A new kind of present is gaining acceptance this holiday season. More consumers are picking secondhand items to gift each other, finding it to be an environmentally and budget-friendly option.

Thrift stores that sell used clothes and goods are springing up online and on street corners. Goodwill Industries International, the nonprofit behind the familiar chain of thrift stores, is ramping up its online efforts. Fashion brands are developing their own resale offering to keep up with clothing-reseller sites such as Depop and Poshmark. Roughly 17% of gifts this holiday season will be a resold item, according to software firm Salesforce.

“Consumers are choosing resale first because of the incredible value, the unique merchandise, and the incredible sustainability benefit,” said Matt Kaness, chief executive of GoodwillFinds, the nonprofit’s online e-commerce platform run in partnership with Salesforce.

Secondhand clothes, once seen as frumpy and embarrassing, are now keenly sought out by the fashion conscious. A popular vintage aesthetic dovetails with consumer calls for goods that do less harm to the world. About 85% of American shoppers have bought or sold preowned items over the past year, nearly a third for the first time, according to online marketplace OfferUp’s Recommerce report. In apparel alone, some 10% of the global market will be secondhand by next year.

GoodwillFinds is the only major nonprofit player in resale.

GoodwillFinds’ online platform allows a smarter operation than the traditional bricks-and-mortar store, said Kaness, formerly an executive with retailers including Walmart and Urban Outfitters. The platform uses artificial intelligence and large data sets to more accurately price and categorise items, creating a much more efficient system, Kaness said.

“In a store, it’s a human looking at the item. They have paper sticker tickets for the price and they have to process such a volume that it is somewhat random,” he said. In contrast, the company’s online system uses computer vision to take a picture, identify the item, create a listing and price it.

Moving online is the logical choice for secondhand sellers, said 25-year-old Brooke Bowlin, who runs lifestyle blog Nuance Required. “Secondhand stores just can’t sell enough,” said Bowlin, who started her own thrift store in Siloam Springs, Ark. “By moving online and expanding the audience, there is an opportunity to re-home more clothes,” she said.

Major fashion brands are also increasingly recognising that secondhand is as much a necessity as it is an opportunity. The fashion industry is responsible for up to 8% of global emissions, relying on resource-intensive raw materials and fast-moving trends that have contributed large amounts of waste. Around 11.3 million tons of textile waste go to landfills in the U.S. every year, according to environmental organisation Earth.Org.

Outdoor-clothing retailer Patagonia established its Worn Wear platform in 2017, one of the first resale channels by a major brand.

As much as adapting to trends, Patagonia Worn Wear aims to change consumer behavior, said Asha Agrawal, managing director of the Patagonia venture fund that runs the platform.

“A lot of our messaging is around—‘you don’t need to buy something new,’” she said.

Worn Wear buys back used brand gear from consumers by paying higher prices than peer-to-peer apps or other marketplaces, Agrawal said. This strategy contributes to the bulk of the platform’s costs but also boosted its inventory fourfold this year alone, she said, adding Worn Wear has been profitable for the last two years.

Worn Wear is now integrated into the Patagonia brand. “You can now do your main shopping with Patagonia with our resale business in the U.S.,” she said. “That’s a huge evolution for us.”

Resale by brands and third parties is expected to outpace traditional thrift sales and donations in the U.S., rising to 60% of a $70 billion total by 2027 from 15% of the $20 billion secondhand market in 2017, according to online thrift store ThredUp’s recent resale report.

Other fashion players have their versions. Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz launched H&M Pre-Loved in the U.S. this year, in partnership with ThredUp. Inditex-owned Zara has launched a preowned platform that offers repair services, customer-to-customer sales and donations of used garments in the U.K. and France, with plans for a U.S. rollout by 2025.

Resale remains an imperative for fashion brands as a way to control distribution and retain the trust of shoppers increasingly alert to the fate of their old clothes. However, scaling up resale generates a raft of operational challenges such as authentication, returns and ensuring that secondhand doesn’t look like an afterthought, said Anita Balchandani, fashion lead at consultant firm McKinsey & Co.

Unlike nonprofits, such as Goodwill, that get their inventory from donations and don’t have to be accountable to shareholders, retailers are struggling to make business sense of resales, Balchandani said.

