They're clearly not giving their references, calculations, or any basis for comparison, which is awful.
But there's no need to minimize what you've found in your own research, which is that that defaults are up ≈25%.
My focus was critiquing their phrasing, which turns that 25% into 38%.
Like I said, I’m not actually an expert on this to know if the trend is what matters.
Thanks! I feel like this is actually the next reporting step that the source article needed to do. The original data source citation is helpful of course too.
But my feel is the FT author is trying to avoid just listing the numbers, so tries to cleverly explain them and unintentionally creates a meaningless statement. Instead, they should exercise a tiny bit of analysis and tell us on a relative basis the metric has changed since the premise is that it’s changed a lot, how does “higher level” even compare to what the readers can relate to or comparing to another time they where high or the previous record holder. In any case, if I read it’s 25% higher than 2019 I immediately can see how that would be concerning and drastic change and makes me want to read more.
The cynical part of me thinks it’s possibly just a way to increase word count and write with less numbers. But this is one of those cases when the author should use the data to create information for their audience to consume instead of describing the raw data (raw data nearly never needs description, if you’re tempted to do that, just cite/recite it directly). In short, information > raw data > convoluted descriptions of raw data.