MarketPlace - APM

For sports fans who are blind or have low vision, it can be hard to experience the full excitement of a game without being able to see where the ball is or what the players are doing.

But a Seattle tech company is hoping to change that after creating the first tactile sports broadcast, transforming gameplay into trackable vibrations for visually impaired sports fans like Hank Vogel.

“I’m blind, but I don’t just see blackness,” said 11-year-old Hank. “Blindness does not mean blackness.”

Hank has aniridia, a rare, degenerative eye disease that caused him to be born without irises — the colored part of our eyes.   

“It just means I can’t see as well as other people, so I can see, it’s just fuzzy,” he explained.

Hank reads large-print text, uses a monocular to see in the distance and a white cane to help him navigate when walking. And when he attends a basketball game, there’s the brand-new technology he can use.

“We’ve essentially developed a laptop-sized haptic display that’s capable of communicating dynamic information like sporting events through touch,” said Jerred Mace, the CEO and founder of OneCourt.

The technology uses real-time data that’s already collected by the NBA, using cameras installed in the catwalks of each arena that track the movements of every player on the court. 

“So you can think of it like a normal screen, but instead of visual pixels, they’re tactile,” he said. “You can feel the motion of the player with the ball moving around the court in real time.”

The OneCourt device looks like a thicker, oversized iPad with a rubber mat that sits on top. The mat has a raised outline of the court, and Mace said users can track the action in a few ways.

“By placing their hands flat on the surface, you’re feeling those vibrations in your palms and your fingers, and you get a great sense of the location generally, but then you can use your fingertips to zoom in and really pick out some of those fine details,” he said.

For blind and low-vision sports fans, the tech could be a game changer to help them engage.

“[Studies show] patients with low vision, especially children, tend to participate less in social activities and tend to have lower quality-of-life scores,” said Alan Labrum, a low vision optometrist at Oregon Health & Science University’s Casey Eye Institute.

Labrum thinks a technology like OneCourt could give patients access to something doctors usually can’t: fun.

“In my clinic, I focus on daily tasks, like how to help someone meet their educational goals or their work goals — things that are very practical like helping them read,” he explained. “And I think it’s awesome to find ways to improve accessibility to just having fun.”

And OneCourt can be used for all kinds of sports, not just basketball, since the rubberized mat is removable and can be swapped out for a different game field.

This year, the Portland Trail Blazers became the first NBA team to make it available for games. Fans who are blind or have low vision can check out a device free of charge at any home game, said Matthew Gardner, senior director of customer insights with the Trail Blazers.

“We have five devices available for the rest of the season,” said Gardner. “Three of them we have on a reservable basis, so you can reach out to our guest experience team to set one aside, and then we keep two on a first-come, first-served’ basis.”

Consumers can’t buy a OneCourt device for personal use yet, but founder Jerred Mace said that is the ultimate goal.

“Fans have been telling us from the beginning that this isn’t just something that is useful in a stadium, [saying] ‘I’m watching sports at home all the time, and I want to listen alongside my friends and family,’ or ‘I want to watch at the bar,’” said Mace. “So we’re doing our best to stay focused and achieve initial scale within the the stadium markets, but we will get to that at-home model.”

Mace said as they expand, one element they are focused on is the device’s price.

“We are well aware that accessibility concerns cost as well, so we are doing our best to keep the cost around the range of a cellphone or a gaming console.”

“Think of it like a normal screen, but instead of visual pixels, they’re tactile,” says OneCourt founder Jerred Mace of the device. “You can feel the motion of the player with the ball moving around the court in real time.” Crystal Ligori/OPB)

Hank Vogel was able to try out the OneCourt device during a Blazers game against the Charlotte Hornets in February. After a Blazers shot from the three-point line early in the first quarter, the crowd exploded with a roar and over the cheers, Hank explained the experience, “It said in my headphones, ‘Score, Blazers three points,’ and it was really cool ’cause I could feel it.”

Vogel said it was a much different experience than the Blazer games he’s been to before.

“It was just boring. I would just sit there, and then I also felt like I was missing out on a lot because everybody [would be] standing up and cheering, and I’d be like, ‘I really wish I knew what was going on.'”

Now with this new technology, he does.

In most parts of the country, strawberry growing won’t start until after the last frost. But in California, a single $19 strawberry has already captured the nation’s attention.

The dome-enshrined berry, sold at the notoriously expensive grocery chain Erewhon, went viral last month when social media influencer Alyssa Antoci (the niece of Erewhon’s owners) posted a TikTok video of herself eating “the best strawberry” she’s ever had. Others have described it as “juicy,” “sweet” and “floral.” 

The internet has responded with plenty of outrage over the hefty price of the berries, which are imported from Kyoto, Japan, and distributed by luxury fruit seller Elly Amai. The company’s other products include a $95 Japanese musk melon, available online, and a $90 box of strawberries, which are sold out.

Erewhon and Elly Amai did not respond to Marketplace’s request for comment on how they set their prices.

It’s not the first time prices at the Southern California grocer have invoked the wrath of consumers. Think $30 bags of ice and $26 bottles of oxygenated water. Even its regular organic produce costs more than its competitors. A pound of organic strawberries costs $9.99 at Erewhon; Aldi, $5.75; Vons, $7.

But in a piece for Business Insider, one former employee defended Erewhon, saying many of its high prices are explained by the store’s “high standards for product and ingredient sourcing.”

Pricey products in general are a way for shoppers to display their social status, said Richard Sexton, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. 

“There are going to always be these kinds of very small, niche markets where people with means can afford to flaunt their consumption,” Sexton said. 

Chiranjeev Kohli, a marketing professor at California State University, Fullerton, said he also thinks Erewhon charges very high prices because they signal exclusivity, and for the simple reason that people will pay them. 

The business strategy appears to be successful. In 2023, the grocery chain made an estimated $171.4 million in profit across its 10 stores, according to Fast Company. 

But while Erewhon’s elevated strawberries are costly, it’s important to understand their cultural context. 

“In Japan, fruits are not just food. Fruits really have a lot of symbolic meaning and cultural meaning,” said Soyeon Shim, a scholar of consumer and financial behavior who’s studied the country’s fruit market. “High-end fruits are used as a gift. And gifts are a very important practice in Japan.” 

A $19 strawberry isn’t unusual there, said Shim, who’s the dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. The high-quality fruit is grown in controlled greenhouses and requires a lot of hand labor, she said. 

“I wouldn’t ever buy a $19 strawberry to get my daily intake for vitamin C. So it isn’t designed for everyday consumption,” Shim said.

Elly Amai isn’t the only luxury fruit supplier that ships to the United States. Online retailer Ikigai Fruits, established in 2023, also sells strawberries to American consumers.

A box of 20 “Bijinhime” or “beautiful princess,” strawberries costs $238, about $12 per berry. 

