MarketPlace - APM

We got an early look at the balance of trade Thursday morning. Imports in February were more or less flat after surging in January, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, exports picked up. 

All in all, the trade deficit shrank a little from the previous month. But that gap between imports and exports is just about the widest it’s ever been.

President Donald Trump has demonized the trade deficit. And he’s argued that tariffs can help boost American exports and narrow the trade gap. But the thing is, that negative trade balance also has an upside.

Think about the United States as one big household that really loves going out and buying imported goods. To pay for those goods, the household has a of couple options.

“One option is you can export to pay for your imports. The other option is that you can borrow to pay for your imports,” said Robert Johnson, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame.

He said the United States simply can’t export enough products to pay for all of those imports. We just don’t make enough stuff that the rest of the world is buying.

But we do have financial assets that foreign investors want to buy. Think stocks, mortgage-backed securities, Treasury securities — as in government debt.

“As a result, foreigners want to pour money into the United States, in safe assets in the United States. And that has made it very easy for us to borrow from abroad,” said Johnson.

It’s not like the same foreign manufacturers that are selling us goods are turning around and buying U.S. Treasurys.

But George Pearkes, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group, said at the national level, foreign demand for U.S. government debt and other financial assets allows us to import more than we export.

“There is no other way to make that work,” Pearkes said. “If you’re going to spend more than you earn, then you have to, have to, have to either be increasing debt or decreasing assets.”

What this means is that the trade deficit and foreign investment in the U.S. are two sides of the same coin.

Let’s say the U.S. could magically figure out how to eliminate the trade deficit by making exports catch up with imports.

Emily Blanchard, a professor at Dartmouth College, said the tradeoff would be less foreign investment.

“That means we lose a critical source of lending,” said Blanchard.

She also said boosting exports would require an increase in capital investment. And those resources couldn’t go to other parts of the economy — building bridges, educating kids, coming up with innovation.

If you drive a car in Los Angeles, sitting in traffic is just a part of life. Though the city once touted a burgeoning railway system, cars have dominated since the opening of the Arroyo Seco Parkway in 1940.

But sitting in standstill traffic isn’t the only concern for drivers in LA. There’s also the time and money spent.

“You’ve got gas and just routine maintenance but also repairs [and] parking tickets. But the thing that people really forget about is paying to park. Parking is what really sucks,” said Eric Brightwell, a car-free Angeleno.

According to AAA, the average owner of a new car in Los Angeles spends $12,297 a year or $1,024.71 monthly on related expenses.

For years, Brightwell has relied on walking, cycling and public transit to navigate the City of Angels. And while it has added time to his commute, it hasn’t shrunk the scope of his activities.

“I made a map of all the places I can get to within a 10-minute walk, a 15-minute bike ride or a one-seat bus ride,” Brightwell said. “And there’s, like, 400 places on the map.“

But his commitment to a carless life has not stirred disdain for those who love their vehicles. It’s not a purity test, said Brightwell. It just means he doesn’t own a car.

“I just went to the Petersen Automotive Museum the other day to see the low riders,” said Brightwell. “In 100 years, hopefully there will still be beautiful cars in museums, just not on the streets.”

And Brightwell still uses a car from time to time. One reason he lives in LA is access to the mountains that border parts of the city. But when he wants to hit the trail, he goes with a friend who drives.

“I don’t think I’ll ever own another car,” Brightwell said. “It gets less and less likely as transit gets better.”

President Donald Trump believes that tariffs will shrink the trade deficit by getting more Americans to buy U.S. stuff instead of foreign stuff. But in economics, things don’t work quite that simply.

There was this “Simpsons” episode where Homer traveled back in time to the age of the dinosaurs: “As long as I stand perfectly still and don’t touch anything, I won’t destroy the future,” Homer said.

He obviously touches something, kills a bug and messes up the future, which he finds out when he gets back: “Don’t you remember Dad?” said Bart. “Flanders is the unquestioned lord and master of the world!”

Cue that classic Homer “D’oh!”

Economics is a little bit like that. Mess with one thing, something else gets messed up too. Take the trade deficit. The U.S. imports more than it exports. 

“The trade deficit reflects the difference between U.S. income and U.S. consumption,” said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which is a Marketplace underwriter.

More money going out of the house than coming in — we’re all just shooting dollars out the door to Temu, every day. Now if that was all that was going on decade after decade, we would have no money and the rest of world would have dollars just piling up, worth nothing. That’s not happening, because those dollars we send out into the world don’t stay there. They come back.

“They’re used to buy American assets,” said Matt Slaughter, dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “U.S. stocks, purchasing maybe corporate debt, they’re definitely used to buy U.S. Treasury securities,” he said.

Remember, when someone buys a corporate bond or a U.S. Treasury security, they are making a loan to that business or the federal government.

Now let’s imagine that the trade deficit was magically smaller. We’re sending fewer dollars out the door. So fewer dollars are coming back in the door as investments. Fewer loans to business, fewer loans to the government.

“If foreigners are buying fewer American assets, either the federal government has to borrow less or the private sector,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of international trade and investment at Harvard.

A world with a smaller trade deficit is a world where this country is borrowing less, because there are fewer dollars coming in, because there are fewer going out. But here’s a problem: It looks like the federal government may need to borrow just as much as before or more because it may be spending more.

“All forecasts are they’re going to increase the federal budget deficit,” said Lovely at the Peterson Institute.

So if the government borrows just as much as before or more, the trade deficit is unlikely to fall — tariffs or no tariffs.

Some part of this economy would have to borrow less for the trade deficit to fall, and if it’s not the government, then there’s only one place left: the rest of the economy.

You know what makes the economy borrow and buy a lot less? A recession.

Need a civics refresher? How about over lunch?

Eleesha Tucker is a professor of American history and civics education at Utah Valley University Center for Constitutional Studies. She also is part of the Visible Hand Project, which offers free lunchtime civics lessons for companies in Utah’s tech corridor. Tucker recently spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Your program is nonpartisan, but I would have to give up my lunch time to attend. What would I get in return?

Eleesha Tucker: So from the perspective of the business leader, it helps to stop the polarization that happens among employees, but from an employee’s perspective that they could be motivated to learn more about some basics in civics. There’s a well-known Annenberg study from a few years ago that found that only 39% of Americans can name all three branches of government. So just kind of refreshing on civics in general, but for the most part, they’re looking for ways to understand our really confusing, divisive political landscape.

Brancaccio: But what’s the principle at work? Is it the idea that if you actually knew the rules as enshrined in, for instance, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, there might be fewer arguments?

Tucker: The principle is that we’re promoting civic wellness to overcome divisiveness. So civics meaning understanding the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and how our system of governments works, and that’s different from politics, where it’s the jockeying for power and the negotiation around policy decisions. So the principle is that as more Americans embrace civic wellness, instead of this divisive battle that’s common in the broader political landscape, then we generally will have a healthier society and a healthier system. And I think a lot of Americans care about that.

Brancaccio: I guess if people see that, they have a role in politics, and there’s a way that you go about it, if you go down to a city council meeting, and a way perhaps not to go about it, that could also help lower the political temperature, because you know what’s expected of you.

