Stubbornly high inflation and interest rates are taking an increasing toll in California as the state experiences rising unemployment and slowing wage gains. And those feeling it the hardest: the largest and perhaps most budget-minded generation of them all.

Millennials, those roughly 28 to 43 years old, are generally thought to be more averse to debt and better savers than earlier cohorts such as Gen X (44 to 59 years old) and baby boomers (60 to 78).

But new data from the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley show that while consumer debts overall are growing and becoming more difficult to manage for all but the very oldest generation in America, millennials are having the most trouble making their loan payments on time.

In the first quarter, 7.6% of millennial borrowers were at least 30 days late in making monthly payments on their credit card, auto and other loans. That compares with 6% of Gen X, 5.5% of Gen Z (ages 18 to 27) and 3.3% of boomers who fell behind on their loans. The earlier Silent and Greatest generations had even lower delinquency rates.

Unlike for Gen X-ers and boomers, the overall loan delinquency rate among millennials — who make up about one-fourth of California’s population — has now climbed above pre-pandemic levels. And economists worry that financial pressures will only continue to mount, especially with an end to the student loan repayment pause. Among other things, millennials are known for carrying a lot of college loan debt.

“I see no reason to believe that delinquencies aren’t going to be tracking higher,” said Evan B. White, the California Policy Lab’s executive director.

Foreclosures and personal bankruptcies for all ages are still very low by historical standards, as is the percentage of after-tax income that households are spending on making debt payments, another important indicator of financial stress.

Even so, consumers in California and across the country have been taking on more debt in recent quarters, including credit card borrowing. And 30-day delinquencies have been creeping higher — an early warning sign of potential trouble ahead.

Thus far consumer spending, which accounts for most of the nation’s economic growth, has held up well. But many people are feeling the effects of what’s been an extended period of high inflation and interest rates. A pullback by consumers could have a significant effect on the broader economy.

In the Federal Reserve’s annual report on the economic well-being of Americans, also released this week, about two-thirds of adults surveyed said that changes in the prices they paid in 2023 compared with the prior year had made their financial situation worse. And one-fifth of them said inflation had made things much worse.

The Fed report found that 72% of adults were at least “doing OK” financially, similar to the 73% figure in 2022 but well below the recent high of 78% in 2021.

U.S. households continue to benefit from a strong labor market, including solid, if slightly smaller, gains in wages. The nation’s unemployment rate was 3.9% in April, the 27th straight month in which the jobless figure has been below 4% — the longest such stretch since the 1960s.

California’s employment situation, however, has not been as strong. The pace of job gains statewide has lagged behind the nation’s. And California’s unemployment rate of 5.3% last month was the highest in the country, reflecting weakness in key sectors such as entertainment, high tech, and business and professional services. The number of unemployed workers in the state has increased by 164,000 over the last 12 months, according to California’s Employment Development Department.

Meanwhile, wage growth has slowed more in California than for the nation overall — and it’s now running below the rate of inflation, meaning workers’ purchasing power is shrinking.

In the 12 months ending in April, the average hourly earnings for all private employees in California were up 1.4% from the prior year. That’s less than half the rate of both wage growth and inflation for the United States. In contrast, from 2016 to 2022, California employees saw wage gains averaging 3% to 6% per year.

Nationally, aside from student loans, delinquencies on all types of consumer debt have been steadily rising since the end of 2021, according to the New York Fed.

During the first two years of COVID-19, consumers paid down their debts significantly, thanks in part to stimulus checks and other government programs. But since then, credit card delinquencies, in particular, have risen above pre-pandemic levels, and an increasing share of borrowers are maxing out on their plastic, most of them younger adults.

Why millennials seem to be struggling more financially may seem puzzling at first. They’re the best-educated generation and the first to grow up in the digital age. But many millennials also had the misfortune of entering their formative adult lives amid the Great Recession that began in late 2007 and left a trail of job and financial hardships for some years. Saddled with student loans and other debt, they have been slower to move out of their parents’ homes, start families and build wealth compared with earlier generations.

More recently, with home mortgage rates and home prices having soared, many millennials are stuck in apartments and feeling the squeeze of higher rents and prices for certain services that they are likely to need given their stage in life, like day care.

In fact, the Fed’s economic well-being report found that while there was little change for most population groups between 2022 and last year, one notable exception was parents living with their children under age 18. Given that women are having children later, this group would include a disproportionate share of millennials.

