Business

Online travel sites like Priceline, Kayak and Booking.com rang out 2024 on a high note, according to quarterly earnings reported by parent company Booking Holdings on Thursday. The strong results followed better-than-expected readings from Expedia and Airbnb earlier this month.

Travel saw healthy growth last year, with airline and cruise bookings hitting new all-time highs, and industry groups expect bookings to push higher yet in 2025. Though the new administration has brought a bit of turbulence.

The days of post-pandemic “revenge travel,” when bookings were growing at double-digit rates, might be over. “But the ghost of revenge travel, the spirit of revenge travel, lives on,” said Seth Borko, director of research for travel news site Skift.

He said people seem to have come out of the pandemic with travel as a higher priority. A recent Skift global survey found consumers were most excited to spend discretionary income on travel.

“What we think we’re seeing, both short term and long term, is travel as an identity, right? And experiences as an identity,” he said.

But as we saw in Friday’s consumer sentiment survey, buyers might be feeling a bit unsettled. That could be affecting travel plans for May and June, said analyst Patrick Scholes at Truist Securities.

“The bookings are kind of mediocre. They’re not going down, but they’re not, you know, they’re not exactly on fire either,” he said.

Scholes said tariffs could have a direct effect on travel because they affect exchange rates. A stronger dollar would be good for U.S. travelers internationally. But foreign tourists’ money won’t go as far here.

“One thing that’s interesting we’re watching very closely is inbound Canadian to the United States,” he said.

Typically the U.S. gets its highest number of foreign tourists from Canada, followed by Mexico.

Flyers are also voicing concerns about safety, said Jay Sorensen, an airline consultant. There have been several high-profile air travel incidents in recent weeks.

“Of course, it’s still safe to fly. But then you add to it the whole disruption that the Trump administration is creating in terms of the FAA, so that begins to magnify itself a little bit in terms of perhaps a hesitation for some,” he said.

The new government recently cut hundreds of jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration, but stipulated that air traffic controllers and other safety personnel would not be affected.

Western sanctions on some oil producers, like Iran, Russia and Venezuela, have caused a growing number of oil tankers to “go dark.” That is, to shut off the tracking system that could alert authorities of their movements.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates a whopping 43% of seaborne crude oil exports traveled on “dark ships” in recent years.

That 43% is just an estimate because it’s hard to get an exact number. But the fact is, a whole lot of sanctioned oil is still moving around the global economy.

If you’re piloting an oil tanker and you shut off your transponder, you don’t disappear altogether. 

“This is not Star Trek. We don’t have cloaking devices,” said Ellen Wald of the Atlantic Council. 

But Wald said it does make it harder to find you, which might involve combing through satellite photos and the like.

“It’s just tedious,” said Wald. 

So ships go dark to try and hide their cargo. This often happens when two oil tankers rendezvous at sea, said Ian Ralby, CEO of the maritime consultancy I.R. Consilium.

“ If you have a small tanker, that takes sanctioned oil out from Iran, and transships onto a much larger tanker that is carrying a cargo of legitimate oil, they can obscure the fact that that oil is partially sanctioned,” said Ralby. 

And it turns out it’s not hard to find a buyer for oil of questionable origin. Erica Downs, an energy researcher at Columbia University, said a lot of dark-shipped oil ends up at small, independent refineries in China.

“ These refineries operate on very thin margins and they’re highly opportunistic crude buyers,” said Downs. 

This means they’ll take the lowest cost crude, sanctioned or not. Oil on dark ships also winds up in South Korea, India and Egypt, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research study.

This all means that sanctions haven’t really squeezed the oil market, said Robin Brooks of the Brookings Institution.

“Global oil supply was not at all materially impacted,” said Brooks. 

He said neither was the price of oil. What has happened, with so many major oil suppliers under sanction, is that the global oil trade has basically split into two parallel channels, said Ian Ralby of I.R. Consilium.

“ If you put everyone outside of the tent, they’re just going to make their own tent. And that’s essentially what we’ve done. We’ve created a new marketplace for sanctioned actors and their enablers,” said Ralby. 

Another unintended side effect, said Ralby: these tracking systems are a safety feature to help ships avoid collisions. It’s not a great idea to turn them off.

In our weekly I’ve Always Wondered series, we tackle all of your questions about business, finance and the economy.

Have you ever wondered why gas prices end in nine-tenths of a cent? What you should do with old savings bonds? Why cereal doesn’t come in resealable bags? Or how tariffs will impact the economy?

We’ve got you covered. Let us know what questions you want answered using the form below.

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This is just one of the stories from our “I’ve Always Wondered” series, where we tackle all of your questions about the world of business, no matter how big or small. Ever wondered if recycling is worth it? Or how store brands stack up against name brands? Check out more from the series here.