Tucker: With this kind of shared common ground, understanding that we’re all in this together, that’s a different tenor or feeling than what polarization has produced is understanding people who disagree politically as the enemy. So there’s a lot of bad consequences for our communities, and more broadly, nationally, if we’re seeing other American citizens as the enemy because they have different opinions.

Brancaccio: Now I appreciate that I’m not talking to a professor of economics. I’m talking to a history professor, and somebody teaches civics. Econ 101, though, will usually have an Adam Smith moment, his concept that markets work things out through a metaphorical invisible hand. But yours is called the Visible Hand Project. How does that relate to civics?

Tucker: So it’s a play on the Adam Smith metaphor that we’re driven by our self-interest in the free market, but we’re inviting business leaders to be intentional and visible with their promotion of civic wellness. And actually that promotion is also in their self-interest. But what Benjamin Franklin would call enlightened self-interest, that it’s good for their bottom line, it’s good for their workforce, but it’s also good for the broader community, which, when there’s high levels of social capital in the community, more broadly, social capital, meaning trust and reciprocity, then it’s good for business. There’s more collaboration, there’s more cooperation, there’s people engaged more comfortably in the marketplace.

Brancaccio: Have you measured success of the work that you’re doing with this?

Tucker: Participation in terms of numbers, but we don’t take surveys. One company … consistently does their own surveys, and we have some survey data from them — one employee in particular saying that “I thought they were going to tell me how to think, but they really were just trying to teach me to be a good citizen.”

Mark Moore is racing to make up for lost time. He’s CEO of Mana Nutrition, a nonprofit that makes a nutritional paste from peanuts for starving children.

Most of Moore’s packets of nutritional paste are sent to Africa. Earlier this year, Moore got a series of emails from his main client, USAID.

“It’s been a kind of a yo-yo effect,” Moore said. “First, there was an email in January.”

That email said Moore’s contracts were paused and that he should stop work. About a week later, he was told to resume operations. But then a few weeks after that? Never mind, Moore’s contracts were abruptly canceled. USAID said Mana’s life-sustaining packets weren’t “in the national interest.” Then, the yo-yo bounced up a final time when Moore was told to restart a week later.

He did, even though the federal government still owes him a lot of money. “Somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to $25 million,” he said.

All this time, Moore was thinking about the children in places like Sudan and Chad who depend on Mana’s nutritional paste.

If these malnourished kids go for a week without food, “for a child under six — especially these children — it’ll cost them their life.”

Boxes of ready-to-use therapeutic food at the Mana Nutrition plant in Fitzgerald, Georgia, earlier this month. (John Falchetto/AFP via Getty Images)

The gutting of USAID has derailed aid programs around the world. The State Department said it’s terminating around 80% of USAID’s grants and contracts. Aid groups and nonprofits say even some of the life-saving humanitarian programs the Department promised to protect are faltering. And children — like the ones Moore helps to feed — could especially suffer.

Moore said it’s all well and good for him to be producing his packets again, but they still have to get to these children. And there could be big supply disruptions this summer because of other contract cancellations and payment disruptions for shippers. And if nonprofits that run feeding centers in places like Africa are not able to restart their work, the outlook is grim.

Put plainly: Children will die, Moore said.

“We may not even be able to count them. They will have nowhere to go. So it would probably look like tens of thousands of children dying quietly at home,” he said.

In an email, the State Department told me “critical USAID program awards remain active.”

But for the most part, USAID still isn’t able to make payments or issue new contracts, according to Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. That’s not just for food aid. Kenny said the U.S. also paid for anti-viral drugs for HIV and AIDS patients across the globe.

“Without all of that being fixed, we have an emergency of just an awesome scale. We are talking 3 million, maybe 4 million deaths over the course of a year,” he said.

Kenny added that the first victims of any AIDS crisis will be children born to HIV positive mothers who weren’t taking anti-viral drugs. If those babies don’t get anti-virals right away, around half of them could die within a year.

Up until late last year, a popular brunch spot in Shanghai with free-flowing alcohol that was not too expensive was the Bull & Claw.

“It was housed in a beautiful villa-style lane house [with] three floors,” said Rachel Gouk of the Shanghai-based food and drink blog Nomfluence. “That was a lot of overhead to manage just to do brunch, which has an average check of [$50 including] three hours of free-flowing drinks.”

Bull & Claw is part of the Australian firm Camel Hospitality Group, which also ran a handful of gyms and other restaurants serving Italian, Mexican and Thai food. Last November, it shut all its restaurants and bars, and the gyms now operate under a new entity. Camel group sent a WeChat message to all its staff announcing the sudden changes.

“We received a PDF document from our boss Tony Finocchiaro,” graphics designer Joan Dai said. “The document said that the company had dissolved, and every employee’s contract had been terminated. It said our salaries would be ‘prioritized’ as soon as the company’s bankruptcy liquidation was complete. Then the boss disappeared, and he hasn’t answered our calls since. He just ghosted us.”

Protest signs set up by former Camel group employees demanding outstanding wages and compensation. (Courtesy Joan Dai)

While catering revenues in China went up by 5.3% last year, profits in cities like Beijing dropped by 81% in 2024 compared to a year earlier. In Shanghai, where catering and accommodation data are combined, profits are estimated to have decreased by a third last year. Many restaurants have closed and sometimes abruptly.

Marketplace tried, without luck, to reach the former bosses of Camel group for comment.

The firm was established in 2010, when times were good.

“They were printing money back in the day,” Gouk said.

In a statement she obtained from the Camel group, the firm wrote it was a “difficult” decision to close all their venues but that “the current challenging market environment have made it unsustainable to continue.”

The firm’s procurement and sourcing manager Cathy Guo was part of the layoffs but still fronted calls from anxious and sometimes angry suppliers who blamed her for not giving them a warning before the closure.

“I had an emotional breakdown and cried for a long time when I picked up those phone calls,” she said. “[Camel boss Tony] should have come up with a proper plan, like negotiating with suppliers to pay them at a discounted rate and pay our workers [what they’re owed].”

Marketplace reached one of the vendors the Camel group owes money to, which was luckily not a large amount.

“It was something like 2000 yuan ($280) that was outstanding. So it wasn’t that much,” said Maria, who manufactures and distributes alcohol to restaurants.

Marketplace is not using her full name because she worries about official retaliation for speaking about the economy in less than glowing terms, which has happened to top economists in the country.

“I think it’s extremely hard to get people to dine out right now,” she said.

A popular brunch spot, the Bull & Claw, abruptly closed in late November when the restaurant’s parent company, Camel group, declared bankruptcy to the surprise of employees and suppliers. (Charles Zhang/Marketplace)

That is because of China’s real estate slump. People in China invest most, if not all, their savings in property, which used to be a safe bet until the market dropped.

“[China] overbuilt and there’s a lot of vacant properties,” Maria said. “So, when real estate has started to sort of hit this brick wall, a lot of people have seen their main assets decrease quite a lot, and therefore they’re tightening their purse strings.”

Meanwhile, restaurants have a lot of fixed costs, according to longtime Shanghai resident and Bostonian Scott Minoie.

In 2001, he co-founded the Element Fresh restaurant chain, which was popular for its sandwiches, salads and smoothies.

“[For] 10 to 12 years we were like the rest of China, which is growth. Massive growth,” Minoie said. “What shifted 2012 to 2014 is [that] rents continued to go up. Labor costs doubled and tripled.”