“Those are years when you’re moving into higher expenses of buying homes, buying cars and even setting aside money for children’s college,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com, which has studied generational differences in handling debt. “When we’ve experienced the type of inflation we’ve had, that really puts the squeeze on tight budgets.”

Money, as we all know, is the mother’s milk of politics in America. It can look even more nourishing if you can manufacture it yourself.

That’s surely what accounts for the solicitude that the cryptocurrency industry has been receiving from Congress.

The House on Wednesday passed a law reducing regulation of crypto, despite ample evidence that the asset class has been a haven for fraudsters, extortionists and worse.

The law will “make the United States safer for drug traffickers, for terrorist funders, for child and drug traffickers and those who buy and sell child pornography,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), listing a few of the documented users of crypto in recent years. “I did not know those groups had such proud advocates in Congress.”

Casten may find himself in the House minority in more ways than one. Crypto promoters have managed to peel several Democrats in the House and Senate away from the party’s strong opposition to reducing regulations on the asset class.

Earlier this month, bipartisan majorities in both chambers voted to roll back a two-year-old Securities and Exchange Commission guideline for how financial institutions should account for crypto assets left in their care by customers. President Biden said he would veto the change, and the majorities in neither chamber were large enough to overrule a veto.

The congressional crypto caucus handed the industry another victory Wednesday, when the House passed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, known as FIT21. The vote was 279 to 136, with 71 Democrats joining the Republican majority.

The measure’s fate is unsure in the Senate, which hasn’t yet taken it up. Biden has stated his opposition to FIT21 but hasn’t promised a veto, which the crypto gang and its supporters seem to think is a big victory. Biden said that he was willing to negotiate a regulatory system that protects crypto consumers and investors without unduly interfering with innovation, but “further time will be needed.”

If it becomes law, FIT21 would deliver to crypto promoters their most heartfelt desire: removing them from the jurisdiction of the powerful SEC and transferring oversight to the chronically underfunded and understaffed Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Their goal is understandable, since the SEC has been explicit about its intention to regulate crypto as securities, subjecting the asset class to the disclosure rules and safeguards against fraud that have made the traditional financial markets in the U.S. the safest in the world.

During Wednesday’s floor debate, the bill’s advocates talked of the virtues of freeing an innovative technology from “overzealous regulators” — that was Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), mouthing words that could have been dictated to her by crypto executives — and relieving them of “regulatory uncertainty.”

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler put the latter claim to rest in a statement about FIT21 he issued Wednesday a few hours before the vote. “The crypto industry’s record of failures, frauds, and bankruptcies is not because we don’t have rules or because the rules are unclear,” he stated. “It’s because many players in the crypto industry don’t play by the rules.”

The bill’s advocates tried to pump up the importance of crypto as a financial asset with claims that 20% of Americans are crypto owners. There’s no evidence for this. On the contrary, the Federal Reserve has found that interest in crypto among ordinary Americans is weak and fading.

In its most recent survey of the economic condition of U.S. households, issued this month, the Fed determined that only 7% of Americans bought or held crypto as an investment (down from 11% in 2021) and only 1% had used it to buy anything or make a payment. That underscores the most important truth about crypto, albeit one its promoters seldom acknowledge: No one has yet identified a genuine purpose for crypto in the real world.

“The entities that stand to benefit from this bill are not ordinary investors trying to build wealth,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said from the House floor Wednesday, “but rather the crypto firms. … They have already made billions of dollars unlawfully issuing or facilitating the buying and selling of crypto securities.”

Waters accurately described the effect of FIT21 as placing crypto effectively into a regulatory “no man’s land.” She described the bill as “an extreme MAGA libertarian approach, where companies can operate without regulatory scrutiny, and consumers and investors are on their own on detecting and avoiding fraudulent schemes.”

What’s most striking about the push for FIT21 is that it comes so closely on the heels of major scandals in the crypto space. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto firm FTX, was sentenced in March to 25 years in jail for crypto fraud, after having been convicted in November on seven federal counts related to fraud.

During the heyday of FTX, Bankman-Fried appeared before congressional committees to promote a tailor-made regulatory scheme for crypto bearing close resemblance to the one embodied in FIT21.

Just last month, Changpeng Zhao, founder of the international crypto firm Binance, was sentenced to four months in prison on federal money-laundering charges; Zhao had earlier agreed to pay a $50-million fine, and Binance settled the government case against it for $4.3 billion.