Richard Rowley asks: 

What do retail stores do with damaged merchandise that is returned to the store by customers? Like a toaster that doesn’t work or a dress shirt with a tear in the fabric.

Returns are not only costly for companies – they’re also costly for consumers in the long run. 

Customers returned an estimated $890 billion worth of goods in 2024, which amounted to 17% of all merchandise, according to a report from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, a logistics division within the United Parcel Service. 

That’s almost triple the $309 billion worth of goods customers returned in 2019. “Returns are a very costly problem for retailers,” said Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at the Santa Clara Leavey School of Business.

Returns increased over the pandemic as online retailers offered generous, free return and shipping policies to consumers in an effort to compete with one another, said Lauren Beitelspacher, a marketing professor at Babson College. 

If a customer returns a product that was already damaged, some retailers will send it back to the manufacturer, and then ask the manufacturer to refund them for selling a defunct product, Beitelspacher said.

If the customer is responsible for any damage, like a crack on the item or a hole in the garment, retailers who do accept the return will likely just end up throwing it away, Beitelspacher said. Most resellers don’t have the capacity to fix an item and then resell it, with the exception of some stores that sell outdoor products, she added. 

Many online stores will also tell customers to keep their item because of the hassle of handling returned items. Generous return policies have become an increasingly bigger headache for retailers, especially online stores who lose out on the sale and have to pay for the cost of shipping, retail experts told Marketplace. 

They also lead to higher consumer prices, since retailers want to compensate for reduced profit margins.

“You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. If you don’t have a good returns policy, people are going to go shop elsewhere, because returns help people feel comfortable making purchases.” Beitelspacher said. ”But if you do have a good returns policy, people will take advantage. So what you see a lot now is a lot of retailers just saying, ‘Just keep it.’” 

During the pandemic, e-commerce business rose exponentially, and retailers tried to lure customers to shop online through their return policies, Beitelspacher said. But some customers who ordered clothing purchased multiple items if they didn’t know their size, and then returned the ones that didn’t fit, Beitelspacher explained. 

“If something wasn’t damaged before, and you would return it to a store, they could just hang it back up and put it back out on the floor. But now that we have more e-commerce, it’s been out of the inventory for weeks at that point,” Beitelspacher said. 

Retailers struggle with handling returned merchandise even if it’s in pristine condition, especially seasonal clothing items. If you returned a sweater in January, retailers will struggle to sell it at the original price now that the weather is becoming warmer, Kalyanam said. 

Return rates tend to be high in the apparel and fashion industry, reaching 20% to 30%, he said.

The problem is worse for e-commerce sites because they have to pay for shipping and return shipping, Kalyanam added. “It really, really hurts their financials,” he said. 

The cost of consumer goods across the board have been rising since the pandemic, including apparel (although price increases are far less than other items, like food). 

“Part of the reason that costs are going up for consumers is because of a huge increase in returns coming out of the pandemic,” Beitelspacher said. 

To reduce returns, Amazon uses a concept inspired by the andon cord method, which empowers assembly line workers to stop production if they find certain parts are repeatedly faulty, Kalyanam said. If Amazon discovers that customers are excessively returning an item, the retail giant might decide to stop selling it, he explained. 

Amazon will also tell customers if an item has frequently been returned, Kalyanam added. 

Some retailers are also offering less generous return policies, lowering the period from 60 days to 30 days and providing store credit instead of a full refund, Beitelspacher said. 

“It is better, when we can, to go to the store and touch the product, try it on, get some information from a sales associate if it’s a high-involvement purchase, and just really pause and think to ourselves, ‘Is this what I really want?’” Beitelspacher said.

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Whether it’s the jobs report, gross domestic product or the Consumer Price Index, public data is key to understanding what’s going on in the economy. But under the Trump administration, public data increasingly looks to be at risk of disappearing, or even fall under the influence of Elon Musk, which begs the question: can private data take the place of public data?

“If we think about the ways that companies collect data, it ranges so widely from different company practices and styles,” said Tara Sinclair, professor of economics at George Washington University. “That’s why it’s so important that we have government statistical agencies.”

Sinclair spent nearly a decade working in the world of private data at Indeed, where she served as chief economist and founded the Indeed Hiring Lab. She spoke to “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about what private data can, and can’t, do.

Kai Ryssdal: You have spent a good chunk of your career working on private indicators about this economy, and I guess the first thing I want to get your sense of is how hard it is to take data from private sources and make it useful to the public.

Tara Sinclair: Well, that’s a fantastic question, because it is really, really hard. If we think about the ways that companies collect data, it ranges so widely from different company practices and styles, and to be able to try and take that data and condense it into something that answers a question that is important to the general public really takes specific tools, specific skills, and it’s typically outside the scope or objectives that any one particular company has. That’s why it’s so important that we have government statistical agencies.

Ryssdal: Yes, go back to that thing you just said, “Outside the scope of what any specific business has.” These businesses are collecting this data for their business purposes, not to clarify things for the public.