He said companies, which previously did not have to pay social security taxes for out-of-town workers, were suddenly required to do so. Social security taxes in China are “astronomically high” said Minoie — about 40% of payroll.

“The cost started to outpace the revenue growth. We started to see per-restaurant profit level decline because revenue would go up by 5% [and] costs go up by 15%, 20% year-on-year,” he said.

Restaurateur and CEO of True Legend Hospitality group Bryce Jenner once ran seven sports bars and restaurants, a beer brand and a company importing and distributing liquor. Now he is down to just one venue, his Mexican food outlet Pistolera.

He said the first big shift in his business came in 2018, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping got rid of the two-term limit on the presidency, shaking consumer confidence.

“The optimism went,” he said.

Then came the pandemic lockdowns.

Restaurants like the Element Fresh chain officially closed in 2021, though Minoie had already quit the business three years prior.

In 2022, the Shanghai government forced 25 million residents to stay home for over two months. For the remainder of that year, there were layers of restrictions that changed daily.

There was a brief moment of optimism after the pandemic restrictions were fully lifted in 2023. Betting that pent-up consumer demand would drive economic recovery, Jenner re-opened one of his biggest restaurants and bars, the Social House, in the spring of 2023.

“[I thought] there is no way this great country that was so solid [couldn’t] get back on its footing quickly,” he said. “I was quite bullish, and I was very wrong. That sank me.”

A restaurant worker trying to attract diners in Shanghai. More restaurants are competing for a customer pool that is not spending as much as usual. (Charles Zhang/Marketplace)

He closed the large venue two and a half months later, racking up debt.

“We’re seeing a lot of closures because not only is the economy bad, but we have an oversupply of restaurants,” Gouk said.

Competition comes from other western restaurants and also Chinese restaurants.

“I go around Shanghai, and you can see in Beijing as well, the local Chinese restaurants are better than a lot of the Western restaurants. They really pay attention to decor, to service and social media,” Minoie said.

Following the Camel group closure, a pioneer in food delivery in China, Sherpa’s, aimed at the expat community, quietly shut its app after 23 years. It lost out to platforms Meituan and Alibaba’s Ele.me.

An empty Mexican restaurant in Shanghai under the Camel group after it announced its closure late last year. (Charles Zhang/Marketplace)

Jenner said he is friends with the Camel group owners and the last time they met was over a year ago to discuss what they should do in the downturn.

“I’d said, ‘Hey, maybe we should fight this together.’ And they [grunted and said] ‘Yeah I don’t know.’ And we all sat there pretty sad,” he said.

In the end, Jenner sold parts of his business and closed others.

However, even downsizing costs money. Unlike in the U.S., companies in China are legally required to pay severance to their workers.

“We don’t have a lot of money in the bank and if we let everybody go, that we should let go so that we can cut down on payroll, well, we’ll be in the red immediately with the severance payment,” Minoie said.

“So, you kind of hang on one more month, two more months, three more months. Eventually you run out of cash. And that’s what happened to [Element Fresh].”

A restaurant busy during the lunch hour in Shanghai. Industry insiders say restaurants may look like they’re doing good business but profit margins are shrinking. (Charles Zhang/Marketplace)

Camel group employees are reeling. 

“I knew the company was on the decline, but I didn’t expect [the boss Tony] would do this unbelievable thing. We had worked together for so many years, but he just disappeared,” Guo said.

In addition to fighting for severance pay and last month’s salary they’re owed, some employees found out the company had missed contributions to their social security insurance.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a policy to [allow employers to] postpone the social security payments. It lasted for about a year,” Dai said, adding that the Camel group never made up for the payments.

For people like chef Alan Liang who come from a different province, social security also determines access to local services.

“The Camel group stopped making social security payments for over a year for me. So, my child can’t go to public school in Shanghai. It’s stressful,” he said, adding that his child has had to return to his hometown for schooling.

A new tenant moves into the former Bull & Claw location in Shanghai three months after the abrupt closure of the Camel restaurant group. (Charles Zhang/Marketplace)

Today, some of the more established restaurants are still packed, but consumption habits have changed.

“People aren’t buying the drinks and they’re not buying the extra appetizers. They’re not buying that bowl of soup. They’re not buying the coffees,” Jenner said.

Items that can increase the tab by 30% to 40% he said.

Until China’s overall economy improves, Jenner said restaurant profits will likely be very thin.

Meanwhile, many restaurants in Shanghai offer discounts on apps.

“It’s a race to the bottom,” Jenner said.

Additional research by Charles Zhang.

The MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index slid nearly 7 points over the past quarter, wiping out its postelection gains. 

Small-business owners still think the economy is on pretty solid ground, but they’re feeling uncertain. Hence the gloom. 

It’s been a quiet March for René Hidalgo, owner of Don Pepe Mexican restaurant in Houston. And he thinks that has a lot to do with the fact that he raised prices this year because his costs keep going up.

“Sometimes people comment, ‘Whoa, that’s a little too much for a breakfast taco or breakfast plate.’ But I have no option. You know, we have to pay for employees. You know, all our other bills, rent, electricity bill and all that,” Hidalgo said.

And rising food costs — especially eggs.  

Instead of raising prices, some business owners are just taking the hit. 

Janessa Purney owns Erskine’s Grain & Garden, a farm supply store in Chester, Vermont. She recently ordered wood shavings — for animal bedding — from Canada, and her supplier crossed the border right before President Donald Trump rescinded his 25% tariffs.

“I paid 20% extra. They swallowed 5% for me. So that kind of thing is really disconcerting. Thinking about those types of things are making it hard to plan cash flow,” she said.

The Chamber of Commerce survey found a sharp uptick in the number of business owners who feel concerned about their future revenue.

“We know that that revenue, depending on how much of a chunk is taken out from inflation, is really what is going to result in growth, stability or decline,” said Tom Sullivan, the chamber’s vice president of small business policy. 

It’ll determine, he said, whether businesses feel like they can hire more workers or make capital investments. But right now, what he’s seeing “are small business owners hitting the pause button on growth plans for 2026 and beyond.”

In Houston, René Hidalgo hopes business picks up in the next few months. Because right now, he’s at the front counter, seven days a week.

“And I’m working here since opening in the morning till closing because I cannot afford to have another person, you know, like a manager or something,” he said.

If business picked up, Hidalgo could hire someone and take some time off.

When the March jobs report comes out in early April, Marketplace will note the new unemployment rate at the top of our newscasts. And we’ll be quoting what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as the official unemployment rate — identified as U-3 in the jargon of the agency’s statisticians.

The U-3 unemployment rate was 4.1% in February, up from 4% in January.

But buried in the monthly jobs report are five more unemployment rates, labeled U-1 through U-6. They measure various aspects of what the BLS calls labor underutilization. As of February, those rates ranged from 1.5% (U-1) all the way up to 8% (U-6).

Six rates to measure joblessness may seem like a lot. But they tell different stories about the labor market and whether it’s working for American households.

Take, for example, 25-year-old Aurora Azbill from Dayton, Ohio. She turned her passion for theater into a profession.

“I build costumes,” she said.

Azbill moved to New York City two years ago with a theater-tech degree and soon landed a job in a shop making costumes for movies, cruise ship theatricals and Broadway shows.