The SEC is pursuing a lawsuit against the crypto exchange Coinbase for selling unregistered securities. In March, federal judge Katherine Polk Failla denied the firm’s motion to quash the case. Her reasoning effectively explains why FIT21 is not only unnecessary, but harmful: “The ‘crypto’ nomenclature may be of recent vintage,” she wrote, “but the challenged transactions fall comfortably within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly eighty years.”

The counterweight to the arguments against FIT21 is cash — the green variety, not the notional type marketed by cryptocurrency firms. Three super PACs formed by crypto executives and investors have raised about $85 million to spend on 2024 political races.

The financial potency of this industry’s campaign spending isn’t in question. One of the PACs, Fairshake, spent more than $10 million over the last year in opposition to Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) in her race for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.

Porter was known as a strong critic of crypto. In 2022 she joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the most vociferous crypto critic on Capitol Hill — in an investigation of how crypto “mining” by computer had affected the energy grid in Texas and raised energy prices for consumers.

Porter lost the Senate race. Her victorious opponent in the primary, Rep. Adam Schiff, has taken a much more indulgent position toward crypto, listing it on his campaign website among the “new developments in technology … we need to grow” in order to keep jobs and regulatory oversight in U.S. hands.

In the current congressional election cycle, Fairshake has made $702,300 in donations to Democratic campaigns and $551,700 to Republicans. Its largest single recipient is Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and sponsor of FIT21. His campaign has received $126,626 even though he has announced that he is not running for reelection this year and retiring from Congress.

In his statement, Gensler tried to strengthen the lawmakers’ understanding of the risks they were endorsing with the measure. The bill would “create new regulatory gaps and undermine decades of precedent” in the regulation of investment contracts, he wrote, “putting investors and capital markets at immeasurable risk.”

It would allow crypto promoters to “self-certify” that their products lay outside traditional regulations and give the SEC only 60 days to respond. By removing crypto trading platforms from the regulatory structure overseeing stock and bond exchanges, it would open the door to conflicts of interest by reducing consumer protections against the platforms commingling their funds with client funds.

The bill also exempts crypto promoters from rules requiring risky investments to be offered only to accredited investors—those with a net worth of more than $1 million, not counting their primary residence, or income over $200,000 (for couples, $300,000) in each of the prior two years.

The cynical device FIT21 uses to neuter the SEC’s oversight of crypto investments is to turn that task over to the CFTC. As the regulatory watchdog Better Markets observes, the CFTC has a budget of only $365 million, versus the SEC’s $2.1 billion, and fewer than 700 employees, compared to the SEC’s approximately 4,500 staffers).

The bill “would heap a whole new set of responsibilities on the CFTC, making it the de facto regulator of countless new crypto exchanges and broker-dealers,” Better Markets wrote, even though the CFTC “does not have the funding to fulfill all its current statutory mandates.”

The debate Wednesday that preceded the House passage of FIT21 was typically tone-deaf and filled with fictitious and factitious assertions. Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) invoked the FTX scandal, which saw billions of dollars in clients’ and investors’ crypto deposits illegally appropriated by the firm’s leaders. “We need to ensure that there are the protective rules that prevent anything like that happening again,” he said.

Flood asserted that, under FIT21, FTX would have been barred from registering as an exchange, and it would not have been able to commingle its funds with those of its clients. One wonders what he was talking about. FTX was barred from registering as an exchange, and didn’t do so. Why? Because Bankman-Fried, its founder, knew that to do so would have subjected the firm to SEC oversight, which no one in crypto wants to undergo.

As for commingling funds, it’s already illegal — it’s one of the practices that landed Bankman-Fried in prison.

The bottom line is very clear. There’s no justification for bestowing on crypto a hand-manufactured regulatory scheme all of its own. Its promoters have no argument other than to claim that they need regulation-lite to foster “innovation,” when the result will be to facilitate the cheating of customers, laundering money or lubricating ransomware attacks like the one that has disrupted the crucial operations of the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Change Healthcare, which manages reimbursement processes for medical providers nationwide.

If there’s a corner of the financial world crying out for tougher regulation, it’s crypto. For Congress to even contemplate a slackening of the regulation that already exists is nothing short of absurd. But Congress doesn’t respond to practicalities; it responds to money. That’s the only driver of efforts like FIT21.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s effort to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster has been a long time coming, following years of complaints from concertgoers who say they’ve been squeezed by exorbitant prices and hidden fees when trying to buy passes to see Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and other music megastars.

