The Indicator from Planet Money - SK Hynix to the moon, Gen-Z to their rooms, and Connecticut tax reform looms

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

It’s Indicators of the Week (now on YouTube!). On today’s episode: You could’ve septupled your money if you invested in this scalding-hot South Korean memory chip stock; nearly half of all adults under 30 are moving back in with the ‘rents; and a new democracy is born … in Connecticut.  Fact checking by Julia Ritchey and Corey Bridges. Your Next Listen — Why Americans don't want to move for jobs anymore (Encore)Connect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s brand new newsletter — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. And I'm Darym Woods. And joining us today, the premier producer himself won Cooper Katz McKim. So kind. So kind. Thank you.

I'm here. Super producer Cooper. You know why you're here. We know why you're here. It is Indicators of the Week. Indicators of the week. It is the day when we talk about our favorite numbers from the news. On today's show.

S.K. Heinex? Who is she? A lot of adults are moving in with their parents. And a governmental experiment in Connecticut. All of that after the break. Indicators of the week, Daryon Woods, start us off. My indicator of the week is septuple. As in if you'd invested in the South Korean chipmaker S.K. Heinex a year ago, you would have septupled your money.

Wow. So it's not a number, but a factor. of a number. That's new for us. Indeed, seven times. So I'll note that there's been a lot of volatility recently with SK Hynix and past performance is never a promise of future performance. But the reason I'm raising this is because this is a company that will be more in the American public's consciousness soon. S.K. Hynex is listing on the NASDAQ this week. It's selling slices of its company for a total of $28 billion, which is one of the largest listings ever, at least before We were just for inflation.

The largest ever was SpaceX, of course. Yeah, this is a company that I hadn't really heard of until recently. So just, I feel like we need a kind of a rundown of who they are. They are one of the three big makers of memory trips. You might know that as RAM or DRAM. Okay, so this is one of the things that's making my next laptop purchase worse, just more expensive. Yeah, you've probably heard about the memory chip bottleneck, maybe even paid the price for it. SK-Hinex's memory chips, along with the ones from Micron and Samsung,

go into the Nvidia graphics processing units or the GPUs that are one of the basic building blocks for the AI data center boom. With all the AI hyperscaling fueling demand, the chips are getting more and more expensive. So companies like SKHinex are profiting a lot. And that's fueled a lot of speculation. People want that sweet, sweet 7X return. In fact, they're not even satisfied with that.

there are these kind of odd types of exchange traded funds or ETFs that only invest in SK Hynix. And they arrange the investments so that they double whatever SK Hynix does on a given day, up or down. So if SK. HynX goes up 5%, their investments got 10%. It's very convenient. How does this actually work? It's complex, but basically leverage. Well, what could go wrong when you just start throwing more money on top of,

of speculative bets. Yeah. Don't forget the losses are doubled to you've got 5% down. That would also mean 10% down for those funds. South Korea's markets regulator actually said he regrets allowing this. Okay, Darien Woods,

thank you very much. Adrienne Ma, you are up. My indicator is 49%. Last year, that is the proportion of adults under the age of 30 who said they lived with a parent. That is according to the Federal Reserve's latest survey of household economics and decision-making. And this is a big increase from just a few years before. Before the pandemic, it was just 37%. Okay, so it's gone up from about a third to half? Yes. So obviously

the pandemic, I understood a lot of people went back to living with their parents. Absolutely. But we're kind of out of the pandemic era now. Totally. So that's a part of it. Of course, so are rising home and rental prices. But here's the thing, according to the Wall Street Journal, adults who live with their parents are not just more common than they used to be. It's actually becoming more socially acceptable. Right, because rightly or wrongly, a lot of Americans used to look at 20 or 30-somethings living with their parents and think that something has gone wrong. Right. I mean, I think it's fair to say a lot of people still do. They see it as sort of like failure to launch. But in this story, they talk to a lot of young adults who say, you know, they don't feel embarrassed or ashamed about living with their parents.

and they actually appreciate getting to spend time with them, and they feel financially savvy. They're saving money. I'm sure the parents are very happy about this. Well, this is a good point, right? Like, how do the parents feel about it? Well, at least the ones they interviewed in this story said they enjoy the company. It's nice to have some extra help around the house with, you know, technical support sometimes.

Although occasionally it can get awkward, like when someone is bringing home a date. What happens? when they bring home their prom date at 29? Well, that can be awkward, but it's also, it goes both ways. At least one parent they interviewed in this story talked about how, so she is 52 years old, a widow, and she has two 20-something sons at home. She says when she brings home a new boyfriend, it is uncomfortable for all involved. Another knock-on effect with this crazy housing market.

Speaking of this crazy housing market, I want to be a lot of this crazy housing market, I want to put in a plug for an upcoming special virtual event for NPR Plus supporters. So on July 23rd, we're going to do a live Q&A with Redfin chief economist Darrell Fairweather, where she'll answer all your questions about this wild housing market. If you are already a plus supporter, check out Planet Money's bonus episode next week for details on how to register. And if you haven't joined NPR Plus yet, you can do so by going to plus.npr.org. Very good. Cooper Casper Kim. What's your indicator? My indicator is 110. That is how many Connecticut residents are joining in a government experiment starting tomorrow. Sounds sinister. It's actually quite wholesome. According to the website, it is a groundbreaking democratic initiative.

Okay. That sounds, well, I don't know how to feel about it, given the way that you've introduced this. But what does this mean? So they're trying to take on a problem that's plagued the state for decades. I'll get to what's actually happening in a minute. But first, here's the groundbreaking Democratic initiative part. More than 2,000 people applied to be a part of this thing. And the lottery chose 110 people that accurately represent the state to basically take this problem off the politicians' plate. And so what's the actual problem here that politicians can't figure out? Money.

Specifically, how towns can get it. Right now, the system is not working. towns there rely mostly on property taxes for their local revenue, their schools, their roads, police, all of it that's paid for mostly by the taxes people pay on property. So sales tax, income tax, that's not a thing for local revenue in Connecticut. Yeah, exactly. The state actually bars towns from taxing that stuff. And it's created this pattern in the state where poorer towns aren't getting the money they need.

Right, because if the property values lower, that means property taxes are, lower for that community. Politicians have tried to solve this in 20 different ways, but there's always a trade-off someone's unhappy with, so they are officially offloading the problem. Okay. What will they have to work with here? So we have these people that we mentioned earlier, the 110. Yeah. They'll get paid $1,200 over the summer and the fall to hear from experts to deliberate and to actually draft some recommendations to solve this problem or try to. Huh. A citizen assembly. A citizen, exactly, a citizen assembly. The state comptroller, Sean Scanlan, who we actually had on the show recently, will then present the findings to the state legislature and hopefully real change will happen.

Sounds like they're almost putting the people that they've selected to make the unpopular decisions that the politicians don't want to make. Crowdsourcing the political blame. Yeah, exactly. Having an arm's length or something like that. Yeah, they're not running for re-election, so they're not worried about it. Yeah, it's a good point. So tomorrow is the first day of the Citizens Assembly wish them luck. You can read more about it in our Indicator Newsletter.

You can sign up for that if you haven't already in our show notes or go to npr.org forward slash indicator newsletter. This episode was produced by Angel Karearis with engineering by Anne Lee Huang. It was fact-checked by Julia Ritchie and Corey Bridges. Kek & Canada edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.