“While I had a 9 to 5, if Broadway is not doing any cast changes, nothing’s opening, hours get cut,” said Azbill. “I would walk in in the morning, my boss would be like, ‘Sorry girl. Like, we don’t have any work for you, you can go home. Maybe I’ll see you in two weeks.’”

When this happened, she’d try to find short-term freelance gigs to tide her over.

“You can’t really fall back on ‘Oh, well I’ll just file for unemployment,'” she said. “You’re constantly looking for work.”

So Azbill had a job, though she sometimes didn’t get any hours or a paycheck. She did temp jobs in her field, but that didn’t pay as consistently as her regular 9 to 5. And all the while, she would be aggressively looking for a new job.

So, would Azbill be counted in the monthly jobs report as “unemployed” or “underemployed”? It’s actually not an easy answer.

Victoria Gregory is a labor economist at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. She said that each of the unemployment rates the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes tries to get at a different slice of people who tell the monthly Current Population Survey that they want to work, but aren’t working, or at least, aren’t working as much as they want to.

“Going from narrowest to broadest,” Gregory explained, “U-1 is just capturing the long-term unemployed, people who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or longer.”

Gregory said this matters because the longer the duration of unemployment, the less likely a worker is to find another job soon.

The next category: U-2. “This starts to add in job losers because of a layoff or a firing or their temporary job ending. When you have a lot of those, it’s typically a bad sign for the labor market,” Gregory said.

This might be the unemployment category Azbill would have fallen under — a temporary layoff, or perhaps she would have been in the next one, U-3, when she gave up on the first job and started looking for a new one.

“U-3 is the official rate,” said Gregory. “It’s the simplest notion of unemployment. It just captures people who want a job and have actively been searching for one within the last four weeks.”

The “official” rate has its virtues, said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. “The value of the headline number is that we’ve been collecting it the same way for, like, 80 years. It’s comparable over time. It’s comparable internationally.”

But, he continued: “It’s not everybody facing distress in the labor market.”

This has been a long-standing criticism — that the “official” rate is an undercount.

“It doesn’t count you if you’re so discouraged, you’re not doing something active to find work; if you work 10 hours a week but that’s not enough to support yourself and you really want to work full time,” Katz said.

BLS studied the issue, and in 1994 it revised its measures of unemployment. The U-4 rate added “discouraged workers” who say they want and are available to work, have looked in the past year but not the past four weeks, and give a job-market-related reason for not actively looking. U-5 adds all the “marginally attached,” who want and are available to work and have searched in the past year, but not the past four weeks.

The broadest measure, U-6, includes discouraged and other marginally attached workers, plus people who are employed “part-time for economic reasons,” also called underemployed or involuntary part-time workers.

And, as if six different unemployment rates aren’t enough, Lawrence Katz at Harvard daydreams about a seventh. “A more expanded measure in which you included people whose wages were sufficiently low that they couldn’t lift their household out of poverty.”

For now, though, BLS’ limit is six. Rebecca Dixon, president of the National Employment Law Project, follows the U-6 closely. “The U-6 rate bumped up in February to 8%. It was at 7.5% in January,” she said. “Seeing that increase is an example of the labor market slowing down.”

Economist Gary Hoover at Tulane University watches all the rates, but said he pays special attention to the broadest unemployment measures when tracking longer-term trends. He’s most concerned “about what’s happening with the marginally attached part of the workforce, on the periphery of the economy.”

Hoover said these are likely to be workers with the least education and experience, more likely to be women and minorities. They’re the last hired and first fired in a downturn.

For him, the U-6 is “the canary in the coal mine, the harbinger of things to come, and it’ll probably show up later on in the U-3.”

Back in New York City, Aurora Azbill has left the unemployment rolls entirely, for now.

After being laid off at the end of 2024, she started a new job in February. “I needed a little bit more stability,” she said. “I’ve recently accepted a full-time position in the drapery part of things. So instead of clothes, I’m working with big curtains.”

They always need mending or replacing, as long as there are shows playing at the opera, the ballet, on cruise ships and on Broadway.

Universities that rely on federal grants and funding have been hit hard by cuts to federal programs. Research funding for the University of Pennsylvania has reportedly been frozen, federal grants for Columbia University are being withheld and the National Institutes of Health — by far the largest federal funder of university research — announced last month that it would cut the rate it pays for university facility costs on the scale of billions.

Some might say that these cuts are justifiable considering that universities often have large endowments and the schools can draw from those funds instead. However, those endowments are complicated, and as Elizabeth Popp Berman, a professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan, argues, they can’t make up the difference from lost federal funding.

Berman joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about why that is and what losing this funding means for universities. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: So, uh. I guess we start at the very beginning here, which is endowments. What are they? Because contrary to popular opinion, they are not just a giant pool of money.

Elizabeth Popp Berman: Right. The first thing to know about endowments is that they are actually tens of thousands of little specific funds. So when a donor gives money to the university, they give it with some specific intent in mind. So maybe it’s for a particular kind of cancer research, or maybe it is for a particular scholarship. Then the university agrees to hold that money and is allowed to spend the interest on it effectively on those specific things.

Ryssdal: So a dollar is not a dollar is not a dollar. Right? They can’t, you know, sort of replace that with something else. They just, they gotta do that.

Berman: Exactly, and that’s oversimplifying a little, but that’s what most of the endowment actually is.

Ryssdal: OK, so to the matter at hand, federal funding gets cut — as is happening now, and chances are it’s gonna happen more in the future — the point of this post is that university endowments cannot make up the difference. And the question then has to be why?

Berman: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of reasons really. First, they’re just not that large relative to the amount of money that the government contributes to universities. You know, most recently we’ve seen Columbia had $400 million immediately pulled from it. But the [Trump] administration said they [Columbia] had $5 billion in contracts outstanding that could be pulled, right? So even though Columbia’s got a $15 billion endowment, much of which they legally can’t spend anyway, it can’t cover something like that on more than a one-time basis.

Ryssdal: The other thing you point out in this post is that, and I think you cite the University of Michigan, your university specifically, it’s got like a $19-ish billion endowment, but it has tens of thousands of students, with huge obligations, and so, on a per-student basis, you can’t get there from here.

Berman: Yeah. And I think that’s another thing too, is that it’s easy to forget just how large these institutions actually are. So the University of Michigan has an annual budget of something around $13 billion, $14 billion. So again, you know, if you sort of translate this into the kinds of terms of kind of an ordinary family, right, if you make $100,000 and you have about that much in savings, it’s not like you can really just retire on that and support yourself.

Ryssdal: We’ve all heard of, and I actually have friends in academia who pointed out, that Ph.D. enrollments are being put on hold if not completely rolled back. What are you seeing in Ann Arbor? And the point to make here clearly is that you don’t speak for the university, but what’s your experience?

Berman: Sure. I mean, I think what you see right now is that research programs are being cut. Lines of work that I think most people in the public would be generally very supportive of — you know, we have a huge medical center that does tons of of cancer research, for example — those programs are just kind of grinding to a halt, and so the university’s doing a lot to try to backstop that in the short run. But right now they’ve said they’re gonna be able to backstop about maybe six months to kind of give people some time to transition, but there’s no long-term solution to federal funds going away.