“No one has proven the path to scaling this up profitably,” she said. “You almost have to create a whole new end-to-end supply chain…. The retailer who cracks that journey is going to make a real difference in this space.”

RUSH CITY, Minn.—Before the guards let you through the barbed-wire fences and steel doors at this Minnesota Correctional Facility, you have to leave your phone in a locker. Not a total inconvenience when you’re there to visit a prolific iPhone thief.

I wasn’t worried that Aaron Johnson would steal my iPhone, though. I came to find out how he’d steal it.

“I’m already serving time. I just feel like I should try to be on the other end of things and try to help people,” Johnson, 26 years old, told me in an interview we filmed inside the high-security prison where he’s expected to spend the next several years.

For the past year, my colleague Nicole Nguyen and I have investigated a nationwide spate of thefts, where thieves watch iPhone owners tap their passcodes, then steal their targets’ phones—and upend their financial and digital lives.

Johnson, along with a crew of others, operated in Minneapolis for at least a year during 2021 and 2022. In and around bars at night, he would befriend young people, slyly learn their passcodes and take their phones. Using that code, he’d lock victims out of their Apple accounts and loot thousands of dollars from their bank apps. Finally, he’d sell the phones themselves.

It was an elaborate, opportunistic scheme that exploited the Apple ecosystem and targeted trusting iPhone owners who figured a stolen phone was just a stolen phone.

Last week, Apple announced Stolen Device Protection, a feature that likely will protect against these passcode-assisted crimes.

Yet even when you install the software, due in iOS 17.3, there will be loopholes. The biggest loophole? Us. By hearing how Johnson did what he did, we can learn how to better secure the devices that hold so much of our lives.

How he got started

Johnson isn’t a sophisticated cybercriminal. He said he got his start pickpocketing on the streets of Minneapolis. “I was homeless,” he said. “Started having kids and needed money. I couldn’t really find a job. So that’s just what I did.”

Soon he realised the phones he was nabbing could be worth a lot more—if only he had a way to get inside them. Johnson said no one taught him the passcode trick, he just stayed up late one night fiddling with a phone and figured out how to use the passcode to unlock a bounty of protected services.

“That passcode is the devil,” he said. “It could be God sometimes—or it could be the devil.”

According to the Minneapolis Police Department’s arrest warrant, Johnson and the other 11 members of the enterprise allegedly accumulated nearly $300,000. According to him, it was likely more.

“I had a rush for large amounts at a time,” he said. “I just got too carried away.”

In March, Johnson, who had prior robbery and theft convictions, pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to 94 months. He told the judge he was sorry for what he did.

How he did it

Here’s how the nightly operation would go down, according to interviews with Johnson, law-enforcement officials and some of the victims:

Pinpoint the victim. Dimly lit and full of people, bars became his ideal location. College-age men became his ideal target. “They’re already drunk and don’t know what’s going on for real,” Johnson said. Women, he said, tended to be more guarded and alert to suspicious behaviour.

Get the passcode. Friendly and energetic, that’s how victims described Johnson. Some told me he approached them offering drugs. Others said Johnson would tell them he was a rapper and wanted to add them on Snapchat. After talking for a bit, they would hand over the phone to Johnson, thinking he’d just input his info and hand it right back.

“I say, ‘Hey, your phone is locked. What’s the passcode?’ They say, ‘2-3-4-5-6,’ or something. And then I just remember it,” Johnson described. Sometimes he would record people typing their passcodes.

Once the phone was in his hand, he’d leave with it or pass it to someone else in the crew.

Lock them out—fast. Within minutes of taking the iPhones, Johnson was in the Settings menu, changing the Apple ID password. He’d then use the new password to turn off Find My iPhone so victims couldn’t log in on some other phone or computer to remotely locate—and even erase—the stolen device.

Johnson was changing passwords fast—“faster than you could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” he said. “You gotta beat the mice to the cheese.”

Take the money. Johnson said he would then enrol his face in Face ID because “when you got your face on there, you got the key to everything.” The biometric authentication gave Johnson quick access to passwords saved in iCloud Keychain.

Savings, checking, cryptocurrency apps—he was looking to transfer large sums of money out. And if he had trouble getting into those money apps, he’d look for extra information, such as Social Security numbers, in the Notes and Photos apps.

