Buy Now Pay Later services have stopped being a way to finance a pair of sneakers. People now use them to buy groceries. Milk. Eggs. The stuff you eat so you don't die.
CNBC's Sharon Epperson reports that borrowers are falling behind on these loans. Borrowers. That's what we call someone who splits a grocery bill into four installments now. Not broke. Not miscalculating. Borrowing.
The products were supposed to be for luxuries. A treat. Something fun you couldn't quite afford but wanted anyway. Now they're for daily expenses. Rising costs pushed consumers toward BNPL for bread and chicken. They took out loans to manage their budget. Then they couldn't pay back the loans they took out to manage their budget.
This is technical analysis in its purest form. Draw a line from "I need credit to buy food" to "I can't pay back the food credit" and you've charted the entire trade. No indicators needed. No moving averages. Just a straight f*cking line down.
The data show a growing number of people falling behind. Growing. As in more than before. As in the trend is directional. Retail traders love directional trends until they're the data point inside one.
Sharon Epperson joined Squawk Box with more details. More details about people who financed their groceries and then didn't pay. There are only so many details you need there. You borrowed money for cereal. You didn't pay it back. The end.
Buy now, stress later. That's the headline. Cute. Like the stress comes later. The stress came when you needed a loan for milk.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
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