Ikigai Fruits works with 20 farms, with each farm producing its own brand of strawberry, said  Takeru Saito, a sales assistant at Ikigai Fruits. 

In Japan, the number of farmers and the scale of farms are much smaller than in the U.S., Saito said, and their smaller yields help account for the higher price. Ikigai Fruits also ships its fruit on airplanes, which is more expensive than shipping them by sea, Saito said.

The number of Japan’s farmers are dwindling, Saito said, and many farmers are nearing retirement age with no one to succeed them. Exporting their produce to the U.S. gives them a wider revenue stream, he said. 

More people in the U.S. have become interested in Japanese luxury fruits since Ikigai launched in 2023, Saito said. The company sells 250 boxes of strawberries per month, he said. 

In the U.S., consumers over the past several decades have become more interested in where their food comes from and what varieties are available, leading growers to produce and develop new types for the more affluent sector of the population, said James Luby, professor emeritus of horticultural science at the University of Minnesota. 

While everyday consumers probably aren’t shelling out hundreds for luxury fruit, Luby said they are paying 50% to 100% higher for premium fruits. 

Take Honeycrisp apples, noted for their sweet-tart flavor and crunchy texture. They’re more challenging to grow and harvest, Luby said, and demand has outpaced supply for a couple of decades. They might cost about $2.99 a pound, compared to nonpremium apples, like Gala or Red Delicious, which are around $1.29 to $1.79 a pound.

There is a segment of our population that now has more disposable income to buy premium and luxury fruits, Luby said.

Trends inspire cheaper versions, encouraging companies from all market segments to make their own versions of a popular product. Even if many Americans can’t splurge on luxury fruit at the moment, Shim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said that Japanese strawberries could influence the mass market, driving down prices in the long run.  

Oishii, a New Jersey-based fruit company that sells Japanese varieties of strawberries, has been able to drastically lower the price of its Omakase berries, described as having “a delicate sweetness” and “a deliciously creamy texture.” In 2019, a box of eight sold for $50, or $6.25 a strawberry. Now, a similarly sized tray costs $12 at some stores after Oishii scaled up its production.

More strawberry farmers in the U.S. may end up replicating the techniques used to grow Japanese strawberries, Shim said. 

In the future, you may be able to find luxury fruit within your budget at a grocery store near you.

Amazon is consolidating its grocery business after a rough couple of years for its physical retail stores. The company told Marketplace in a statement it’s eliminating “a very small number” of jobs across teams working on Amazon Go convenience stores and Amazon Fresh grocery stores. 

The company has shuttered about half of its tech-centric convenience stores in the last couple of years and slowed expansion plans for grocery stores. 

Of course, Amazon still has more than 500 Whole Foods locations, the upscale health food chain it bought in 2017. And earlier this year, Whole Foods’ CEO was put in charge of Amazon’s broader grocery business.

Amazon, which is a Marketplace underwriter, launched its Go and Fresh store concepts in 2020. Their focus was on high-tech: Customers could walk in, pull products off the shelf and walk out — their purchase tracked by a system of sensors.

“It didn’t go well,” said Phil Lempert at SupermarketGuru. The novelty wasn’t enough.

“When people go shopping for food, guess what they want? They want food,” Lempert said. “They want to talk to, you know, Betty the baker and Bob the butcher and, you know, Sal the seafood monger.”

Amazon has mastered the technical side of retail by optimizing supply chains and logistics for its online operations, said Neil Saunders, a consultant at GlobalData.

“You certainly need those skills, but you need softer skills as well. It’s about the customer service. It’s about the experience, about the ambience, it’s about how customers feel,” he said.

Last year, Amazon began revamping its grocery stores — adding everything from better lighting and more colorful signage to a bigger selection of products and a heavier emphasis on fresh, prepared foods.

The problem now, said CFRA analyst Arun Sundaram, there just aren’t enough of them.

“I think to really be successful in grocery, you need to have a strong physical footprint as well as a strong online presence,” he said.

He pointed to Walmart, which has almost 5,000 locations. There are 15 Amazon Go convenience stores and 60 Amazon Fresh grocery stores nationwide. 

Amazon has been tentative about plans to open new stores. “My guess is they’re kind of keeping this warm as to when there might be a day where it makes more sense to go after it,” said Dylan Carden, an analyst at William Blair.

He said low-margin grocery stores might not be on the front burner for big capital investment right now. “Grocery is not the sexiest of industries, right?”

Especially since artificial intelligence started turning heads in tech.

By the time Shana Laurienzo finished college and graduate school, she had taken out about $100,000 in student loans. A decade later, she owes just over $160,000, even though she’s been making payments for years. That’s partly because the interest rate on her loans is 6.5%, and she’s made most of her payments on an income-driven repayment plan.

“So a lot of the time, and in my case, it doesn’t even cover the interest,” said Laurienzo, who’s based in Philadelphia and works in fundraising at a nonprofit. “And that’s how you get that ballooning-out-of-control loan balance.”

Income-driven repayment plans, or IDR, cap a borrower’s monthly payments at a certain percentage of their income, usually 10 or 15%. 

Jane Fox, chair of the attorneys chapter of the Legal Aid Society union UAW Local 2325, said the idea behind them was, “Let’s make a program that lets people pay in a way that isn’t going to wreck their finances, that isn’t going to cause them to go into default.”

IDR plans have been around in some form for 30 years, and they’re critical for many borrowers, particularly those who might not be able to afford their student loans on a standard 10-year repayment plan.

“The cost of higher education is just astronomical,” Fox said. “So most people rely on loans. And most people rely on loans understanding that, when they graduate, they will be able to make a monthly payment that is reasonable. That’s the promise of income-driven repayment.”

Another promise: If borrowers still have a balance after 20 or 25 years of paying, it will be forgiven. 

But people who are trying to get into income-driven repayment plans right now can’t. In late February, the Department of Education temporarily stopped accepting and processing applications for income-driven plans because of an ongoing court case over one particular income-driven plan the Joe Biden administration tried to implement.

Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center, said that plan, called SAVE, “was going to be the most affordable option for millions of borrowers across the country. And a number of Republican-led [state attorney general] offices sued the Biden administration and got the court to impose an injunction, meaning it would block the SAVE plan.”

That was last spring. Originally, the injunction only applied to the SAVE plan, but a few weeks ago, a judge expanded it to include other income-driven plans too. Which means right now, no one can apply for income-driven repayment at all.

“It’s a mess,” Yu said. “And it has caused a lot of chaos for a lot of borrowers.”

This is a particularly big deal for borrowers who are not already on an income-driven repayment plan but want to be. The difference between a monthly payment on a standard repayment plan versus an income-driven one might be hundreds of dollars.

“What is likely to happen is that millions of Americans will be sent bills for their student loans that they will not be able to pay,” Fox said. “If you don’t know what your student loan payment is going to be next month, so many economic decisions ripple out from that, right? People can’t make decisions about whether they can take a different job, whether they can move. Can they pay down their credit cards?”

