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Market Overview
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Year To Date Performances:

1. The Biden administration announced plans to forgive $1.2 billion in student debt for nearly 153,000 borrowers enrolled in the new repayment program called the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan. This relief targets borrowers who have been in repayment for ten years or more and initially borrowed $12,000 or less. Typically, debt forgiveness under income-driven repayment plans occurs after 20 or 25 years, but the SAVE plan offers cancellation after a decade for those who borrowed less. This move, part of a January announcement by the administration, aims to provide relief to borrowers who have faithfully made payments over a long period, according to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

2. Google has introduced Gemma, a new series of lightweight AI models, starting with Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, which are designed for commercial and research use. While specific performance benchmarks against competitors' models weren't shared, Google emphasized that Gemma models are state-of-the-art, dense decoder-only models similar to its Gemini and PaLM models. These models are described as "open models," meaning they are accessible for developers and researchers to customize and fine-tune, but they are not open-source. Google aims to distinguish between traditional open-source models and its approach to Gemma, focusing on controlled usage terms. Additionally, Google is launching a responsible generative AI toolkit and a debugging tool to support safer AI applications development with Gemma. These initiatives reflect Google's interest in enabling more efficient AI application development, including the ability to run inference and tuning on local devices or single hosts in the cloud.

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4. Headlines

   1. Grocery costs as a percentage of income are at a 30-year high.

   2. China is restricting the sale of stocks to prevent volatility in the stock market.

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Onwards and Upwards,

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