Ryssdal: With the acknowledgement here that you are an academic and not a tax policy specialist, there is on the table, certainly in Washington, Vice President JD Vance has said he wants to tax university endowments at something like 35%, and they are now, if not tax-free, then much lower levels of taxation. What do you think of that?

Berman: I mean, I think it’s complicated because I do think that it’s a problem for the sector that there’s so much inequality between very wealthy institutions with large endowments, and the majority, you know, a large majority of colleges and universities that have almost no endowment to speak of. So I might support an endowment tax that was going to help fund underfunded parts of higher education. But I think right now what we’re looking at really is a potential endowment tax that is essentially going to fund tax cuts for the well-off.

Ryssdal: You mentioned inequality there. It should be pointed out that there are like 20 institutions of higher learning in this country with, you know, $20 billion endowments, and they get all the attention, but most schools have way less, if any, right? And I guess the point is these endowments do contribute to inequality.

Berman: Yeah. And I think it’s really important to remember is that, you know, when we read the news, we’re really reading about the same handful of five or 10 or 20 institutions that do have these large endowments, but most colleges are not in this position. Your regular regional university down the street that enrolls a lot of students in your community does not have an endowment that’s contributing in any significant way to its bottom line. And rising endowments have kind of contributed to that inequality, but, you know, as part of a larger story.

Ryssdal: All right, so look, here comes the “put up or shut up” question. If federal funding is really going away, which certainly seems to be the case, and endowments can’t make up the difference, as you lay out in this post, now what do we do?

Berman: I think if federal funds truly go away, universities will still exist, but they will just be smaller. They will not be globally competitive, and a lot of really important work that has been getting done will no longer happen.

Mike Samples is proud of the “Made in the USA” stamp he puts on his products. He’s owner of Monster Rings and Cages in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, and manufactures boxing rings and cages for fighting sports like wrestling and mixed martial arts. The company ships products all over the world and has made countless fighting rings for movie sets and even Madison Square Garden.

Samples sources as much steel from U.S. suppliers as he can.

“In the boxing and MMA community, you have a lot of ex-military people, and they certainly are happy to see ‘Made in the USA,’” Samples said.

One might expect tariffs on imported metal would just raise the prices of imported metal, but Samples said the price of his American-made steel is going up too.

His supplier for U.S. steel recently raised prices from about 60 cents per pound to 75 cents, he said. That’s about a 20% increase. Imported steel has a 25% hike from tariffs.

Samples believes paying a little more is worth it — especially if it can help him compete against foreign companies and create new jobs in manufacturing. But there is a limit.

“Now we’re taking some bad-tasting medicine that will eventually make us all good, you know, that’s my hope,” he said.

Monster Rings and Cages owner Mike Samples poses in front of a boxing ring frame assembled on his factory floor. (Justin Hicks/LPM)

Tariffs are causing increases in the price of domestic aluminum too.

Debra Dudley owns Oscarware based out of Bonnieville, Kentucky. It’s a small family company that makes grill accessories. She also hopes tariffs will give her a competitive edge against cheaper Chinese copies.

“We’ve had a lot of competitive knockoffs of everything we’ve done, basically coming in from China at lower cost and lower quality,” she said. “I can’t compete with that.”

Dudley said she’s stocked up on aluminum and has a low price fixed for the rest of the year. But her supplier told her that next time she orders some of that U.S.-made aluminum, prices are going to be higher.

“I’m asking why?” she said. “How are the tariffs on imports going to affect the materials that are actually made in the USA?”

Clark Packard, a researcher at the Cato Institutes, said the answer is pretty simple: U.S. metal makers are raising prices because they can.

“It ultimately comes down to competition, right?” Packard said. “By raising prices of foreign steel and aluminum through tariffs, domestic producers are given a sort of green light to raise their own prices.”

Packard said the rise in prices is also odd because demand is pretty low. The biggest users of raw metal are the automotive and construction industries and they’re waiting for market uncertainty and high borrowing costs to cool down.

“So prices should, in theory, be falling, but because of this added protectionism… It’s unfortunate, but not really surprising,” Packard said.

Packard has heard the argument that folks like Samples have made: maybe this will be a brief moment of pain that ushers in a new golden era of manufacturing, but he’s skeptical.

“It makes it really hard to invest when it’s so uncertain,” he said. “Historically, the economics don’t back up that idea.”

Still, Samples said he supports President Trump’s attempt to use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. And if it doesn’t pay off, he’ll have to wrestle with whatever comes next.

“Days when I think, you know, maybe I should just retire and forget it, which isn’t very often, then I remember, well, there’s nine or 10 families, depending on me,” Samples said, watching his workers grind and weld steel tubes.

As he drives around the Port of Baltimore, Mark Schmidt points out giant cranes used to unload cargo from ships.

“The cranes are the coolest part, I think,” said Schmidt.

Schmidt is president of Ports America Chesapeake, which runs Baltimore’s container ship terminal. He actually started his career at the port over 30 years ago repairing container ship cranes, and he still enjoys the challenge of moving cargo around.

“It’s a puzzle, and it’s sophisticated and very high speed and tech-y,” he said.

Those cranes are a prominent part of the Port of Baltimore, much of which was inaccessible for over 10 weeks after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge exactly one year ago. The bridge fell after it was hit by a container ship, the Dali. With the collapse of the bridge, six construction workers died, a major piece of infrastructure was destroyed, and the shipping channel to the port of Baltimore was blocked for more than 10 weeks. The more than 300-year-old port is known for being a hub for cargo such as cars, construction and farming equipment, and coal.

At Ports America Chesapeake, Schmidt said the company moved 35% fewer containers in 2024 compared to the year before. This affected revenue significantly. 

However, it could have been a lot worse. Early estimates of how long it would take to clear the shipping channel ranged from six months to a year. Instead, it took 74 days.

“It could have been two or three times as bad as what we encountered,” said Schmidt. “It really, really came back quickly.”

Ship traffic at the port of Baltimore is back to about 90% of where it was prior to the bridge collapse, according to Richard Scher of the Maryland Port Administration. 

At Trans American’s warehouse near the Port of Baltimore, a worker lashes a box of cargo to a flat metal rack before it goes on a ship. (Stephanie Hughes/Marketplace)

That’s being felt at storage facilities around the port. At Trans American Trucking and Warehouse’s Baltimore location near the port, workers lashed a giant wooden box of cargo to a flat metal rack before it was moved to a ship.  Last spring, they were doing a lot less of this work, said warehouse supervisor Timothy Summers.

“We barely had any trucks coming in, barely had any containers,” said Summers. “I thought with business slowing down, they might start laying people off, but good thing they didn’t.” 

One of Trans American’s owners, Craig McGraw, said things are pretty much back to normal now. He had been worried about losing customers in the long term. 

“The concern with us was that they were going to leave, go to another port and then not come back. But once they realized that it wasn’t going to be the six months, it was going to be shorter — Baltimore is a great port, so they decided to stay with it from the looks of it,” said McGraw.

Mark Schmidt, president of Ports America Chesapeake, stands outside its office at the Port of Baltimore. (Stephanie Hughes/Marketplace)

Baltimore is known for its expertise in handling cars and other big rolling machinery. It’s also the farthest inland port on the East Coast, which means items shipped here have less distance to cover on land.