Borrowers have been panic-emailing Betsy Mayotte, who runs the nonprofit Institute of Student Loan Advisors. She’s trying to reassure people that this is temporary, and income-driven repayment plans won’t disappear permanently. 

“Under federal statute,” she said, “the Department of Education is required to offer at least income-based repayment and another income-driven plan to borrowers.”

When people will be able to start applying for them again, though, is unclear. And this is happening at an already tumultuous time for people with student debt.  

After nearly five years, “the collections machine for the federal student loan system is turning back on again,” said Adam Minsky, a lawyer who works with student loan borrowers. “All the pandemic-related flexibilities and relief, all of that has ended. And so things are going to get real for people very quickly with this stuff. This is a really bad time for this type of massive [income-driven repayment plan] suspension to be happening.”

It feels like a bad time for Shana Laurienzo. She has been working at a nonprofit and paying her loans for nearly 10 years, so she should be almost eligible to have her balance — that $160,000 — forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. 

“Knowing that PSLF was going to be there at the end was kind of my saving grace, and kept me from having too much anxiety,” she said. 

But she doesn’t know what’s going to happen now because her loans are caught up in the ongoing court case over the SAVE plan, which means she hasn’t been able to make qualifying payments for PSLF in about a year. 

All of this uncertainty almost feels like a feature of the student loan system now. “Under the last administration, it felt like a moving goal post all the time,” she said. 

The Biden administration made a lot of changes to loan forgiveness and repayment plans, which helped a lot of borrowers, but created quite a bit of confusion too. 

“The constant change is a lot to keep up with,” Laurienzo said. “We just want to know where we stand.”

The U.S. Dollar Index — a gauge of the value of the greenback versus other major currencies — is down over 5.5% from a more than two-year high in mid-January. And it’s fallen sharply in just the last few weeks.

Now, keep in mind that from the lead-up to the November election until early this year, the U.S. dollar was on a roll. That was based on markets thinking the U.S. economy was stronger than most others, that the Federal Reserve would likely cut interest rates more before long, and that tax cuts and other stimulus were coming.

Instead, now what we’ve got is the markets worrying about tariff flip-flops and other policy uncertainty, and U.S. economic weakness.

Textbook economics will tell you that significant, sustained shifts in a currency’s value can indicate a country’s economic strength or weakness. 

“It’s a pretty sizable move. The euro is about 6% up against the dollar,” said Jonas Goltermann at Capital Economics of the recent rise in the euro versus the U.S. dollar. “And the move last week in the euro was one of the biggest over the past three or four decades.”

It’s a significant reversal in economic fortunes, said political economist Sharyn O’Halloran at Trinity College Dublin. 

“Last year, the U.S. was doing well while Europe was very sluggish,” said O’Halloran. 

Now, Germany’s new government has pledged to boost spending on infrastructure and defense, which will juice the Continent, Goltermann said. 

“In Europe, there’s a newfound optimism, a sense that maybe we hit rock bottom, and that now things are going to change for the better on the economic front,” said Goltermann. 

Here in the U.S., amid growing uncertainty about tariffs, inflation, interest rates, taxes and federal spending, the stock market has fallen sharply. 

“There’s a question around the U.S. tech firms — are they going to be able to hang on to their exceptionalism — causing people in Europe and the rest of the world to reconsider whether they want to put so many eggs into the U.S. basket,” said Goltermann.  

Keep in mind that heightened global economic uncertainty typically boosts the dollar. But Goltermann said these are not “typical” times. 

“We often say the dollar is a safe haven,” Goltermann said. “But if the uncertainty is emanating from the U.S., it tends to be less true.” 

Bottom line, said Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics: “There is so much uncertainty, and the tariffs are so destructive, they’re causing people to put spending, especially big business investment plans, on hold. And that raises the risk of a recession, scares the markets, and would also call for Fed cuts and a weaker economy.”

And, Gagnon said, drive down the dollar. 

There are somewhere around 15 million people in this economy who work in restaurants and food service. And those workers have gotten about 15% more productive since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This means the value of restaurant sales per employee is way up.

That’s the finding from a study out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Curious Surge of Productivity in U.S. Restaurants.”

“Curious,” because the surge followed decades of basically stagnant productivity among restaurant workers. 

Jonathan Fox has owned Fox Bros Bar-B-Q in Atlanta for two decades. 

“We were one of the original spots in Atlanta to start serving smoked wings, and, you know, Atlanta is a big wing town, so our smoked wings really took off,” said Fox. 

When the pandemic closed their dining room, Fox had to figure out how to keep those wings fresh all the way to customers’ homes. He wrapped them in foil, insulated the takeout boxes. 

“We would do test orders where we deliver to ourselves, find the quality and just try to ensure that it arrives in a quick manner,” said Fox. 

There were benefits for restaurants that figured this out, because takeout hasn’t gone away.

“Americans have gotten used to doing takeout and delivery. We like it,” said Chad Moutray, chief economist at the National Restaurant Association. 

He said some restaurants have even retooled their staffing. The most extreme are so-called “ghost kitchens,” “where there really is not a front of the house, right, it’s really just an operation to cater to takeout and delivery,” said Moutray. 

For sit-down spots, too, takeout allows the same number of staff to produce more meals, said Robert Byrne, director of consumer research at Technomic.

“That’s great incremental business. You know, guest counts can go up without having to actually service them in your dining room,” said Byrne. 

That’s why the study said restaurants are more productive lately. 

“It’s a complete shift in labor from hospitality to fulfillment,” said Byrne. 

But Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, said it’s hard to really compare the restaurants of today with their pre-pandemic counterparts. With takeout, consumers don’t get table service, and they have to clean up themselves.

“It’s just, we’re sort of buying a different product,” said Stevenson. 

She said restaurants are just meeting a different set of customer needs these days — needs that apparently include a plate of smoked wings consumed on the couch.

Imports to the U.S. rose 10% in January from December, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Importers brought in a whole lot of electronics, pharmaceutical products and other goods that would be exposed to the Donald Trump administration’s new tariffs, causing the trade deficit to surge the most in a decade.

And though there are still plenty of questions around what countries and what products will be affected, trade barriers are certain to affect the country’s gross domestic product.

GDP is a measure of production. It’s calculated by adding up consumer spending, business investment, government spending and the balance of trade, or the difference between exports and imports.

“Imports tend to count against the GDP calculation,” said Meagan Schoenberger, senior economist with KPMG Economics. “Exports count towards the GDP calculation.”

The reason imports are subtracted from GDP is that an imported T-shirt, for instance, isn’t something an American company made. It’s not our domestic product. That means all of those imports in January will have a negative impact on GDP growth.

“While none of the other categories of GDP are expected to collapse in the first quarter, we could see a very weak first-quarter number, due to the fact that imports surged,” Schoenberger said.