By the morning, he’d have the money transferred. That’s when he’d head to stores to buy stuff using Apple Pay. He’d also use the stolen Apple devices to buy more Apple devices, most often $1,200 iPad Pro models, to sell for cash.

Sell the phones. Finally, he’d erase the phone and sell it to Zhongshuang “Brandon” Su who, according to his arrest warrant, sold them overseas.

While Johnson did steal some Android phones, he went after iPhones because of their higher resale value. At bars, he’d scope out the scene—looking for iPhone Pro models with their telltale trio of cameras. He said Pro Max with a terabyte of storage could get him $900. Su also bought Johnson’s purchased iPads.

Su pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property and was sentenced to 120 days at an adult corrections facility in Hennepin County, Minn. Neither Su nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.

On a good weekend, Johnson said, he was selling up to 30 iPhones and iPads to Su and making around $20,000—not including money he’d taken from victims’ bank apps, Apple Pay and more.

How you can prevent it

A week after my trip to Minnesota, Apple announced Stolen Device Protection. The security setting will likely foil most of Johnson’s tricks, but it won’t be turned on automatically.

If you don’t turn it on, you’re as vulnerable as ever. Switching it on adds a line of defence to your phone when away from familiar locations such as home or work.

To change the Apple ID password, a thief would need Face ID or Touch ID biometric scans—that is, your face or your finger. The passcode alone won’t work. And the process has a built-in hourlong delay, followed by another biometric scan. This same slow process is also required for adding a new Face ID and disabling Find my iPhone.

Some functions, such as accessing saved passwords in iCloud Keychain or erasing the iPhone, are available without the delay but still require Face ID or Touch ID.

A criminal might still be motivated to kidnap a person with lots of money, then slowly break through these layers of security. However, the protections will likely dissuade thieves who just want to grab phones and flee the scene.

So what loopholes remain? A thief who gets the passcode could still buy things with Apple Pay. And any app that isn’t protected by an additional password or PIN—like your email, Venmo, PayPal and more—is also vulnerable.

That’s why you should also:

• Add a distinct passcode to money apps, like Venmo and Cash App.
• Delete any notes or photos that include personal information such as passwords or Social Security numbers. Store that stuff in a secure note inside a third-party password manager, such as Dashlane or 1Password.
• Create a stronger iPhone passcode—one that uses letters and numbers.

The most obvious is Johnson’s advice: Watch your surroundings and don’t give your passcode out.

If this crime has taught us anything, it’s that a single device now contains access to our entire lives—our memories, our money and more. It’s on us to protect them.

—Nicole Nguyen contributed to this article.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return 14 sculptures to Cambodia and two to Thailand, removing from its collection all Khmer-era artworks associated with an art dealer accused of selling antiquities illegally.

The Met said Friday it will temporarily display a selection of the 16 sculptures while arrangements are made for their repatriation. The works were made between the ninth and 14th centuries in the Angkorian period, the museum said. The Khmer empire ruled much of what is now Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam from about 802 to 1431.

The sculptures are associated with art dealer Douglas Latchford, who was indicted in 2019 by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which said he orchestrated a multiyear scheme to sell looted Cambodian antiquities on the international art market. The indictment was dropped after Latchford’s death in 2020. Authorities later secured a $12 million civil forfeiture against his estate for stolen Southeast Asian antiquities they alleged Latchford had sold.

The Met said it cooperated with authorities in the U.S. and Cambodia following Latchford’s indictment and received information that made it clear the sculptures should be returned.

“The Met is pleased to enter into this agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office, and greatly values our open dialogue with Cambodia and Thailand,” said Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement Latchford was believed to have run “a vast antiquities trafficking network,” an allegation Latchford had denied. He urged cultural institutions and private collectors to remain vigilant about antiquity trafficking.

Many countries and cultures that were colonised have for decades asked institutions to return stolen artefacts. That effort has gained more traction in recent years, with many museums now openly acknowledging that some items in collections were gained through colonial exploitation and looting.

The Cambodian government in recent years has asked the Met and other museums to return artworks taken from their countries of origin under murky circumstances.

In 2013, the Met returned two 10th-century Cambodian stone statues, known as the “Kneeling Attendants,” which were also associated with Latchford. The statues were from the Koh Ker temple in the same province as the Angkor Wat temples. Officials said they believe they were stolen from the temple in the 1970s. The Met had acquired the statues from donors between 1987 and 1992, it said at the time.

