Financial Literacy/Advocacy

• Carly Urban’s latest research paper is now available. Download the paper or the brief.

“This paper and brief, authored by Jeremy Burke, J. Michael Collins, and Carly Urban, estimates the causal effect of required high school financial education on the financial well-being of young adults.”

Economics 

• New home construction slows in August, particularly multi-family construction. (MarketWatch)
• August retail sales figures were released this week. Rather than an article, try this CNBC clip with experts providing some analysis of the figure.
• Unemployment claims came in at 860,000 this week (Yahoo Finance). The NY Times explains how the pandemic has brought to light the issues with various unemployment measures, which were never meant to be economic indicators.
• This graph (FREDBLOG_St. Louis Fed) is worth a thousand words about transportation this year.

• Income inequality is growing. This article has some political commentary, but the statistics are undeniable. (Politico)
• Finally, this article returns to a topic we have included in previous posts: who gets hurt as we move to a cashless society? (NY Times) 

Investing

• Here is the first blog to make this list from an Indian website Safal Niveshak (“Successful Investor”)
• NGPF friend, Ron Lieber (check out this recent NGPF Podcast), discusses how teen trading doesn’t have to be dangerous. (NY Times-subscription) 
• The current boom in IPOs is reminding some of 1999 and some are concerned.(1999 was the dot-com boom, which led to the dot-com bust, for those of you too young to remember). (MarketWatch)
• Not only is Starbucks discouraging its customers from using cash, it is also encouraging the use of Starbucks stored value cards instead of debit or credit cards. In this way, customers are effectively loaning them lots of money! (Moneyness)

Paying for College

• Two stories here about debt forgiveness and court rulings.
  • The Deptarment of Education discloses in Federal Court that 94% of loan forgiveness applications from people claiming they have been defrauded have been rejected. (Forbes)
  • But there was a win for defrauded borrowers owing $330 million in private loans related to ITT Tech. (NY Times)

Education

• Why hasn’t digital learning lived up to its promise? TechCrunch
• The WSJ (subscription) insert today on college rankings, including Douglas Belkin’s take on admissions post-Covid.

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