The balance of trade lately has averaged around 4% of the size of the economy as a whole. Meanwhile, GDP growth has been averaging about 2.75% a year.

Schoenberger said there are big caveats to keep in mind with January’s jump in imports. For one, that surge probably won’t last.

“It is probably likely that we’ll see it for the first couple months of the year. Importers will stock up, and then they may be in a wait-and-see mode,” Schoenberger said.

The other caveat is that the surge of imported goods will have a positive effect on other parts of the GDP formula once those goods are sold: personal consumption and business investment.

Take the example of imported computers and computer parts. “The No. 1 sector right now, when I think of investment booming, is construction of data centers, and putting equipment in needed to support that,” said Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University.

Miller said that boom led to a 55% increase in imports of computers between October and January.

“Some of the computers are going to end up as capital investment in equipment,” Miller said. “Others will end up as personal consumption.”

Bottom line? While that big surge of imports in January will drag down GDP, it probably won’t cause it to tank.

“We should see offsetting increases in investment and consumption under the hood, over the course of the quarter, and perhaps into next quarter or later this year,” said George Pearkes, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group.

Pearkes said a bigger concern is what could happen to GDP if the trade war continues, or escalates. In that case, exports, which add to GDP, are likely to fall.

“We’re going to see countervailing duties applied by trading partners,” Pearkes said. “It’s already happened from China. It’s already happened from Canada.”

And if imports fall at the same time, Pearkes said there are plenty of domestic industries that would feel knock-on effects.

“For instance, transportation of those goods, retailing of those goods, the services that those goods enable,” Pearkes said. “Those are all relatively high value-add activities, and if you don’t have those imports, and you haven’t spun up domestic production to offset them, you’re left in the lurch.”

In other words, slowing down trade slows down economic growth.

We’re in the thick of spring break travel, and Miami Beach has long been a hot spot for student revelers. In recent years though, the annual party scene in March has escalated into stampedes and even fatal shootings. After pressure from residents and bad publicity, officials have announced they’re over the chaos.

The city has implemented a number of rules to keep tourists and residents safe. The strict rules in Miami Beach will be in place through March, and — over the next two weekends specifically — police will institute DUI checkpoints and run license plates to screen for previous criminal offenders.

The idea is to deter large, rowdy crowds with security checkpoints at popular beach entrances and high fees for weekend parking. Two city garages, for instance, will charge up to $100 a day.

The restaurants of the Art Deco hotels also have to shut down their sidewalk seating on the main drag in South Beach.

Holding back tourists though, could hurt local businesses that count on spring break for big profits. These include those forbidden from renting out vehicles like electric bikes, scooters or mopeds.

“We just gotta work with what we’ve got,” said Antonio Prades, who manages a store called Fly E-Bike Miami in South Beach. He said he’s hoping to sell scooters since he can’t rent them out.

A low-end scooter can cost about $300, and renting a scooter for about a week would be more expensive, since rentals start at $70 daily.

“It wouldn’t make sense just to rent something when you can just buy a scooter, a bike, and then resell it and you can even make a profit on it,” Prades said. Tourists would need to find a buyer before they go home, however.

Prades and other business managers in the area are generally not thrilled with the restrictions but are trying to work with the city.

A popular nightlife venue on the main drag in South Beach lacked large spring break crowds that typically form in March, after Miami Beach officials have implemented strict rules to safeguard tourists and locals from violence. (Verónica Zaragovia)

“It’s also the business owners’ responsibilities to not overserve,” said Kyle Grossman, a supervisor at Fat Tuesday, a frozen cocktail bar in South Beach. “Greed breeds some of those disastrous situations.”

Grossman feels like some of the city’s measures are just too much, like barricades to block street parking, because, he added, even families could feel unwelcome. 

“They’re going, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ Too many restrictions make good people also weary,” he added.

Still, the city is going full stop on the rules. It put out a video on social media to let visitors know that police will be enforcing them, like stopping people from drinking in public or using a speaker on the beach.

Jelani Massey, visiting Miami Beach on spring break from college in Washington, D.C., doesn’t mind the rules. He was expecting to find the unruliness of past years.

“People to be dancing on top of cars and the streets to be full,” he said. Instead, South Beach was pretty quiet when he arrived — and he’s happy with that.

“This is my first time being here for spring break, but it seems really safe, really fun,” Massey said. “A lot of people just having a good time.”

The strict rules don’t seem to have turned visitors off. Hotel occupancy rates went up last year even with restrictions, according to the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. So far, March this year looks about the same.

Federally-run tribal colleges were among the targets of February’s mass-downsizing of the government workforce. Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico each initially lost about 20% of their staff. 

Some have been hired back, but a lawsuit filed by three tribal nations and Indigenous students says that’s not enough. 

Ella Bowen is a freshman at Haskell Indian Nations University. She’s studying to be a teacher. Her academic advisor helped her map out all the classes she needs to graduate. 

“My whole four-year program was laid out in her computer,” she said. But last month, Bowen’s advisor was abruptly let go along with dozens of other faculty and staff. 

Now, Bowen said professors are taking on extra courses, and students are filling in for fired custodians and cafeteria workers. 

“I think everybody’s really stressed out and sad as a community here, but we’re all trying to work together,” she said.

Bowen is part of the group suing the federal government over these firings. Their attorney, Jacqueline De León with the Native American Rights Fund, said Haskell and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute help fulfill the federal government’s trust responsibility to tribes.  

“You know, as part of the bargain with the United States to give up vast swaths of land, Native Americans were guaranteed, in many treaties, education,” she said.

De León said that tribes had a right to be consulted on downsizing at the two colleges — which, according to the federal government’s own watchdog agency, are chronically understaffed. 

“Even if some staffing cuts had to happen, tribes had the right to talk about the structure of those cuts, indicate which programs are of the most priority to them,” said De León.

The Department of the Interior declined Marketplace’s request for an interview about the lawsuit. 

Twyla Baker is president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in North Dakota, one of 33 tribal colleges not run by the federal government. Those institutions are safe from federal layoffs, but she said they still rely on government support to fund some job training and academic programs. 

“Our sponsored programs are about anywhere from 60% to 75% federal dollars,” she said — including some grants currently frozen by Trump’s DEI order. “Everything’s kind of just ground to a halt with everything that’s going on.”

Many tribal colleges are the only institutions of higher education in their rural regions, and Baker said they’re bracing for lean times. 

Here’s today’s shocking stat: The U.S. real estate that faces major wildfire risk is worth $9 trillion. For flood risk, it’s $7 trillion. For wind risk: $17 trillion. These numbers all come from a new climate risk analysis from Zillow. And half of the top 10 cities with the most fire-prone real estate value are in California.

California is well-represented in this analysis because, even though there’s a lot of climate risk, “there’s a housing crisis here. There’s just more people that want to live in California than there are homes to put them in right now,” said environmental economist Judson Boomhower with UC San Diego.