One of the most high-profile repatriation efforts involves the Benin Bronzes, West African artefacts stolen more than a century ago from what is now Nigeria.

Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 artefacts were pillaged from the Kingdom of Benin by British soldiers in the late-19th century as the U.K. expanded its colonial empire in West Africa.

Many of the Benin Bronzes—a name used to cover a variety of artwork, including carved elephant tusks, brass plaques, and wooden heads—wound up in private collections and museums in Europe and the U.S. The Met returned three artefacts to Nigeria in 2021.

China’s ruling Communist Party wants the country’s young people to be ambitious, work hard and prepare for adversity.

Li Jiajia just wants to win the lottery.

Demoralised by a weak economy, unfulfilling jobs and a paternalistic state, young Chinese such as Li are looking for pathways out of the carefully scripted lives their elders want for them, putting themselves at odds with the country’s priorities.

After moving to Beijing from her hometown in southeastern China in April, the 24-year-old Li found her new job as a content creator at a technology startup uninspiring. She said she has no desire to climb the corporate ladder, especially when the number of high-paying Chinese tech jobs is shrinking.

The ever-present role of the state in daily life is stultifying, she said. Though she wanted to be a journalist in high school, she gave up when she realised how heavily the government censors the media.

She says she knows she probably won’t win the lottery. But when she plays, at least she can dream of a better life—most likely abroad.

“I want to leave here and live the life I want,” Li said. “It won’t happen overnight, but for now, the thrill of scratching lottery tickets gives me a little break.”

Since China’s government cracked down on disaffected students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, most young people, who came of age in an era of rapid economic growth and rising affluence, have done what they are supposed to do—and been rewarded for it.

They studied diligently to get into prestigious universities, clocked gruelling hours at fast-growing companies and followed traditional expectations of career and family, riding China’s boom to material success.

Many are still doing that. But a growing number of middle-class urbanites in their 20s and 30s in China have begun to question that trajectory, if not reject it entirely, as prospects of upward mobility fade.

More than two years of harsh government Covid controls left some pondering the role of the Communist Party and other sources of authority in their lives, or even the meaning of life and who they aspire to be—questions many had never contemplated before.

Record youth unemployment that topped 21% this year has further dented confidence in traditional paths to achievement in China. Some, like Li, are also frustrated about other issues, such as violence against women in China or government efforts to prevent people from accessing foreign apps such as Twitter or Instagram.

Many are quitting their jobs and turning to meditation and other forms of spirituality. Some are moving far from China’s megacities to start lives anew in places like Dali, a southwestern city famous within China as a hub for digital nomads and dropouts.

Others are flooding fortune-teller stands and Buddhist temples in mountainous areas, or exploring Chinese and Western philosophers and writers from Laozi to Hermann Hesse. Some are throwing “quitting parties” with banners celebrating their newfound freedom.

“This generation has had a lot of resources invested in them,” said Sara Friedman, professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University, who studies Chinese society.

“They have worked really hard. They have been pushed really hard. And to then say, ‘I’m stepping out of this rat race, I’m opting out,’ is a pretty radical decision to be making.”

From ‘lying flat’ to ‘letting it rot’

Social-media discussions about temple visits and anxiety—a central preoccupation of many young Chinese—have surged in 2023, according to BigOne Lab, a research firm.

About 34% of surveyed respondents in their mid-20s quit or were considering resigning from jobs in China’s consumer internet sector—a major employer of young people—in the first half of 2023, according to China’s job-seeking and social platform Maimai.

Playing the lottery has become especially trendy for 20- and 30-somethings, whose purchases of lottery tickets helped push sales to $67 billion from January to October, a 53% jump from the previous year and averaging $48 per person in China.

Catchphrases describing the mood have worked their way into everyday discourse. First, in 2020, was the arcane sociological term neijuan, or “involution,” which referred to situations in which people work hard and compete without anyone getting ahead.

That was followed by “touching fish.” The phrase, borrowed from a Chinese idiom, referred to executing small rebellions at work, such as taking long toilet breaks, doing online shopping or reading novels in the office.

Next was “lying flat,” a form of mundane resistance that involves dragging one’s feet at work or dropping out of the workforce altogether. Last year, the phrase “let it rot” spread to describe young people who have completely given up.

