosatom enterprises and other Russian consumers. They met all the requirements.

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pmc said:

I dont think it takes decades. Rosatom managed to resurrect pilot plant in less than two years and there scaling up road map is less than 5 years and that include extraction in remote regions, refining and permanent rare earth magnets. US has the theoretical tech of most of world technologies but it does not have human capital to make it happen. you can already observe US only manage new Nuclear plant in one place at a time while Russia can manage Nuclear Plant construction in many countries simultaneously.

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GulfLander said:

What r the chances that CPEC/BRI be affected?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1915810475784159731

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Sardaukar20 said:

This is interesting news. It seems like China is now capable of attracting top talents from overseas, starting with East Asia. This used to be one of America's greatest strengths. Much of the great scientific achievements of America was built on the back of foreign geniuses. The American nuclear program was one such example.

Today China is capable of attracting overseas talents while America is happy to deport theirs. Instead, America is more interested in bringing in rich people, and very talkative people. I enjoy watching this very much.

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