NPR This is the Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Weyland Wang here with Adrian Ma.
What's up! and ... Alright.
Okay. That visceral crunching sound is coming from Planet Money's, Kenny Golode.
I'm so sorry, I'm just eating a bunch of Captain Crunch berries.
Don't worry about it.
We'll talk about it later.
I am jealous right now because I have not had lunch yet, but Kenny clearly is fueled and ready to go for Indicators of the Week.
Yeah! That's right, it's our weekly look at numbers from the news.
And this week you could think of it as the Biden exit edition.
As president Biden leaves office, we look at some of the measures his administration is trying to push through before president -elect Trump officially takes over.
We've got indicators about student loans.
Whether high -yield savings accounts are actually high.
A sweet, sweet, artificial judge.
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Indicators of the week.
Whelan… why don't you start us off?
My indicator comes courtesy of an agency that's very much in the crosshairs of the new administration.
That agency is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.
ELA Muska said that the CFPB should be deleted.
Like Backspace, Backspace, Backspace, four backspaces, four letters.
You're gonna do it real slow.
I was gonna do Command A, Oh, that would do it.
Okay, yes. This week the CFPB said it was suing the bank Capital One.
the CFPB accused the bank of cheating customers out of more than 2 billion dollars in interest, that's my indicator two billion dollars and full disclosure I may be one of these customers.
No were you getting dis -interest what is the term here?
I don't know code skimped on interest whatever it is.
Well here a time for a little story back in 2011 my husband and I opened a high yield savings account In 2011, ahead of the curve.
So we did this in 2011, it was with the bank that Capital One later acquired so then we became Capital One customers and our account was called 360 savings.
Now the CFPB says Capital One was marketing this product as a high interest account.
Remember, this is during a time when the Fed's benchmark interest rate was hovering near zero.
So a lot of people, us included, were all looking for anything promising a higher rate.
And the CFPB says that in 2019, Capital One launched a new high -yield savings account called 360 Performance Savings, and the agency says these two accounts were basically identical, except for one thing.
I guess the interest rate was different.
Bingo. So here's one example the CFPB gives in its lawsuit.
In early 2024, the older account was paying out 0 .3 % interest, not high.
The newer account was paying out 4 .35 % interest.
And capital one, the important thing to say here is that capital one can set its rates at whatever level it wants.
So, what the CFPB is suing over is misrepresenting the older savings account as offering a high rate and it's accusing Capital One of keeping customers in the dark about the newer product that was paying the higher interest rates.
I reached out to Capital One.
It's said that the new savings account was marketed widely.
So, it disagrees with the CFPB, and it is quote deeply disappointed to see the CFPB continue it's a recent pattern of filing 11th -hour lawsuits ahead of a change in administration." That's spicy.
Very thematic for our Educators of the Week.
Look at your statements, everybody.
But Adrian, would you like to continue the old theme of 11th hour changes?
I would. And I would say this isn't exactly a change but an 11th hour move.
I guess you can call it.
My indicator of the week is a hundred and fifty thousand, which is how many people had their student loans forgiven this week by the Biden administration, which brings the total number of borrowers who had their federal student loan debt cancelled since Biden took office to 5 million people.
Five million is a little surprising.
And those are all within the Biden four years.
You're saying that's right.
And this might come as a little bit of a surprise to some people because Biden's original student loan forgiveness plan never really took hold.
It was actually struck down by the Supreme Court.
Despite that, the Biden administration has pushed on with this student loan forgiveness agenda through all sorts of alternate channels.
And all in all, the Biden administration has forgiven about $183 billion of student loans.
It's a big number. Just finding all these other workarounds when their main plan got stymied at the court level.
Which is why I feel like there's a lot of people I still talk to who are just like, whatever happened to the student loan cancellation thing because it's like been carried out in this sort of batched piecemeal way compared to what the original sweeping agenda was.
Yes, there's no stroke of the pen, debt goes away dramatic moment.
So what's left is this, this piecemeal patchwork thing that you described.
Absolutely, and this is just one of the sort of 11th hour moves we've seen from the Biden Administration in recent days.
Right, he blocked Nippon Steel of Japan from buying U .S.
Steel, that was in the news a ton.
Mm -hmm. Then there was there a ban on new oil and natural gas drilling of some sort also, right?
Yeah, there was also that let's see there was um the administration also proposed restrictions on the export of AI chips and Even this week they released a proposed rule for nutrition labels.
So they've been pretty busy I feel like I can see the the smoke coming off of the quickly signing pen from from Pennsylvania Avenue We'll see if all this, you know, kind of pen action really has a lasting effect because of course, President -elect Trump is taking office in a few days and may try and roll
back some of these policies.
All right. So let's round it out Kenny.
What you got for us?
All right. Well, my indicator of the week for the type of crunch what are you saying, is the number three.
Because this week the FDA removed from its list of approved food dyes red number three This is in response to a petition Citing two studies showing a link between red three and cancer in lab rats now The FDA says that that particular mechanism causing rat cancer doesn't actually happen in humans Plus
we were eating the food diet much lower rates But they are banning the dye because of a decades old law banning additives that cause cancer in humans, or Animals, that's the deal, huh?
So red number three What do you find this in the FDA says it is a lesser -used dye for it's worth It has actually been banned in cosmetics since the 90s.
Yeah, but but yeah candy Frosting medicine and it might still be in those things through January 20 27 or 2028 food and medicine companies have to comply respectively.
Oyster string. Oh my god, so good.
I guess this is where we ask, why Kenny, you are eating fistfulls of Captain Crunch?
Oh, thank you for asking, everybody.
Much like W peddling, a personal story to share here.
Imagine a tiny little teeny kid, Kenny Malone.
I ate some Captain Crunch then with red berries And legend has it.
I got so hyper that my parents forbid me from eating red you ever again Now I'm all grown up and Cap & Crunch mixed cereal.
That is oops just the berries In fact, I separated out just the red berries from that cereal Actually a thing though like could the hyperness that you experienced just be from the fact that you just ate a lot of kids cereal Or your natural joie de vivre.
This isn't our science podcast, Adrienne.
That's a short way.
Go give us your science verses for that question.
Now I will say these are redder and more sugary, and more delicious than I remember, but were we not everyone, these are still legal.
They are made not with red three, but red 40, which now I guess is really the last remaining red food die that you can use.
40 times with red. And if you're keeping track at home, We are down to eight allowable food dice.
There's a couple of blues, yellows, a green, many of which, according to a 2012 literature review, do have health concerns of varying degrees, including, yeah, hyperactivity as well.
Well, let us know if you ever go to sleep tonight, Kenny.
I'm so happy right now.
Well, that's it for Indicators of the Week.
Kenny, thanks so much for joining us.
we will let you go to continue your breakfast of champions.
— I'm gonna have a very productive rest of the day, I think.
— This episode was produced by Angel Correras with engineering by Neil Roush.
It was fact -checked by Céra Juarez and edited by Julia Richie.
Kicking Cannon is our show's editor, and The indicator is a production of NPR.
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