That housing shortage makes homes more expensive, he noted. The high fire-risk homes in Zillow’s report sold for 49% more than low fire-risk homes.

“These risks have been around for a long time. They’re getting worse,” he said. “It seems like real estate markets haven’t fully priced them in historically.”

Home insurance companies have already started to react — that’s why they’re dropping home policies in California. Home prices lag behind, because climate risk is only one factor in a home’s value.

“Many high-risk areas are desirable places to live for other reasons, like being near an ocean,” said Zillow senior economist Kara Ng.

That’s already started to change, she said. Homes with extreme fire or flood risk in the study are less likely to sell or go pending.

“These fire- and flood-prone homes do simply sell, but at a greater discount than compared to the initial list price,” Ng said.

She added that higher flood-risk homes also see more mortgage application denials and withdrawals.

Inflation eased a bit in February to 2.8% year over year, according to the latest consumer price index. That number was 3.1% in January. The category that’s most responsible for keeping inflation stubborn and sticky is shelter, which rose enough to account for nearly half of the monthly CPI increase.

Meanwhile, inflation for food at home, mostly what consumers buy at the grocery store, came in flat — literally 0%. That’s good news for consumers. So why does a trip to the supermarket still feel so bad?

“There was no change in grocery prices, but there was a lot of movement within categories,” said David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University.

So much movement within categories that a lot of the bad — price hikes — canceled out a lot of the good — price drops.

In February, beef was up nearly 2.5% from January. And of course, eggs were up nearly 10.5%. Meanwhile, lots of categories were down. Bacon fell more than 2%, fruits and vegetables 0.5%.

“From a data perspective, you know, it’s good news,” Ortega said.

Good news because if you’re a little flexible with your grocery list, you can stick to your budget. Maybe skip ground beef and go for chicken.

But doing that kind of math does not make consumers feel good, said Charlotte Ambrozek, a food economist at the University of Minnesota.

“Our preferences are what they are. They’re really hard to move,” she said.

That’s especially true for lower-cost, higher-value items like eggs. “Two things matter: The price of eggs matters, but the price of the thing that I’m substituting also matters,” Ambrozek said.

An alternative like breakfast sausage might be too big of a price leap. And for bakers, there isn’t a perfect substitute for eggs at all. 

Plus, after years of high prices and grocery cart trade-offs, people are tired, said Ricky Volpe, an agricultural economist at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

“I think consumer sentiment for food prices right now remains pretty negative,” he said.

Remember, between 2020 and 2024, food prices rose by nearly 24%.

“I think a lot of consumers continue to wait for food prices to come down,” he said. “It’s worth pointing out they almost never do.”

And that just feels bad. Even for people whose wages are keeping up.

As health-conscious consumers shift away from traditional sugary sodas, major beverage retailers are jumping into the market for prebiotic soft drinks — drinks that contain dietary fibers that feed friendly bacteria in the gut — dominated by startups Olipop and Poppi.

Olipop’s co-founder and CEO announced a $1.8 billion valuation after a new investment round led by J.P. Morgan Private Capital. Coca-Cola has already released a prebiotic soda called Simply Pop, and PepsiCo is planning to enter the market. The prebiotic soda market is growing, particularly among Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012.

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke to Laura Cooper of The Wall Street Journal about the growing market for “gut pop.” Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: Gut pop. What is this?

Laura Cooper: You’ve probably seen it in the supermarket, maybe walked by it, didn’t know what it was. But they’re prebiotic sodas, so like Olipop and Poppi. A lot of people know Poppi from their two Super Bowl commercials this year and last year, and yeah, Gen Z really enjoys it.

Ryssdal: Clearly I must have just spaced out during those Super Bowl commercials, because I have no memory of them. What are they supposed to do, this prebiotic thing, just to get the biology out of the way?

Cooper: I’m not a doctor, but I spoke to a lot of dieticians and gastroenterologists about this. And so essentially, prebiotic versus probiotic: Probiotic, you might know — kombucha, yogurt, things of that nature. This soda is prebiotic because it contains dietary fibers that feed bacteria already living in your system, and probiotic puts more microbes into your system. This is feeding what’s already inside your body. And when you think about prebiotic soda and any perceived health benefits you could get from that digestive health, people are all in on trying it. So, you know, as opposed to maybe having just a regular Coca-Cola or a Pepsi, people are, they’re still having those, just not as often.

Ryssdal: These things are going to cost me two and a half bucks a piece — did I read that right?

Cooper: It really depends where you’re buying them. But yeah, soda has similar pricing, depending on what you’re buying. There’s actually something at Walmart called “modern soda,” and this falls under that, an aisle where all these drinks live together.

Ryssdal: Coke and Pepsi clearly see this, and they say, “We got to get in on this.”

Cooper: Oh, 100%. I mean, Coca-Cola already put out their first prebiotic soda called Simply Pop. I tried the strawberry at a conference. Very strawberry. It has a lot of juice in it. It also has just things that are different from Olipop and Poppi. I believe it’s Vitamin C for one, and Zinc. So PepsiCo, I believe plans to enter this space as well. It is definitely, you know, it’s picking up steam with Gen Z. And as you know, Gen Z is a share of the market everyone wants to get a piece of.

Ryssdal: Hey, do you drink these things on the regular?

Cooper: I drink soda. I have drank these. I just don’t drink a ton of them, but I’ve tried them all, especially in reporting this, I drank a lot of them and have spoken to a lot of people who are just huge fiends of this.

Ryssdal: A word about the magnitude here. You point out that the co-founder and CEO of Olipop announced a valuation with a new round of investment, puts that company at like, $1.8 billion, which is, I mean, that’s not peanuts.

Cooper: Last month they raised money, I believe it was raised with J.P. Morgan in the lead. So, you know, this is a big business. Is it, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-sized business? Unclear. But Coca-Cola already put out their first prebiotic soda, called Simply Pop, and PepsiCo, I believe, plans to enter this space as well. It’s definitely picking up steam and getting a following. And I think that all the big guys are aware that they want to be involved with this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr Pepper was also interested.

Know how a lot of small business owners are feeling more hesitant about hiring lately? Well now we have a glimpse into how workers are feeling.

A new survey from Glassdoor found that employee confidence dropped in February to the lowest it’s been in nine years. Just over 44% of workers feel good about how the next six months are looking at their own company. 

The hard economic data published recently, like the latest jobs report, shows the labor market is still solid.

“But of course, a jobs report is looking backward. Some of the forward-looking measures are the stock market, as well as various confidence surveys,” said Jed Kolko, an economist who focuses on the labor market.

He said those forward-looking measures are not so solid. And it’s worth paying attention to how consumers, employees and business leaders are feeling, because how people feel can affect how they act.

“People who might be worried that they could lose their job might cut back on spending even before it happens. That, in turn, can slow economic growth,” he said.

As economic uncertainty rises, Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, said anxiety tends to rise too. And confidence tends to fall.

“Everybody hates uncertainty,” he said.