A survey conducted by Tsingyan Group, a research firm, last year found that approximately 96% of nearly 6,000 respondents in China were aware of people “lying flat” to various degrees in their vicinity. The concept held more appeal among people ages 26 to 40 than other Chinese, the survey showed.

“It’s a very passive form of resistance,” said Silvia Lindtner, an ethnographer at the University of Michigan. “It’s definitely a very difficult moment, but it could also be seen as a hopeful moment where there is pressure, in some ways, on the leadership.”

Echoes of the 1960s

In some ways the ennui resembles the “quiet quitting” phenomenon of postpandemic America—or, going back further, the rejection of social norms by young people across the Western world in the 1960s.

In those days, two decades of fast economic growth and wider affluence gave young people more choices than previous generations. Many responded by challenging their parents’ way of life.

In China, where open protests are rarely possible, young people are now rebelling in other ways.

“Lying flat is a latent resistance to the moral blackmailing of society,” said Amy Yan, a 27-year-old Shenzhen resident who once worked as a buyer for her family’s export business. When the business went bankrupt last year after her parents lost their assets in a financial scam, it reinforced her belief that she should give priority to her spirituality.

Even before the bankruptcy, she had decided that accepting the corporate grind and meeting traditional expectations of marriage and children would interfere with her desire to explore her spirituality.

Following the family crisis, she put her savings of $27,000 into supporting a tiny Taoist ashram she had started with a few fellow practitioners.

Coming into Beijing’s crosshairs

Communist Party leaders have long worried young people could stir unrest, as they did in 1989. The party needs young people to get on board with Beijing’s priorities, not just to keep the economy humming and avoid instability, but to help make China stronger in an era of great-power competition with the U.S.

In a speech at last year’s Communist Party congress, widely quoted in Chinese media, leader Xi Jinping laid out his vision for young people, urging them to have “ideals, courage, a willingness to endure hardship and a dedication to strive” to help “build a modernised socialist country.”

In a 2021 article published in the top party journal Qiushi, he specifically warned against “lying flat.” Discussions of the phenomenon have often triggered censorship online.

If all the young people who had dropped out of China’s labor force and relied financially on their parents were counted, China’s real youth unemployment rate could be as high as 46.5%, according to calculations earlier this year by a Peking University professor.

The Communist Party Youth League—with more than 70 million members—has published commentary on its official WeChat account criticizing college graduates for having too much pride. Job seekers “should not refuse to enter the workforce due to the difficulty of finding a job or choose to ‘lie flat’ out of fear of ‘involution,’” the article read.

Greater affluence—but an uncertain future

Until recently, China’s economic progress seemed to be unstoppable, with per-capita incomes surging to around $13,000 in 2022 from less than $1,000 in 2000, according to the World Bank.

But economic growth has slowed. Many economists worry China could get stuck in the “middle-income trap,” in which a country’s progress plateaus before it gets rich. Per-capita incomes in the U.S. were around $76,000 last year.

Academic research shows that social mobility for many groups in China has stalled, meaning it has become harder for people without connections to get ahead.

Many employers that young people gravitated to, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, have been shedding staff amid weak growth and government clampdowns on the private sector. Tech salaries have declined in the past three years, according to Maimai, and opportunities for initial public offering payouts have faded, leaving many who used to work “996” schedules—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—wondering what the point was.

It is also true that many more middle-class young people—especially those without children and mortgages—can afford to drop out of the rat race today than in previous eras.

Some plan to leave: Net emigration from China, which fell to 125,000 in 2012 as the country’s economy boomed, rebounded to more than 310,000 in the first 11 months of 2023, according to United Nations data.

Others want to stay—but on their own terms.

Huang Xialu quit her high-stress job as a product manager at one of China’s largest video-streaming companies in April, so she could focus more on spiritual retreats. For a long time before that, the 33-year-old said she had struggled with a lack of purpose.

“I had a very urgent sense that if I didn’t listen to my gut and take a break to explore what I truly wanted to do in this world, it would be too late,” she said.

In the months following Huang’s resignation, she traveled to Dali, where she worked on a tarot-reading stand, took a training course in life coaching and learned to make pottery.