Ever since the government cleared the merger of concert promoter Live Nation and ticketseller Ticketmaster in 2010, there have been demands from consumer advocates to cleave them. The Justice Department argues that the combination is a monopoly that has resulted in harm for music fans and has clamped down competition in the multibillion-dollar live music market.

Live Nation says the arguments are off-base and will probably fail in court. Either way, it will take a long time for the case to wind through the legal system.

Why is the government suing Live Nation?

The Justice Department has raised concerns that Live Nation and Ticketmaster have retaliated against competitors and new entrants and locked out competition with exclusionary contracts.

“The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services,” said Atty. Gen. Merrick B. Garland. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”

Beverly Hills-based Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, has long been a target for government scrutiny.

When the U.S. approved the 2010 merger, it did so after the companies agreed to a settlement meant to ensure fair competition in the ticketing marketplace and prohibit Live Nation from retaliating against venue owners that decided to defect to competitors. The consent decree was extended and amended in 2019.

But this time, the government is going hard at the company. In its Thursday lawsuit, the U.S. accused Live Nation of various anticompetitive practices and said the company uses its market dominance to impose fees on consumers and pressure artists to use its services.

The suit comes amid a wave of antitrust action from the Biden administration, which has sought to curb the power of conglomerates and Big Tech. The U.S. government has filed other cases against tech giants including Apple, Amazon and Google, taking them to task for their alleged impact on competition.

Live Nation said that the lawsuit will not solve issues related to ticket prices, service fees or access to in-demand shows.

“Calling Ticketmaster a monopoly may be a PR win for the DOJ in the short term, but it will lose in court because it ignores the basic economics of live entertainment, such as the fact that the bulk of service fees go to venues, and that competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster’s market share and profit margin,” Live Nation said in a statement.

Would breaking up Live Nation lower prices?

Several industry observers who spoke to The Times expressed doubt that the lawsuit would significantly reduce prices for consumers.

Brandon Ross, an analyst at research firm LightShed Partners, said that artists decide how much they want to charge for a tour and then the promoter buys the tour from them. Due to Live Nation’s large scale, it is able to take a lower profit margin, with most of the money going back to the artist, Ross added.

“There is an efficiency in having a large player in the industry,” Ross said. “If that goes away, then that’s going to come out of either the artist’s take, or the artists are going to charge consumers even more.”

Artists like Swift and Bruce Springsteen are able to charge big sums for tickets because the concerts are one-time events, and some people are willing to pay. Because of supply and demand, tickets resold on the secondary market can be much higher than face value.

But James Sammataro, co-chair of Pryor Cashman’s music group, said he believes the lawsuit could address issues such as excess ticketing fees.

“What’s really harming the consumer is all these excess fees and the restrictions on getting the tickets,” Sammataro said. “For most artists, these ‘increased prices’ aren’t really benefiting the artists. In many cases, it’s alienating their core ticket buyers and their core audience.”

There is a larger issue in the music industry of concert tickets being bought at face value by scalpers and resold on secondary markets for astronomical prices.

It’s leading to two classes of music fans: those who can afford to pony up and those who can’t.

Meanwhile, many promoters left the industry after getting clobbered by the pandemic, which shut down or restricted many live events. Some smaller music artists have also been hurt by the lack of competition among promoters and are not given opportunities to play at larger venues, Sammataro said.

“The overall effect is that it leads to a very tilted playing field where it’s difficult for promoters to compete,” Sammataro said. “And when you have a lack of competition, essentially like the basis of predatory pricing, ultimately there’s going to be long term gouging.”

Could the company actually be broken up?

Anything is possible, but there is one thing everyone agrees on: This legal battle will be a long fight.

“Antitrust litigation can be long and protracted,” said Eric Enson, an antitrust partner at Crowell & Moring. “I expect that this will be a matter of years and not months.”

Music industry expert Bill Werde, who runs the music business program at Syracuse University, cautioned that splitting up such a large enterprise wouldn’t be easy, and it’s unclear what the businesses would look like after being disentangled from one another more than a decade after merging.

“They make their margin in ticketing and sponsorships, so if you break up this company, … I don’t know how Live Nation the concert promotion business necessarily lives and thrives independent of this high-margin ticketing business,” said Werde, who also publishes a weekly newsletter.

But even if it could lose, there are reasons the government might be motivated to go after the company in an election year. As Werde and other experts were quick to point out, there’s nothing that unites people like hating Ticketmaster.