These days, Glassdoor found, people are increasingly worried about their own job security — especially those who work in government.

“There are a lot of workers who are seeing headlines about layoffs and worried about it affecting them,” Zhao said.

And people aren’t just concerned about being laid off themselves.

“We also see a lot of workers who talk about the downstream impacts of layoffs,” he said. “Feeling the pressure to pick up work that somebody who was let go would have done. And so there’s a lot of people who are talking about layoffs in the context of overwork, stress and burnout.”

None of this is a great sign for the economy, according to labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards.

“Recessions tend to tell us that they’re coming,” she said. “They give us lots of warnings that they’re on their way.”

Falling confidence is one of them.

When we start seeing those warnings, she said, “policymakers have the chance to adjust … what they are telegraphing in order to try and prevent that recession from taking hold. What’s most troubling about the economy right now is that the messaging coming from the White House has already been, ‘Sometimes painful things have to happen.'”

Instead of trying to make people confident again.

Big banks of batteries are an important part of the renewable energy transition. Their role is to store power generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing so that it can be used when it’s dark or the wind is calm.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. made good progress on the battery storage front in 2024 — capacity grew 66%. And almost twice as much could be added to the grid this year.

A battery storage system isn’t much to look at. “It’s just, you know, a large, unremarkable set of rectangular structures hanging around,” said Michael Craig at the University of Michigan.

But inside those unremarkable rectangles are lithium-ion batteries. 

Seth Feaster at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said they have something pretty remarkable: “The ability to time-shift power.”

This means storing up power generated when demand is low, then pushing it out into the grid when demand is high. 

A lot of these battery systems are up and running in Texas. Feaster said that the other morning at about 5 a.m., “the market power price in Texas was below $20. But once you hit about 6:30, 7 o’clock, as demand increases, power prices jump.”

So a power company could have charged its batteries on the cheap at 5 a.m. “and then gotten two or three or four times that price for that power during the morning period of peak demand.”

The costs associated with batteries have come down, said Joshua Rhodes at the University of Texas at Austin, thanks to their widespread use in electric vehicles, laptops, smartphones and storage systems. 

“The price of lithium has gone down by, like, 80%. The cost of batteries to install, you know, has gone down by a factor of two or three,” said Rhodes.

Battery storage has also benefited from government incentives — including a tax credit in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. The GOP-controlled Congress could repeal it. But, said Allison Feeney at Wood Mackenzie, “even if the IRA phases out earlier or goes away entirely, we’ll still see strong storage installs, but they just won’t be probably as high.”

They could stay strong, she said, because demand for electricity is likely to increase. And battery storage is, for now, a cheaper way to meet that demand. 

But there’s one more wild card on the price side, Feeney said. You guessed it — tariffs.

Cleaning up from one of the largest wildfire disasters in recent history takes a while. 

The first phase of the cleanup around Los Angeles involved removing truckloads of hazardous household stuff, including propane tanks, batteries and paint cans. All of that went to landfills designated to take hazardous waste. 

The cleanup is now in phase two, which involves removing all the remaining debris. And it is not going very far at all — in fact, a lot of it is staying right in LA County, just hundreds of yards from homes, parks and schools.

That’s not particularly popular with the people who live there.

That’s why dozens of protesters spent a recent afternoon blocking the entrance of the Calabasas Landfill about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. LA County selected this landfill to receive the ash and dirt that was left over from the wildfires after household hazardous materials got cleared. That’s the job of the Army Corps of Engineers, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. LA County’s Sanitation Department said in a statement that all the toxic stuff gets separated out of the debris headed here.

“They cannot guarantee that it’s nonhazardous. And our argument is there’s no way to sort through the ash,” said resident Kelly Martino. She said this is a local, municipal landfill not designed to receive hazardous waste. “At this landfill, you’re not even allowed to throw away a paint can or an Energizer battery.”

Finding all the toxic stuff in the ash and soil is a tall order. Some of it might still be in there, including asbestos, lead, PFAS, arsenic and mercury.

“What I’m concerned about as a pediatrician is that in years to come, we are going to see more cases of cancer and tumors and autoimmune issues and illnesses and diseases, just from the environmental exposure of these contaminants,” said Calabasas-based Dr. Tanya Altmann, who’s with the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Thousands of residents live within a mile of this landfill.

“It’s in the immediate vicinity of five schools. It’s 100 yards away from a park used by kids every single day,” said Dallas Lawrence, president of the local Las Virgenes Unified School District Board of Education.

Until a few weeks ago, the waste wasn’t supposed to go there, because it was coming from too far away. But the LA County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to allow it temporarily. The board also expanded the number of tons of waste it can take every day.

The bordering city of Calabasas filed for a preliminary restraining order to stop the trucks, but the court denied it. Under current circumstances, the county is allowed to send this waste to landfills it wouldn’t normally go.

“The ordinance in 2020,” said Calabasas Mayor Peter Kraut, “was specifically designed to allow for an expedited cleanup in the event of an emergency declared by the governor.”

There are upsides to doing things this way: This landfill is closer to some of the fire-devastated areas than the alternatives. That means truck trips are shorter, so the cleanup goes faster and doesn’t require as much diesel fuel. The state can stop it at any time if there’s a threat to public health.

“The Palisades homeowners and business owners are entitled to a speedy cleanup. What I don’t want to see is a speedy cleanup and a health hazard brought into the city of Calabasas,” said Kraut.

After about an hour, police arrived and broke up the protest. On the last day of February, the landfill received its first loads of debris. Calabasas and its residents have filed lawsuits to try and stop it, but while they wait for the courts, the trucks keep coming.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly proposed — and reneged on — plans to impose tariffs on other countries, giving whiplash to both consumers and the stock market. 

Tariffs are a tax that U.S. importers pay to the U.S. government. To make up for that tax, these importers either eat the costs or pass them along to you in the form of higher prices. 

On the very day he was inaugurated, Trump announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. First, they were postponed for 30 days. Then, they went into effect on March 4, only for Trump to decide a couple of days later to halt tariffs on many imports from Canada and Mexico for one month. He also granted a one-month reprieve to U.S. automakers. 

Trump has also threatened tariffs on the European Union, which exports products like pharmaceutical products, automobiles and alcohol to the U.S., and he’s announced plans to impose reciprocal tariffs on other countries in order to match the rates they’ve set. 

Currently, the following tariffs from the second Trump administration are in effect: 25% taxes on all steel and aluminum imports and 20% taxes on Chinese imports. 

Below is an update timeline of where tariffs stand:

March 12: Trump’s planned steel and aluminum tariffs go into effect. His administration reinstates 25% tariffs on all steel imports and raises tariffs on all aluminum imports to 25%. 

In response, the European Union announces that it will impose retaliatory tariffs on $28 billion worth of U.S. goods, including steel, aluminum, textiles, home appliances and agricultural goods. 

