How are you paying for life right now? Consumers are feeling pinched as their wages fall behind inflation, but they just keep spending.

Some are treating their house like a piggybank when they write checks, while others turn to credit cards. That brings us to a bit of news out of the New York Federal Reserve today: More people are delinquent on their credit card payments now than at any other point since the Great Recession. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor  

The early part of the pandemic was a terrible time in so many ways, but it was an oddly good time for many people financially.

“Federal supports, including stimulus payments, expanded unemployment benefits, helped a lot of families to stabilize their finances,” said Breno Braga, senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Braga said that in the first couple of years of COVID, there was a notable decline in credit card delinquencies.

“But then what happened was, after those programs expired, the environment became much more difficult for families,” Braga said. “They saw a rapid increase in the price of goods such as food, housing, and transportation.”

And then, there was a rapid increase in the number of people falling behind on their credit card payments. Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said that more recently, the number of new delinquencies has stabilized.

“But it's at a level that's higher — I would argue — than it should be, given a pretty low unemployment rate in the economy,” Bivens said.

Part of the reason for that is a lot of people are still carrying those old debts they fell behind on, said Joelle Scally, economic policy advisor at the New York Fed.

“Once people miss a payment on their credit card, that sticks around on their credit report for some time,” Scally said.

She also said that lenders are now reporting and chasing late payments for much longer than they used to. So, even though a lot of these credit card delinquencies aren’t new, Aaron Klein, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said they are still affecting people’s lives.

“This debt overhang of people who have defaulted hasn't gone away for the millions of families affected,” Klein said. “They're still getting called by debt collectors. Their credit scores are still lower.”

And all of that, combined with persistent inflation and a frozen job market, is making it hard for many to catch up.

Best’s platform is partnering with leading AI detector Pangram to help readers understand which of the platform’s popular newsletters are written with generative artificial intelligence. It’s a bet on transparency from a platform that has caught heat in the past for its hands-off approach to content moderation . How will Substack deal with false positives? Best came on “Marketplace Tech” to talk about it.

E-commerce site Overstock bought Bed Bath & Beyond out of bankruptcy back in 2023, then renamed itself Bed Bath & Beyond and acquired other home retailers like The Container Store and Buy Buy Baby. Got all that?

Now Bed Bath & Beyond is rebranding again as Neighborhood Intelligence, moving from from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq, with the ticker symbol NXH. The new company is getting into flooring and maybe even mortgages, touching all parts of homeownership. Can this new integrated whole succeed where its individual parts failed?