Student loans, savings accounts, and goodbye to artificial red dye

0:01NPR

0:11This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong here with Adrian Ma. What's up? And. All right. Okay. That visceral crunching sound is coming from Planet Money's Kenny Malone. 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 can sort of 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.

0:57We've got indicators about student loans. Whether high-yield savings accounts are actually high. Oh, and sweet, sweet artificial dies. After the break. This message comes from NPR sponsor Zendesk. Introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone. With an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months, Zendesk AI agents resolve 30 % of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10 ,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect.

1:35Find out more at Zendesk.com. Indicators of the Week. Waylon, 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. Elon Musk has said that the CFPB should be deleted. Like backspace, backspace, backspace. Four backspaces. Oh, you're going to do it real slow. I was going to do Command A and then delete. 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 in interest.

2:14That's my indicator,$2 billion. And full disclosure, I may be one of these customers. No! Were you getting disinterest? What is the term here? I don't know. Skimped on interest? Whatever it is. Well, here, 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 a 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.

2:57So 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. It's not high. The newer account was paying out 4.35 % interest. And, you know, Capital One, the important thing to say here is that Capital One can set its rates at whatever level it wants.

3:44So 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 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 its recent pattern of filing 11th hour lawsuits ahead of a change in administration. Ooh, 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?

4:29I would. And I would say this isn't exactly a change, but an 11th hour move, I guess you could call it. My indicator of the week is 150 ,000, 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 canceled 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.

5:05It was actually struck down by the Supreme Court. Despite that, the Biden administration has kind of 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. That'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 kind of sweeping agenda was.

5:44Yes. There's no stroke of the pen, debt goes away dramatic moment. Yeah. 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. Was there a ban on new oil and natural gas drilling of some sort also? That's right. Yeah, there was also that. Let's see. There was the administration also proposed restrictions on the export of AI chips. And even this week, they released a proposed rule for nutrition labels.

6:22So they've been pretty busy. I feel like I can see the smoke coming off of the quickly signing pen 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. Sorry. More Cap 'n 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.

7:10Now, the FDA says that that particular mechanism causing rat cancer doesn't actually happen in humans. Plus, we were eating the food dye at 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 what it's worth, it has actually been banned in cosmetics since the 90s. Yikes. But, yeah, candy, frosting, medicine. And it might still be in those things through January 2027 or 2028. food and medicine companies have until then to comply, respectively.

7:50With those things. Oh my god, so good. I guess this is where we ask why, Kenny, you are eating fistfuls of Captain Crunch. Oh, well, thank you for asking, everybody. Much like Waylon, 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 dye ever again. Now I'm all grown up, and Cap 'n Crunch makes cereal that is, oops, just the berries. In fact, I separated out just the red berries from that cereal. And my parents aren't here to stop me. So go, go, go, go.

8:31Wait, so good. Is this actually a thing, though? Like, could the hyperness that you experienced just be from the fact that you just ate a lot of kid cereal? Or your natural joie de vivre? That's not a science podcast, Adrian. That's short way. I'm going to be science versus for that question. Now, I will say these are redder and more sugary, you're right, and more delicious than I remember. But worry not, everyone. These are still legal. They are made not with red 3, but red 40, which now I guess is really the last remaining red food dye that you can use. 40 times more red. And if you're keeping track at home, we are down to eight allowable food dyes.

9:09There'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 hyperactivity as well. Wow. 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 going to have a very productive rest of the day, I think. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Neil Rauch. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Julia Ritchie.

9:47Kicking Cannon is our show's editor, and The Indicator is a production of NPR. My precious. Om, om, om, om, om. This message comes from Grammarly. From emails to reports and project proposals, it's hard to meet the demands of today's competing priorities without some help. Grammarly is the essential AI communication assistant that boosts your productivity at work so you can get more of what you need done faster. Just a few clicks can tailor your tone and writing so you come across exactly as you intend. Get time back to focus on your high-impact work. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com slash podcast.

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