Support for KQED podcasts comes from Oakland, San Francisco Bay Airport.

OAK makes travel easy with convenient parking, new restaurants, and new nonstop flights to your favorite destinations across the U.S. and Mexico.

Learn more at IFlyOAK.com, the best way to San Francisco Bay.

From KQED. Welcome to Forum.

I'm Alexis Madrable.

There are changes going on all the time in our economy, though many of them fall beneath the radar.

Here's a wild one.

Buy now pay later services, allow you to to as you check out from a retailer basically

take a loan to pay for your product and installments. Back in 2019 they were a rounding error

in the larger economy. Two billion dollars worth of purchases were done this way. Just four years

later that had ballooned to $120 billion.

This is also a global phenomenon and there's no reason to think the industry is declining.

It's just one of the ways that our economy works now that it didn't before.

Here discuss these services like Klarna and a firm and their other competitors.

We're joined by Julie Margetta Morgan,

who's president of the Century Foundation.

That's an independent think tank,

research with public policy.

She served as the Associate Director

of Research Monitoring and Regulations

at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Thanks for joining us, Julie.

...