Hi, 3 charts for you today:
Every year the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta runs a survey of 1,000+ adults on how they spend their money — and the latest results make for some interesting reading.
Cash is trash, card is king
Last year cash accounted for fewer than 19% of all transactions — a record low. The pandemic appears to have accelerated the demise of cash, which as recently as 2015 was responsible for around one-third of all payments.
Overall, cards of some sort — whether debit, credit or prepaid (like gift cards) — accounted for more than 57% of all payments.
When you look at the data based on the number of transactions, as we have in the chart above, checks look like they are on their way out as they represented just 6.5% of all transactions. However, if you slice the data differently, and look at the share by dollar value, rather than just the number of transactions, checks were actually used for 20% of dollars spent. That's even more than credit cards by dollar value — suggesting we whip out those checkbooks only when we need to spend big.
It would be a pretty tame prediction to suggest that the use of cash continues to fade — but how long until it completely disappears is a much more difficult bet: 10, 20, 50 years? Never? All seem possible.
The other crisis
Last year we charted about the tragic rise in drug overdose deaths in the United States. Sadly, the preliminary numbers for 2020 are even worse.
Drug overdose deaths in 2020 rose by almost 30% relative to 2019 — with 93,000 people losing their lives to drugs in the US last year. Almost 70,000 of those, or roughly 75% of the total, were related to overdoses in pain-relieving opioids.
Opioid overdoses
As pain management became more common in the 1980s and 1990s, painkillers were heavily marketed and — officials claim — often over-prescribed thanks to kickbacks and payments given to doctors for doing so, leading to addiction and overdoses.
A number of pharmaceutical companies have been successfully prosecuted for their roles in the opioid crisis. 3 weeks ago Johnson & Johnson reached a settlement to pay $230m towards treatment and prevention and Purdue Pharma — which made OxyContin painkillers — agreed to pay $8.3bn for its role in the crisis last year.
Those legal successes unfortunately feel like a hollow victory as the opioid crisis has never been worse in America.
Netflix and... game?
Earlier this year rumors swirled around tech and media communities that Netflix might be about to make a big investment into getting into the gaming industry. This week those rumors came to fruition as Bloomberg reported that Netflix had poached Mike Verdu — a seasoned game exec who has spent time at Electronic Arts, Zynga, Atari and (most recently) Facebook Gaming.
As we wrote about a month ago, Netflix is increasingly looking to increase its offering beyond just "Netflix and chill" — particularly as its subscriber growth has slowed down in recent months and competition intensifies in the streaming wars. Netflix's own forecast for the coming quarter are that it will add just 1 million new subscribers, way, way down on the 15.8 million that it added during the same quarter last year — which admittedly was during peak lockdown for many countries.
The possibility of playing games through the Netflix app on your TV, phone or tablet could give Netflix an edge over rivals who are still rushing to get original TV shows and movies lined up on their own streaming platforms. Linking those games to popular Netflix franchises could be a particular stroke of genius.
Ultimately Netflix will be hoping that games either help attract new subscribers, or let them charge more for a Netflix subscription to their existing subscriber base.
1) Xiaomi has kicked Apple into third place in the smartphone shipment league tables, capturing 17% of the global market in 2Q — behind Samsung's 19%.
2) England is set to remove pretty much all of its COVID-19 restrictions on Monday — but as cases continue to rise more and more people are being told to self isolate anyway by the National Health Service's COVID app.
3) Floods have swept across Western Europe, leaving a trail of destruction and claiming more than 100 lives across Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
4) Semiconductor maker Intel is reportedly looking to acquire GlobalFoundries in a deal worth around ~$30bn.
5) See math and science in a completely new way with one-of-a-kind interactive visualizations from Brilliant.**
6) Some awesome data viz from Erin Davis, who has used satellite imagery to come up with the "average color" of each country's landscape. Europe is very green.
**This is a sponsored snack.