Tinglong Dai, who studies operations management at Johns Hopkins, said there’s another factor that helped in the recovery: Some companies likely moved up shipments in anticipation of a longshoremen’s strike and tariffs. 

“There was a lot of rush, a lot of activity,” said Dai. 

Overall, the port handled about 46 million tons of cargo last year — the second-best year on record. Dai said whether that pace continues will depend a lot on economic factors outside of the port’s control.

That includes both tariffs and how much consumers still want to buy all the things shipped in those containers.

A whole lot more federal workers are looking for new jobs these days. The job site Indeed reports it saw a 50% spike in applications from current and former federal employees in February, particularly those who work at agencies that have been targeted by Elon Musk’s staff-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Federal jobs used to be considered stable. Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, said it’s common for civil servants to stick around for a long time. 

“If you go to any government agency and you talk to the career staff there, many will say that they’ve been working in the agency for 40 years, 20 years, 30 years. Turnover is very low in the federal government,” said Pollak. 

And it’s unusual to see lots of federal employees applying for new jobs outside the government. But it’s happening now. 

Pollak said ZipRecruiter data backs up what Indeed found. 

“Federal workers are looking for new jobs. And this is not just the workers who have been cut. … It is a much wider group than that. Many other workers in the federal government are worried that they could be on the chopping block next,” said Pollak. 

And many are trying to get out before they’re forced out.

But Andrew Stettner at the Century Foundation said it’s a tough time to be looking for a new job. 

“Hiring has really slowed down. We’re seeing college graduates have a more difficult time finding work, we’re seeing the time on unemployment starting to grow. So people are going into that job market,” said Stettner. 

Which may have trouble absorbing them. Especially in parts of the country that lose a lot of federal jobs all at once, like D.C. 

“And also in other parts of the country where there’s large concentrations of government workers, like Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska,” said Stettner. “We’ve seen the economists in those areas say we do not have enough open jobs that match the skills and talent of people that are being laid off.” 

One side effect of the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported goods will be a stronger dollar, which will make U.S. exports more expensive and less competitive abroad. Thing is, those tariffs — along with the administration’s approach to foreign policy — may be starting to have another negative effect on the economy: getting foreign investors to think twice about investing in the U.S.

One of the biggest effects of tariffs is that they make an economy more isolated. Teresa Fort, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, said trade barriers cut out foreign competitors, so American companies can take their market share.

“Workers and capital are going to move towards sectors that are probably not what the U.S. is best at doing,” Fort said.

In that case, Fort said that companies’ output would slow down. The lack of competition could make them complacent — even lazy.

“It might take more U.S. workers to make the same things we were making before,” Fort said. “That’s reduced productivity. And that’s going to translate into higher prices and less domestic consumption.”

In other words, slower economic growth. And that would make U.S. companies a less attractive target for investors.

Over the last few weeks, bond markets have been anticipating less growth thanks to the president’s tariffs.

In the short run, investors have been fleeing to safety, per Winnie Cisar, head of strategy at CreditSights.

“When you have people who are expecting slower growth, or even an economic contraction, they will move into asset classes that are viewed as less risky overall, like U.S. treasuries and also the U.S. dollar,” she said.

But Cisar said the president’s tariffs — and all of the uncertainty associated with them — are causing many investors to question even that strategy. Now, she said some are asking themselves whether they want to invest in the United States at all.

“Whether the administration is willing to go far enough to drive kind of a sour sentiment and actual selling of U.S. treasuries is very much an open question,” Cisar said.

Slower economic growth can make U.S. government bonds riskier. Teresa Fort at Dartmouth said if the economy stalls, U.S. debt will grow as a share of GDP, to a point where it starts to become unsustainable.

“And then, that is going to start giving the U.S. stronger and stronger incentives to want to default,” Fort said.

About a third of U.S. government bonds are held by foreign investors, many of them in countries the Trump administration is beefing with.

“Canadians are completely furious about Trump’s remarks that Canada should be a 51st state, and you’ve got these very, very big pension funds in Canada that control a lot of flows into the U.S.,” said Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And they are subject to political pressure within Canada.”

Meanwhile, President Trump’s decision to distance the U.S. from the European Alliance has caused the German government to ramp up its spending, especially on defense. All of a sudden, Mallaby said the European economy is looking relatively strong.

“This is the first time in as long as most people can remember that global portfolio allocators are saying ‘Hey, this could be the moment to switch your money out of American financial assets, into Europe,’” he said.

If foreign investors start doing that, the effects will ripple throughout the U.S. economy, said Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at UC Berkeley. For instance, if demand for government bonds starts to fall, the government will have to pay more interest to try to win investors back.

“So that will push up interest rates and borrowing costs across the board,” Eichengreen said.

And Eichengreen said a U.S. economy with less foreign investment is a smaller economy — which would mean less spending and lower incomes for Americans.

The star of the show is this 12-foot-long, four-foot-wide cylinder that’s getting lowered into the water. After half an hour, it reaches the bottom and goes to work.

“You have a bulk of fluid that passes through the membrane,” said Mark Golay, engineering director with OceanWell, who helped make this machine. “And then it’s pumped back up here to the panel.”

Like a lot of desalination systems, this one shoves salt water through a filter, and spits out fresh water on the other side. Unlike those other systems, this one is designed to work 1,500 feet beneath the surface, where water passes through the membrane on its own because of the immense water pressure. OceanWell said compared to other membrane-based systems that take water from close to the surface, its technology uses 30 to 40% less energy to produce fresh water.

Right now it’s getting tested in a reservoir about 40 miles from Downtown Los Angeles. It’s cheaper to try it out here, because the cylinder is installed right offshore and not too deep. But Golay said compared to deep sea water, fresh water is actually more difficult to process.

“That’s because there’s more stuff in this water that we have to filter out,” Golay said.

The company is based in California, which bounces in and out of drought every few years. Southern California primarily relies on the Colorado River, local groundwater and a network of reservoirs to quench the region’s thirst. But the river and the groundwater are shrinking from overuse, and the reservoirs have run low as the climate gets warmer and drier.

The machine getting tested is much smaller, with a diameter of about four feet. OceanWell estimates a commercial-sized machine would be 25 feet wide. (Courtesy OceanWell)

OceanWell has raised $11 million, which is enough to test this machine and build the next one that’ll actually go in the ocean. The biggest investor is Kubota, the agricultural machine company. There are also two dozen California water authorities that have signed on to be part of a working group.

They’re excited because OceanWell is the only company in the U.S. testing a solution like this. And when the drought gets bad enough, the water restrictions can be severe.

“We were disproportionately impacted by the drought like three four years ago … because we are 100% dependent on imported water,” said Mike McNutt with the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which is part of the working group, and runs this reservoir. “And because of that, we promised our communities that we would look for other alternative water resources.”

Last time there was a drought, McNutt’s customers had to operate on a quarter of the water they normally get. Now the district wants to be first in line if this tech becomes available, in case of another severe shortage.

“If we have a local water source, like what this can be,” McNutt said, “You could, in fact, have physical water molecules available to combat any emergency.”

The water in this reservoir doesn’t meet safe drinking water standards, but the machine filters out bacteria and chemicals. OceanWell CEO Robert Bergstrom drinks the filtered water. (Caleigh Wells/Marketplace)

Using the ocean as a drinking water source is not a new idea. Desalination with membranes has been around for decades.

