Finance

Joe Biden and Xi Jinping to speak after rare U.S. security advisor trip to China

Published

8 months ago

August 29, 2024

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) shakes hands with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at Yanqi Lake in Beijing on August 27, 2024.

Ng Han Guan | Afp | Getty Images

BEIJING — U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to speak over the phone in “coming weeks,” the White House said Wednesday.

The announcement came amid U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan’s trip to Beijing this week to meet with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat.

Both sides said their military leaders would also hold a call in the near future.

Chin added that plans for the second round of U.S.-China talks on artificial intelligence are underway. The White House noted John Podesta, senior advisor to the president for international climate policy, would soon travel to China, without specifying a date.

In official readouts of Sullivan’s trip, the two nations maintained their positions on tech restrictions, Taiwan, the South China Sea and Ukraine.

China's 'appetite and dreams' about Taiwan are still there, says CFR's Richard Haass

Biden is not running for reelection in November after this summer, ceding the nomination to his vice president, Kamala Harris. The White House statement did not name the presidents, instead it noted plans for a “leader-level call.”

The Chinese side’s statement used its typical language of “two heads of state,” and said both sides were discussing “a new round of interaction,” according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese.

Biden and Xi held a nearly two-hour phone call in early April, after the two leaders had met in November 2023 on the sidelines of a summit in Woodside, California.

High-level communication between the world’s two largest economies hasn’t been easy in recent years amid heightened tensions and Covid-19 restrictions.

Then-U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August 2022 and a high-profile “balloon incident” in February 2023 had further strained their relationship, suspending some planned talks.

First U.S. security advisor visit since 2016

Sullivan arrived in Beijing Tuesday, wrapped up two days of meetings with Wang on Wednesday and is set to depart Thursday. This is his first trip to China as national security advisor, despite multiple meetings with Wang in recent years.

The last official trip to China by a U.S. president’s national security advisor was in 2016, when Susan Rice traveled to Beijing under the Obama administration.

While the outcome of November’s presidential election remains unclear, being tough on Beijing is a rare issue that both U.S. political parties agree on.

Harris’ current national security advisor, Phil Gordon, said in May at a Council on Foreign Relations event that the “China challenge” is much greater than Taiwan, and requires ensuring that Beijing “doesn’t have the advanced technology, intelligence and military capabilities that can challenge us.”

Finance

More Americans buy groceries with buy now, pay later loans

Published

4 hours ago

April 26, 2025

Business Finance News

People shop for produce at a Walmart in Rosemead, California, on April 11, 2025.

Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images

A growing number of Americans are using buy now, pay later loans to buy groceries, and more people are paying those bills late, according to new Lending Tree data released Friday.

The figures are the latest indicator that some consumers are cracking under the pressure of an uncertain economy and are having trouble affording essentials such as groceries as they contend with persistent inflation, high interest rates and concerns around tariffs.

In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.

Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.

Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so.

“A lot of people are struggling and looking for ways to extend their budget,” Schulz said. “Inflation is still a problem. Interest rates are still really high. There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and other economic issues, and it’s all going to add up to a lot of people looking for ways to extend their budget however they can.”

“For an awful lot of people, that’s going to mean leaning on buy now, pay later loans, for better or for worse,” he said.

He stopped short of calling the results a recession indicator but said conditions are expected to decline further before they get better.

“I do think it’s going to get worse, at least in the short term,” said Schulz. “I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of reason to expect these numbers to get better in the near term.”

The loans, which allow consumers to split up purchases into several smaller payments, are a popular alternative to credit cards because they often don’t charge interest. But consumers can see high fees if they pay late, and they can run into problems if they stack up multiple loans. In Lending Tree’s survey, 60% of BNPL users said they’ve had multiple loans at once, with nearly a fourth saying they have held three or more at once.

“It’s just really important for people to be cautious when they use these things, because even though they can be a really good interest-free tool to help you kind of make it from one paycheck to the next, there’s also a lot of risk in mismanaging it,” said Schulz. “So people should tread lightly.”

Lending Tree’s findings come after Billboard revealed that about 60% of general admission Coachella attendees funded their concert tickets with buy now, pay later loans, sparking a debate on the state of the economy and how consumers are using debt to keep up their lifestyles. A recent announcement from DoorDash that it would begin accepting BNPL financing from Klarna for food deliveries led to widespread mockery and jokes that Americans were struggling so much that they were now being forced to finance cheeseburgers and burritos.

Over the last few years, consumers have held up relatively well, even in the face of persistent inflation and high interest rates, because the job market was strong and wage growth had kept up with inflation — at least for some workers.

Earlier this year, however, large companies including Walmart and Delta Airlines began warning that the dynamic had begun to shift and they were seeing cracks in demand, which was leading to worse-than-expected sales forecasts.