To Huang, lying flat is the opposite of being passive—it is a path for taking control of one’s own life when wading through uncertain terrain, she said.

Now she has become a certified life coach, helping individuals who are as confused as she was to find a way forward. Her income is less stable.

But “I haven’t regretted quitting for a second,” she said.

The share of Americans who own stocks has never been so high.

About 58% of U.S. households owned stocks in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve’s survey of consumer finances released this fall. That is up from 53% in 2019 and marks the highest household stock-ownership rate recorded in the triennial survey. The cohort includes families holding individual shares directly and those owning stocks indirectly through funds, retirement accounts or other managed accounts.

The data provide the most comprehensive snapshot yet of how the Covid-era explosion in investing has reshaped Americans’ personal finances. Stuck at home during the pandemic with extra cash, millions jumped into the stock market for the first time. The elimination of commission fees on stock trading across U.S. brokerages made investing cheaper than ever.

“It created a whole generation of investors,” said Anthony Denier, chief executive of mobile brokerage Webull U.S.

Most households own stocks through a retirement account, such as a 401(k), but more Americans in the past few years have invested in individual shares directly. Direct stock ownership increased to 21% of families in 2022 from 15% in 2019—the largest increase on record since the survey began in 1989.

As more households bought individual shares, those newer entrants invested with less money than longtime stockholders. The median value of households’ direct stockholdings nearly halved from 2019 to about $15,000 in 2022, adjusted for inflation.

When the stock market crashed in early 2020, Nick Luczak, then a sophomore at the University of Michigan, used the $57 in his checking account to open a brokerage account on Robinhood and buy whichever stocks he could afford. Once the pandemic forced him off campus to live with his parents, he began researching the market and buying more stocks.

“I said, ‘Well, I have all this spare time. There’s no reason at all I shouldn’t be trying to make the most money possible from this,’” Luczak said.

Luczak and his fraternity brothers started a group chat to discuss markets and stock picks. He said he made a profit investing in Amazon.com and watched his friends make, then lose, thousands of dollars trading meme stocks such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment Holdings in 2021. At one point, he considered becoming a day trader.

Now, Luczak, 24 years old, is focused on long-term investing. A salesman in Dallas, he is studying to become a certified financial planner.

Brokerages in recent years have made trading free and easy. Newer apps like Robinhood and Webull helped popularise zero-commission stock trading on smartphones. Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and E*Trade all eliminated commission fees for stocks at the end of 2019. Fidelity and Schwab introduced fractional stock trading in 2020, allowing individuals to buy and sell slivers of shares.

“It’s become more accessible,” said Ashley Feinstein Gerstley, a certified financial planner and founder of The Fiscal Femme. “We’ve been debunking in the last few years the myth that you have to be rich or work on Wall Street to invest.”

The share of households owning stocks increased across all income levels from 2019 to 2022. Upper-middle-income families recorded the biggest jump in stock ownership.

Over those three years, stocks climbed to new highs. The S&P 500 rose 16% in 2020 and 27% in 2021. Even after a 19% drop last year, the benchmark stock index notched gains over the three-year period. The S&P 500 is up 23% in 2023.

Stock-market gains and rising home prices helped boost household wealth. Households’ median net worth climbed 37% from 2019 to 2022, adjusted for inflation, the largest increase in the survey’s history. The median value of a U.S. household’s primary residence surged to $323,200 in 2022, surpassing levels from before the 2007 housing market crash.

Americans’ penchant for stocks is distinct. U.S. households held about 39% of their financial assets in equities in 2022, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data, a higher allocation than most other countries in the data set.

That appetite for stocks has been tested since the Fed began raising interest rates last year at the fastest clip since the 1980s and pledged to keep rates higher for longer. Investors have been flocking to assets with little risk such as money-market funds that are now offering some of the highest yields in years. Everyday investors, who rarely own bonds directly, are taking a second look at assets such as Treasurys and corporate bonds.

Fernando Soto, head of private banking in Chicago at Brown Brothers Harriman, said he has fielded more questions from clients about fixed-income investing and more requests from clients to buy bonds in 2023. In his personal portfolio, he increased his allocation to fixed-income this year.

“There’s a big shift,” Soto said. “This is the new normal.”

How has the higher rate environment shifted American household finances? The Fed consumer finance survey in 2025 will likely paint the fullest picture.