“We have a mousetrap that works pretty well, actually. And in order to beat that, you have to have a hell of a mousetrap,” said environmental engineering professor David Jassby at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jassby said desalination has come a long way, but there’s one problem it hasn’t solved yet: its price can’t compete with alternatives.

“Desalinated seawater at a well-run plant costs about 48 cents a ton,” Jassby said. “Groundwater is, depends, but maybe less than 20 cents a ton. River water can be even cheaper.”

OceanWell claims its method is less expensive than regular desalination, because it uses so much less energy, and energy is the single greatest expense. The company’s next step is to test its system in the ocean, which it plans to do by the end of next year.

Consumer confidence data for March gives us a look at how people are thinking about the labor market. Views of current conditions didn’t move much between February and March. But when The Conference Board, the nonprofit think tank that puts out the survey, asked people about their job prospects six months down the road, that’s when they started to get anxious. 

If you look at the hard jobs data, you’ll see steady hiring and relatively low unemployment. But if you ask regular people, its a different sentiment.

“Consumers are not particularly excited about the state of the labor market,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, an economist with The Conference Board. She said this is the fourth month in a row of eroding confidence, with 28% of survey respondents now expecting fewer jobs to be available in six months. 

Economist Allison Shrivastava with the hiring site Indeed said workers have plenty to be anxious about “any time there is uncertainty among policies.”

And even President Donald Trump has said his policies are causing a “period of transition” in the economy. 

“It’s going to make people feel as though they don’t have a good hold on what the future brings,” said Shrivastava.

But the truth is, nobody really knows where the labor market is heading. Not the experts, and certainly not everyday consumers. 

So why do we bother asking them? 

“There’s one strand of thinking that says that actually you should kind of ignore this” and wait for signs of actual softening, said Preston Mui with the research group Employ America.

If workers are feeling insecure about their job prospects, “people are probably going to be less willing to ask for raises from their current employer,” said Mui. “When they go look for jobs, they’re probably willing to take worse jobs than they otherwise would.”

And in that way our expectations of the job market can start to shape reality.

We got another — honestly — lousy sign for the consumer economy Tuesday.

March’s consumer confidence index from The Conference Board fell again, for the fourth straight month. And it fell more than economists expected.

The expectations index dropped even more sharply. Like the name says, it measures consumers’ economic hopes and fears for the future. It’s now at its lowest point in 12 years and sitting well below the threshold that signals a recession is coming, according to The Conference Board.

Inflation expectations were up, expectations for future employment and income were down and confidence in future personal finances was down to its lowest level since 2022.

We’ve been here before, and pretty recently. 

When inflation ramped up in 2022, consumer sentiment tanked. But, said Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, “we did see strong consumer spending despite below-historical-average consumer sentiment.” 

But, there are some differences for consumers now. Lots of uncertainty — around tariffs, government layoffs, interest rates. And now we have a slowing economy.

“It’s an open question whether these fears of economic uncertainty really change behavior, or whether this is a repeat where people said one thing and did another,” said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank.  

But Adams said there is reason to think it’ll be different this time. Now, consumers are worrying about their employment and income. 

“Fears of job losses are more likely to translate into cutbacks in spending than fears of high prices,” said Adams.  

So far in 2025, consumers haven’t dramatically pulled back. 

But, Sofia Baig at polling firm Morning Consult said she’s seeing “little warning signs — I wouldn’t say flashing red yet, but spending numbers in January were quite a bit muted.”

Baig said lower-income consumers are doing worse and spending less.

Upper-income consumers have mostly ignored inflation and kept on spending, said Marshal Cohen at market-research firm Circana. But now, “your 401(k) and the stock market having a seesaw reaction. That gets that upper-end consumer nervous, and they pull back a little bit,” said Cohen. 

Overall, Cohen sees American consumers becoming more hesitant, asking themselves why they need to rush out and buy something now, when they can just wait a while. 

As the Trump administration implements economic policies like tariffs and cuts at the IRS, fears of a recession have gone up. Earlier this month on Fox News, President Trump was asked if he was expecting a recession this year and said, “there is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.” Other administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have echoed this sentiment. Bessent said the economy may need a “detox period.”

The economy is not in a recession right now, but the administration is signaling a slowdown might be coming. So “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University, about what a recession might look like and how that would impact the American people. Blyth has written several books, including “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea,” and he is co-author of the upcoming “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.” The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: Let’s set the stage for one second here. President Trump and his advisors have said in almost this many words, if there’s a recession, so be it. We’re shooting and we’re playing the long game here. We’re going to do a little short term pain for a little long term gain. Do you buy that?

Mark Blyth: I buy that there’s going to be short term pain, and it’s probably not going to be that short term. If they’re going where I think they’re going, this is a once-in-a-generation shift in how we run the global economy.

Ryssdal: Global economy, so it’s not just here?

Blyth: No, it’s the whole thing. Here’s how to think about it. For the past 40 years, the United States has basically been sending digital dollars called Treasury bills to the rest of the world to pay for all its imports. Imagine this, in 1975 the three biggest employers here were ExxonMobil, General Motors and Ford. 2025, the biggest employers are, in reverse order, Home Depot, Amazon Logistics and Walmart. In other words, we don’t make anything anymore. And eventually, all those digital dollars we’ve been sending out, somebody’s going to want something real for them. And we stopped making real stuff a long time ago. So whether it was Biden with the IRA, with green re-industrialization, or Trump with tariffs and trying to double down on a carbon model, it’s a bigger thing than just what’s going on for local pain and a little bit of Social Security here.

Ryssdal: Yeah, but look, I’m not going to be a Biden apologist, but he admitted he was playing the long game. We did a whole series about this, where he said it was going to take decades. Trump is now trying to do it in like an hour and a half.

Blyth: Yeah, I know. And lots of things will break, and it’s really difficult to execute this type of turn. But they do seem to be serious about, this is the direction of travel. America is no longer just writing IOUs to the rest of the world. Everyone else needs to rebalance. And that’s the one advantage the U.S. has. It can cause the pain to go elsewhere.

Ryssdal: Let’s talk about the pain domestically for a second. To be completely clear, we are not in a recession. A recession is not happening right now, but indicators are not great. If there is a recession in this country, it has typically been the federal government that has come in and supported people as we make our way through it. Based on what you see with this administration now, what do you anticipate happens if the economy goes south?

Blyth: There will be far less attempt to cushion the effects. Because this is going to be compounded by DOGE’s cuts. This is going to be compounded by the desire to do this alongside massive tax cuts. There’s simply no way to put on the fiscal brakes to stop that recession really hurting if you go down that track.

Ryssdal: This is a stupid question, but then what happens?

Blyth: That’s the $64,000 question, Kai. Nobody has said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea, why don’t we take stuff that’s been working reasonably well for the rest of the world and for us for the past 30 years, and let’s just trash it all in a two year period and rebuild the 19th century balance of power with us behind McKinley tariffs?’ If that’s what’s going on, it’s a really, really big challenge.

Ryssdal: Put on the political side of your political economy hat here. Do you suppose there’s a degree of economic pain that would make the politics of this untenable for the Trump administration?

