An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Buy now, pay later" loans took off during the pandemic as a way for online shoppers to go on retail splurges without using a credit card. Now, lenders are offering the loans as a means for people to finance basic households needs. The lending apps Flex and Zip allow customers to take out loans to pay for their broadband, electricity, health insurance, mobile phone service, mortgage and water bills. Affirm, one of the most popular pay-later apps, has started providing some tenants loans to extend their monthly rent payment for a few weeks. Many dentists, veterinarians and medical clinics now often offer instant pay-later financing, and Intuit this year started promoting "File Now, Pay Later" loans to TurboTax users who owe money in their tax return. Pay-later loans are becoming the "working capital for the modern middle class," said Karen Webster, the chief executive of Pymnts, a news and market research company for the payments industry. "Consumers are using it more for essential, everyday things." Americans spent $160 billion last year through pay-later loans, according to research released recently by Federal Reserve economists -- nearly twice what consumers spent two years earlier, in 2023. That's still a fraction of the more than $3 trillion U.S. shoppers spend annually on consumer credit cards. But the industry continues to expand by double-digit rates each year. How much of that growth reflects consumer preferences, versus desperation, is a question economists and industry analysts are trying to unravel. The rise in pay-later financing comes as many households are leaning more on debt to keep up with their daily expenses. Paying interest -- to afford basic needs -- adds to the overall cost of living, which has already been rising amid higher medical, housing and fuel costs. For many borrowers, the loans have become their only option: Half of those using them said they could not make ends meet otherwise, according to the latest edition of a survey that LendingTree, a loan marketplace, has compiled for years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Billions of dollars are traded every week on the lightly regulated prediction market sites, where users bet on everything from movie reviews to elections to conflicts in the Middle East. Clinical trials are just the latest area where the industry's rapid growth is raising ethical questions. Kalshi claims such bets will provide a new source of information about which drugs will get approved, and what clinical trials will show promising results, which the company says can help investors decide what new drugs to fund. "If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger," said Kalshi spokesman Jack Such, pointing to stock market short sellers who have profited from clinical trial failures. "While Kalshi and the stock market are the same in this regard, they do differ in one important way: the stock market doesn't give any valuable information to researchers," Such said. Drug trial researchers, though, are far from convinced. David Tsai, who runs clinical trials at a biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, started an online petition pushing for such betting to be banned, making the case that betting on drug trials "threatens the very foundation of trust and integrity in biotechnology." Tsai is concerned that the prospect of betting provides those involved with a clinical trial a reason to tamper with the results for a prediction market payout. "If we were running a trial for an oncology drug that requires an infusion, a pharmacist who had placed a bet saying that it's gonna work well, or doesn't work well, could obviously adjust the infusion rate, could adjust the source temperature of the drug," he said. "They could change any number of variables that could obviously have a direct impact [on] how the trial and the data and the patient safety would come out." Another skeptic is Nicholas Zaorsky, a professor of radiation oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who has helped run clinical trials and agrees that prediction markets can interfere with the advancement of life-saving drugs. "Prediction markets can be valuable in some settings because they aggregate information, but clinical trials are fundamentally different: investigators, coordinators, and sometimes even participants can directly influence aspects of the outcomes being wagered on," Zaorsky said. "That creates financial incentives that risk undermining trial integrity." Bettors should not be rooting for an experimental medicine to fail just to earn a buck, says Joshua Pederson, the father of a 12-year-old cancer patient enrolled in a clinical trial. "It's a dark idea," he said. "It's quite ghastly." Kalshi, for its part, argues that its prediction markets could help patients track promising medical breakthroughs and clinical trials, enlisting experts including 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki to make the case. "Most patients don't know about the choices available in clinical trials or which programs are most promising. The opportunity to have an open, transparent dataset about trial probabilities is extremely promising and empowering for people," a white paper sponsored by Kalshi stated.

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Trump Media has officially launched its $100,000-per-month data feed giving trading firms machine-readable access to Truth Social posts milliseconds before the public. According to Fortune, five Wall Street firms have already signed up for the service, which "would generate about $500,000 in monthly revenue, or $6 million annually." Critics argue the service could let President Trump, who owns about 41% of the company, profit from early access to market-moving presidential communications. "I'll be blunt," Gian Luca Clementi, an economics professor at NYU Stern School of Business, told Fortune. "This is insider trading by definition." "He's going to monetize the role of the office of the president of the United States," he said. "The undisputable fact is that somebody is going to earn some more money than before, and that's the president of the United States." From the report: Trump's media venture has struggled to build a profitable social media business despite its lofty valuation. Truth Social has reported significant operating losses since going public. According to the company's earnings report for Q1 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group netted a roughly $405 million loss and raised less than $900,000 in sales. Not everyone agrees the arrangement meets the legal bar for insider trading. Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, has pushed back on the characterization, telling Quartz that Truth API "offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data" and that critics "must have invented a new theory of 'insider trading' based on publicly available information." Classic insider trading law hinges on trading on secret, material information in breach of a fiduciary duty, and Truth Social posts are, by design, meant to become public within moments -- raising real doctrinal uncertainty about whether faster access alone qualifies. But other legal experts argue the greater risk lies ahead. Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics counsel, has argued that the arrangement could violate federal law once Trump posts genuinely market-moving news -- on tariffs, military action, or other policy decisions -- before it's public, with Truth Social effectively acting as a paid "tipper" on the president's behalf. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said he plans to introduced legislation Tuesday to ban the president from selling expedited access to his statements.

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