Canada is also planning to impose tariffs on $21 billion worth of U.S. goods. The United States’ trading partner has already imposed 25% tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods, which includes certain types of meat, wine, orange juice, pajamas and footwear. 

March 11: The premier of Ontario, Canada, agrees to halt a 25% surcharge on electricity that the province supplies to Minnesota, New York and Michigan. Trump says he will double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports to 50%, but rolls back his plan after the premier backs down on plans to impose a surcharge on Canadian electricity.

March 10: In response to Trump’s tariffs, the premier of Ontario, Canada, announces that Ontario will charge 25% more for the electricity it supplies to Minnesota, New York and Michigan. 

March 6: Trump postpones 25% tariffs on many products from Canada and Mexico for one month, but Canada is committed to keeping retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports in place. Canada has a plan to set 25% tariffs on $155 billion worth of imported U.S. goods, and has already imposed tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods.

March 5: The Trump administration announces that U.S. automakers are exempt from tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico for one month, as long as they follow rules set forth by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. 

March 4: Planned 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico go into effect, ending the 30-day pause on these taxes. The Trump administration also slaps an additional 10% tariff on China, meaning Chinese imports now face a tariff of 20%. 

China announces it will impose 15% tariffs on U.S. imports, including chicken, pork, soy and beef, that will take effect on March 10. These tariffs are on top of the 10%-15% tariffs China imposed in February. 

During a joint address to Congress, Trump also says the U.S. might impose a 25% tariff on copper. 

Canada announces it plans to move forward with its plans to set 25% tariffs on $155 billion worth of imported U.S. goods, and has already imposed tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods. That $30 billion worth of goods includes certain types of meat, wine, orange juice, pajamas and footwear. 

Feb. 27: The European Union says it will fight Trump’s plan to impose 25% tariffs on EU imports, targeting the U.S. bourbon, jean and motorcycle industries. 

Feb. 26: Trump threatens to impose 25% tariffs on imports from the European Union. Trump says the planned 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico will go into effect on April 2, although a White House official walks back that claim and says they’re still set to go into effect in early March. 

Feb. 13: Trump signs a memorandum calling for the development of a reciprocal tariff plan. These reciprocal tariffs would ensure that U.S. tariff rates on other countries match the rates that countries have imposed on U.S. exports. 

Feb. 10: China’s retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. go into effect. The country imposes a 15% tariff on coal and liquefied natural gas products, and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars. 

Trump announces plans to reinstate 25% tariffs on steel imports and raise tariffs on aluminum imports to 25% “without exceptions” on March 12. 

Feb. 4:  Trump’s 10% tariffs on China go into effect. China announces it plans to retaliate against the U.S. by imposing a 15% tariff on coal and liquefied natural gas products, and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars. 

Feb. 3: Trump agrees to a deal with Canada and Mexico, pausing 25% tariffs on both countries for 30 days, but tariffs on China are set to go into effect. Canada agrees to appoint a fentanyl “czar” and create a joint strike force with the U.S. to tackle organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering, according to a tweet from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mexico agrees to reinforce the U.S.-Mexico border with 10,000 troops from its National Guard to curb drug trafficking, especially fentanyl. 

Trump hints the European Union could also face tariffs. 

Feb. 1: The White House announces that Trump is planning to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and a 10% tariff on China, which are set to take effect on Feb. 4.  Energy from Canada, specifically, will face a 10% tariff. 

Mexico announces it plans to respond with its own tariffs against the U.S., although it does not specify what those tariffs will look like. Canada says it plans to impose 25% tariffs on $155 billion worth of goods. 

Jan. 20: Trump announces that he plans to put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on Feb. 1. While Trump threatened to place tariffs on China prior to Inauguration Day, he does not mention any concrete plans for China. 

Solar power is winning the electricity generation race. A new report from the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association says that in 2024, two-thirds of new energy made in the U.S. came from the sun. That’s double the percentage solar claimed five years ago.

Solar is among the cheapest power sources to develop. Michael O’Boyle, senior director of electricity at the think tank Energy Innovation, said that’s partly thanks to government incentives.

But it’s also benefiting from a virtuous cycle: “Goods get cheaper, utilities and consumers buy more of it, then manufacturers can scale up manufacturing and make it even cheaper,” he said.

President Donald Trump has threatened to end solar incentives, but “there’s no scenario where solar isn’t growing pretty significantly,” said Rob Gramlich, president of the power consulting firm Grid Strategies.

Trump can set up road blocks that will slow solar’s growth, but utilities and homeowners decide whether to install a new power plant or rooftop solar, and “the costs are just too compelling,” Gramlich said. “It’s too cheap, too prevalent and too available for utilities to not want it and consumers to not choose it.”

This week, 21 house Republicans signed a letter asking to keep clean energy tax credits because they’re needed to help the U.S. become energy dominant.

It’s been five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This week, we’re looking at how various industries have recovered from that economic shock and how they’ve been changed by it. 

February 2020 was a pretty good time for airlines, said industry consultant Robert Mann. “The irony was early February was record traffic, record revenue,” he said.

Of course, that wouldn’t last. By April, there were days when the Transportation Security Administration screened fewer than 90,000 travelers, said Henry Harteveldt of Atmosphere Research. 

“We hadn’t seen a number that low in the United States since the 1950s,” said Harteveldt. 

With few passengers, airlines cut staff and parked their unused planes out in the desert. It took more than $50 billion in government support to keep airlines from going bankrupt. 

But then, in the middle of 2021, “As more people were vaccinated, as restrictions started to ease, we saw domestic and international travel explode,” said Harteveldt. “So-called revenge travel.”  

People wanted to get back out there and see family and friends, said Nicholas Rupp, an economics professor at East Carolina University.

“They’ve gotten stimulus checks, so they’ve got money to spend. They’re ready to travel, so it was leisure travelers that first brought back the airlines,” said Rupp. 

Business travel didn’t see the same rebound. Managers learned Zoom could do the trick just fine. Consultant Robert Mann said that hurt routes to and from smaller cities, where previously just a handful of business travelers could make it profitable to fly a 50-seat airplane.

“They were subsidized by the five or six very-high-fare business travelers who were flying in those markets,” said Mann. “And if that type of demand doesn’t exist anymore, then the cross-subsidy doesn’t exist. And the service will be eliminated.”

Mann said some of those routes may never return, even with business travel picking up lately.

The pandemic has also had a lasting impact on aircraft supply chains, said Harteveldt of Atmosphere Research. Manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus are still behind on deliveries of new planes. 

“So a key lesson here is, when you’re faced with a crisis, stay away from knee-jerk reactions,” said Harteveldt. “There are airlines that wish they hadn’t gotten rid of airplanes because when demand hit, they could have used those planes.”

Airlines may soon get a chance to apply some of the lessons they learned back then. With consumer sentiment running into turbulence, Delta, American, United and Southwest all slashed their revenue forecasts this week.