Blyth: If you go after Social Security. Roosevelt thought that no one would ever touch it because it’s a contributory program. If they go after Social Security, that’s a really, really tough one. If they go after Medicaid to really fund these tax cuts, while at the same time firing people in the IRS who are tax collectors, then that’s a really hard sell to the public that you’re doing this for the greater reordering of the world to benefit the United States.

Ryssdal: Of course, that all plays into the austerity that Elon Musk and his minions have said that they want and that the President of the United States is going along with, right? They want to cut, cut, cut.

Blyth: And austerity means recession. I mean, they’re basically synonyms. You can’t have one without the other, so it’s kind of baked into the cake directionally.

Ryssdal: So as I sit here internally debating whether to ask you this question or not, I’m going to ask it anyway. Do you think they’re lying to us?

Blyth: I think there’s a real danger that what I could be doing, and a lot of other people are doing, are basically looking for designs within disorder. This could simply be sane-washing the way that the Trump administration is essentially just going for a grift, whether it’s on taxes, whether it’s hollowing out the state, we don’t know. But let’s assume for a second that the United States government isn’t just a giant grift machine, and this is the play. We got to think it through as to what’s going to be coming ahead, and also how we’re going to deal with the fallout from it.

Ryssdal: Let’s talk about that fallout for a second. The last big recession we had in this economy was 2008, 2009, the scarring of which, as we’ve talked about on this program, and economists and experts such as yourself know, the scarring from that lasted a decade or more. If, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but if this is worse than the Great Recession, what does that mean for the scarring for the next 10 to 20 years in this economy?

Blyth: What it means is it’s really hard to get back to where you were at the start. That was the lesson of the Great Recession. Because people’s skills atrophy, because people get afraid to invest. No one invests, in a recession, and then when no one invests, the investment collapses, the recession gets worse. It’s really hard to dig yourself out of this. And if you’re not going to do it with any type of state action to counterbalance it, if you’re going to basically say, bring it on, because we want to break things and purge the system, then there’s kind of two ways of looking at this. The world can be divided into people who think the economy can get into trouble, and if the state doesn’t step in to stop it, it’s one way traffic all the way down. And then there’s people who think, no, absolutely not. Let’s break things. And then when we do, there’ll be a huge amount of growth afterwards. We’re making a bet, one way or the other, that that’s going to be what’s happening.

Walmart is further expanding its reach in the beauty market. The big-box retailer announced another round of Walmart Start, its program that launches smaller beauty brands at the store. It’s also investing more in premium beauty products. Meanwhile, in recent earnings results, Ulta Beauty has reported it’s lost some market share, and Sephora is giving its stores a makeover.

You might not associate Walmart, a store whose tagline is “every day low prices,” with fancy face creams. But Joseph Nunes, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, said they’re considered affordable luxuries. 

“Those are the products that are sort of within everybody’s budget and they’re quite prone to buy when they’re in the shopping mood,” said Nunes.

And Nunes said, over the years, people have become less picky about where they buy their lotions and potions. 

“There are a lot of categories where the retail experience is less important,” he said.

That’s partly because stores like Ulta and Sephora have done away with the glass-case experience found at department stores.

“So you’re already in the space where you’re open to buying it at a retailer” versus directly from a brand rep at a counter, said Amarachi Chukwuma, a beauty consultant at market intelligence agency Mintel. 

Meanwhile, for Walmart, beauty is likely a safe bet. David Swartz at Morningstar said the category has bigger margins than, say, apparel. It also has an increasingly bigger reach, thanks to social media. Sales in the prestige beauty market grew by 7% last year. 

“For the most part, it’s an industry that’s constantly cranking out new products and also new brands,” Swartz said.

That’s because consumers tend to be willing to experiment, and beauty products require regular restocking. Many have come to see them as a necessity. 

“A lot of women and girls see it as part of their wellness routine,” he said.

Which means you’re more likely to buy it, even when you’re watching your wallet.

Americans will wager an estimated $3.1 billion on March Madness this year, according to the American Gaming Association.

That’s up 15% over last year, driven in part by increased betting on the women’s tournament. However, despite rapidly growing fan interest, opportunities to legally wager on women’s sports still lag. 

In last year’s NCAA women’s final, superstar Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes faced an undefeated South Carolina team. 

That drama helped it break the record for the most bet-on women’s sporting event ever, plus plenty of promotion.

“The big sportsbooks were putting out prop bets, so you could bet on over-unders, on player totals, whether it be points, rebounds, things like that,” said Gambling.com’s Christopher Boan.

Boan said those bets are an indicator of the increasing value sports betting companies see in women’s college basketball and women’s sports more broadly. 

“Because that’s where the growth is,” he said. “There’s only so many more NFL bettors you can get, only so many more MLB bettors that you can get, whereas there’s a lot more people out there who are maybe going to put a first-time bet on the Phoenix Mercury to win a WNBA title.”

That means there’s been healthy growth, but you’ll still have a harder time finding legal opportunities to wager on your favorite women athletes and teams, especially outside of high-profile tournaments and championship games, said Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross.

“Those you’re not going to see the same level of participation among the big sports books for the men vs. the women,” he said.

Alicia Jessop, an expert on the business of sports at Pepperdine University, said it’s “a huge missed opportunity” and that there’s a marketing gap at play. 

“Very likely if you live in the United States, you’ve seen a commercial for a sportsbook,” she said. “And I’m willing to bet you that that advertisement featured a male athlete.”

Jessop said companies willing to make bolder investments in reaching women’s sports fans could see a big return. 

Additionally, for growing leagues, sports wagering can be a tool to attract more eyeballs, said Meghan Chayka with the sports data analytics firm Stathletes. 

“If you made a small wager on a game, you’re far more likely to return in the fourth quarter even in a blowout versus an average fan that just flicks their TV off,” Chayka said.  

More viewers mean more ad and sponsorship dollars and lucrative deals for players. However, Alicia Jessop at Pepperdine said high stakes can also increase bad fan behavior, like player harassment. 

As betting markets grow, she says leagues have a responsibility to protect athletes.

The lowest-paid workers in the economy saw the fastest wage growth by far over the last five years according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. 

Adjusted for inflation workers in the bottom 10% of the income distribution saw their wages grow more than 15% between 2019 and 2024.

This time five years ago between February and April 2020, about 22 million people lost their jobs, many of them low-wage workers. 

“Workers in leisure and hospitality and retail — all of those industries were essentially shut down,” said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute.

Gould said when things reopened and employers started hiring again, “Workers had a moment to pause. We had, one time in history, better unemployment insurance programs and they could be a little bit choosier.” That meant employers had to pay more. 

This happened across the economy, including for those in higher-paying jobs, to a lesser extent. Wages for these workers have risen about 6% or 7% since 2019, compared to 15% for people in the lowest-paying jobs. 

“It’s also 15% starting from a very low base — if you’re making $10 an hour, 15% growth is a buck-fifty” said Brad Hershbein at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Hershbein said even with that jump in wages many of the lowest-paid workers are still struggling, and that inflation has hit them particularly hard.

“[Those workers] tend to buy things that are more subject to inflation, and those things also represent a larger share of all the things that they buy,” he said. “Take rent for example, we know that rent is a bigger share of people’s budget at the bottom than at the top.”

Rent has gone way up in the last five years, which Hershbein says has eaten into those wage gains.