2018
May
24
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

May 24, 2018
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Yvonne Zipp
Features Editor

It wasn’t the avocado toast.

Much has been made of cultural explanations of why Millennials put off homeownership and having kids – including what they spread on bread. (Locally, avocados run two for $4 on sale, so I’ve never been sure how that would empty out anyone’s account.)

And it’s not their spending habits: Millennials actually save at a higher rate than baby boomers and Gen Xers, according to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Center for Household Stability. All ages suffered financially during the Great Recession. But those born in the 1980s are the only group studied to have lost even more financial ground between 2010 and 2016.

Both Generation X and Millennials took severe financial hits, but because more Gen Xers went into debt to buy homes, their personal wealth recovered along with housing prices. Millennials, meanwhile, bet big on their futures, the college degrees they were told were the secret to financial security. As a result of that debt-load, the study says, they missed out on purchasing assets that would increase in value, putting those born in the 1980s in danger of becoming “members of a lost generation for wealth accumulation.”

The study does lay out reasons for hope for younger Americans: “Two reasons for optimism are that the 1980s cohort has many years to get back on track, and it is the most educated – hence, also potentially the highest-earning – group ever.”

Before we get to our five stories of the day, staff writer Peter Grier examines three of the most immediate questions in the wake of today’s cancellation of the US-North Korea summit. We’ll be looking at the long-term prospects for peace on the Korean Peninsula next week.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Presiding Officer Carmel McBride and Garda Alan Gallagher carry the polling box for the referendum on changing Ireland's abortion law onto the island of Inishbofin, Ireland, May 24.
SOURCE:

US Energy Information Administration

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Karen Norris/Staff

Monitor Breakfast

Mark Naftalin/UNICEF/AP
Schoolchildren wash their hands before entering a classroom in the northwestern city of Mbandaka, Congo, May 22. Congo’s Health Ministry announced six new confirmed Ebola cases and two new suspected cases as vaccinations entered a second day in an effort to contain the virus in the city of more than 1 million.

Finding ‘home’

An occasional series exploring what it means to belong

The Monitor's View

Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
Workers walk past steam storage tanks at Reykjavik Energy's Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant outside Reykjavik, Iceland. Reykjavik Energy is a public utility company providing electricity and geothermal water for heating. To offset global warming, since year 2007, scientists have collaborated with Reykjavík Energy on developing the idea of fixating CO2 into basaltic rock. They recently started working on a revolutionary pilot project to have the world's first carbon negative plant enabled by direct air capture of CO2. The company is working towards carbon neutrality through a pilot program called CarbFix2 that is funded by the EU.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters
A man cools down at a water pump in Delhi, May 24. Temperatures have soared to dangerous levels in northern India and Pakistan, with temperatures during the day reaching about 115 F. and often dipping only to the lower 80s at night.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks so much for joining us. Come back tomorrow! With new privacy laws going into effect Friday, will Europe set the new global standard for internet privacy?

More issues

2018
May
24
Thursday
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