The whiplash from the Donald Trump administration’s on-again, off-again tariff policy is leading to a lot of uncertainty on Wall Street and stirring worries that an old economic menace, stagflation, could be lurking around the corner. Stagflation is essentially a macroeconomic cocktail of rising prices, high unemployment and recession.

To be clear, the U.S. economy is not currently grappling with that dismal condition. Unemployment in February remained historically low at 4.1%. Inflation, while elevated, is down significantly from its pandemic highs. But at the same time, sweeping tariffs could create an environment in which stagflation might take root.

“We all know that tariffs, because it’s a tax, it’s going to lead to higher prices, but we didn’t know there’s going to be so much uncertainty about it,” said Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, a professor of economics at Brown University and director of the Global Linkages Lab. “That creates a lot of uncertainty about economic outlook in the future, which means now consumers are going to cut down their demand, investors are going to cut down their investment. And that’s the recession part of the stagflation.”

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Kalemli-Özcan about the risk of stagflation and the challenge it poses for central bankers. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: For those who might not have experienced it back in the 1970s, what does stagflation feel like in an economy?

Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan: It is basically higher prices and higher unemployment, recession. So you have a double whammy. The economy is slow, people are unemployed. At the same time, prices are high.

Ryssdal: We are not in stagflation right now, that is an important point. But my question is, what has happened to get us to the point where we’re having this conversation again?

Kalemli-Özcan: Why we are having this conversation is what I call extreme uncertainty created by a series of policies of the new administration. We all know that tariffs, because it’s a tax, it’s going to lead to higher prices, but we didn’t know there’s going to be so much uncertainty about it. You know, back and forth, back and forth. That creates a lot of uncertainty about economic outlook in the future, which means now consumers are going to cut down their demand, investors are going to cut down their investment. And that’s the recession part of the stagflation.

Ryssdal: What do we do about it? I mean, if, if you’re Jay Powell listening to this interview — I don’t know if he’s going to listen — but what do you tell the head of the [Federal Reserve] to do?

Kalemli-Özcan: The Fed’s role here is look at what happens to expectations, to inflation expectations, because the future plans of businesses and consumers is going to be reflected in that inflation expectations. And if Jay Powell sees those expectations are elevated, but at the same time the data — which is, of course, always about the past — that inflation is not going down, we are having a sticky inflation, then obviously they are going to increase the interest rates.

Ryssdal: Seems to me, though, based on what you’ve said about uncertainty in the policies of the Trump administration, that a lot of the solution would be not having so much uncertainty.

Kalemli-Özcan: That’s right, that would be the solution. So that solution is better than the Fed’s solution because if the uncertainty really keeps feeding into these lower demand and lower investment plans and consumption plans — and that’s also what we are seeing in the stock market meltdown yesterday and today — then it is going to be a very difficult job for the Fed. They don’t want a recession. So if the recession now wins over inflation, that means they need to cut the rates. If you have both, or the stagflation scenario, stagflation is a very, very hard scenario for a central banker. And the solution here is really not the Fed, but it is not having these type of uncertain policies coming from the administration.

Ryssdal: With the understanding that things in an economy, to paraphrase here, happen very slowly and then all at once, we’re talking about stagflation now, and again, we are not there, but it could be here. How long do you suppose it’ll take?

Kalemli-Özcan: In terms of when are we going to see the recession and the higher prices, that is going to take time. Because remember, for actual higher inflation to be observed, the tariffs have to be in effect. It is just like all this talk creating this uncertainty. So if tariffs never really happen, but then, because now this uncertainty fed into the future plans of consumers and businesses, we might really end up with a recession.

When Austin Ramirez learned there was a way to potentially get out of being taxed on imports during the Trump administration’s first trade war with China, he knew he had to apply.

“There are a subset of our products that we just don’t have North American alternatives for,” he said.

Ramirez’s company, Husco, is headquartered in Waukesha, Wisconsin. It makes hydraulic and electromechanical components for cars, and construction and agricultural equipment. About half the parts he needs to manufacture these goods, like iron castings, are imported from abroad.

“So these are molten metal that’s poured into a mold. You know, it solidifies and ultimately it’s machined into a final product,” said Ramirez. “It’s a fairly labor intensive, you know, not hugely environmentally friendly process, so a lot of those foundries have moved overseas.”

This was the main argument Ramirez’s lawyers used in tariff exclusion applications back in 2018 — that there was no way to source these castings in the United States. They had to outline reasoning in pages of applications for dozens of items, a process that took months.

The back-and-forth confusion of the Trump administration’s trade policy has yet to settle. But as business owners wait, they’re exploring their options. During Trump’s last term, and last trade war, one option was to apply for an exclusion. They granted businesses temporary relief from tariffs on specific imports so that, for instance, a business wouldn’t have to pay the tariffs while they transitioned supply chains. It’s unclear if there will be a formal process this time around, but if there is, and if it looks anything like it did last time, it might be a bit messy.

“I’d say probably a third to half of our exclusions were approved,” said Ramirez.

That’s higher than the average 13% approval rate through early 2020 for tariff exclusions on Chinese imports, according to the Congressional Research Service. But Ramirez said the whole process was frustrating because it was opaque.

“We couldn’t find any kind of rhyme or reason to why certain component categories were approved and why others were rejected,” he said.

Dinesh Hasija at Augusta University researched exclusions data from the 2018 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

“There was a lot of randomness,” he said.

It was hard to find consistent reasons why applications were denied or approved, but there were some patterns. For instance, if your supplier was in a country that had a favorable relationship with the U.S., you were more likely to be granted an exclusion.

“So the country of affiliation mattered,” he said.

So did, perhaps, a company’s political affiliations. A study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis found businesses that made campaign contributions to the Republican Party were more likely to be granted exclusions. 

Robert Friedman, who co-leads the international trade practice at law firm Holland & Knight, has been getting calls from clients for months to explore all their options when it comes to tariffs.

“This time around we were seeing companies preparing far in advance of Trump’s election,” he said.

He’s a bit skeptical there will be an exclusion process because of how wide reaching these tariffs are, and the kind of government staffing that reviewing applications would require. But however messy the tariff exclusion process was or may be, it would at least give smaller business owners a way to be heard. Friedman said no exclusion process would give more voice to bigger firms.

“The companies with greater political power have an easier time conveying their messages,” he said. “But that is unfortunately not available to many businesses.”

Ramirez of Husco, the hydraulics manufacturer, isn’t so worried about Chinese tariffs this time around. The company has reduced its imports from China by about 80%, though none of those supply chains shifted to the U.S.

“We now source in Thailand and Malaysia, and some to India, and some to Europe,” he said.

That won’t save Ramirez if Trump puts global tariffs into place, something he’s floated before.

“It is so volatile that I don’t know that anybody knows what to do,” said Ramirez.

He said he can’t create a plan until the administration solidifies its own.