Sinclair: Right, exactly. And they have their own objectives, and those objectives can change over time, so they don’t have necessarily a need to keep things consistent from month to month or quarter to quarter. The way that it’s so important for us to have that information to be able to make longer run decisions for the general public.

Ryssdal: You’ve got a couple of decks that you put together as you were doing presentations on this throughout your career, and there was a phrase that hit me that I’d like it explained. You talk about “unstructured data,” and you call that something of a peril, and I want to know why.

Sinclair: Well, oftentimes people think that if we can just go and get the data directly from companies, it’s going to be this, you know, amazing archeological find. And it is, but it requires you all of the tools and digging of archeologists, like it’s not just sitting there as this glorious, perfect data set. It’s rather this giant, unstructured mess that has several perils. One of them is that we might find the wrong story from that data, rather than if we had a more comprehensive view from all of the companies in the economy, rather than just a few select ones that are willing to offer the data. I think that’s one of the biggest concerns.

Ryssdal: It does bear a mention here that private data — sometimes called high frequency data, we’ve done stores on that in the past — this private data already plays a role in government policy decision making. You know, on the margins, but it’s there.

Sinclair: Oh, absolutely. And it can be a great input. In fact, it may be one way that we can save people time, because instead of filling out a survey, maybe we can just collect the data of their shopping habits directly from the store. That sort of thing is already being used at statistical agencies and is really improving their efficiency, but it’s got to be done carefully, because we need to make appropriate adjustments for the fact that that data is coming from a select set of sources. We have to make sure that what we’re observing is actually answering the question that we want to be answering.

Ryssdal: So here comes the more subjective question, what is the risk for this economy if government economic data becomes unreliable or something short of unreliable, just gets called into question?

Sinclair: Right, That is really, really scary, because that’s something that I think the statistical agencies have worked very hard to get that credibility. It may be the case that the typical American household isn’t looking up what’s going on with inflation from month to month, or GDP from quarter to quarter, but it is the case that it’s affecting them because it’s affecting decisions that are being made on their behalf, by their employers, by their local and state governments, and without that clear information, we’re going to be in the dark making our decisions. Forward-looking decisions are just already hard enough.

Consumers in this economy are not thrilled. At all.

Their sentiment fell by almost 10 percentage points between January and this month, according to survey numbers released Friday by the University of Michigan.

But behind that decline, there’s a stark divide between consumers. Because when you break sentiment down by political affiliation, you see two entirely different stories. 

There is one thing that consumers across the political spectrum agree on: inflation isn’t going anywhere.

“Regardless of where you lean, I think there’s concern over what does it mean and how’s it going to impact me?” said Sonia Lapinsky with the financial advisory firm AlixPartners. 

She said inflation fears and talk of tariffs make consumers feel uncertain. And uncertainty shows up as negative sentiment.

“They don’t want to spend money, they don’t want to take any risks. So that’s what we’re seeing, I think, a lot in the consumer, for sure,” said Lapinsky. 

Republican sentiment is about the same as the previous month. Meanwhile, Democrats are freaking out.

That switch happened — you guessed it — in the fall.

“And then everything went pretty haywire after that, of course, as the political bias I think gets baked into that data set,” said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial. He’s hopeful the political chasm will start to shrink soon.

“There’s probably some shock factor on maybe both sides coming out of the election. … So I would expect some of these sentiment indicators to normalize a bit,” said Turnquist.

But the divide didn’t start in November.

Michael Green, chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management, said consumer sentiment polarized in 2023, when the University of Michigan stopped gathering data by phone and started using an internet survey.

“You can imagine a phone interviewer saying something along the lines of, ‘OK, so you’re predicting a dramatic jump in inflation,’ and somebody on the phone responding and saying, ‘No, I mean, I just think inflation is really high,’” said Green. 

Meaning that when you’re talking to another person, you’re more likely to moderate your view. Now that it’s people alone with their computers, “you have absolutely no obligation to fill in the survey with any form of accuracy. You can basically reflect any wild view,” he said. 

While consumer sentiment remains divided, business leaders are feeling more confident. New data from The Conference Board said CEOs are the most optimistic they’ve been in three years.

There’s another casualty from the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development: Funding for agriculture research at 17 labs at U.S. universities is now frozen. The labs are laying off workers, and some research is on hold.

David Hughes got the stop work order from USAID at the end of January. Hughes is director of the USAID Innovation Lab on Current and Emerging Threats to Crops at Penn State and was helping farmers in Africa fight a caterpillar that eats corn.

“And that can cause damages and losses to yield between 10% to 40% per year — it depends,” he said. “And we had scaled up an incredibly successful tool.”

The tool? A type of small, parasitic wasp that eats the caterpillars. Hughes’ lab got a grant of up to $39 million from USAID and used part of the money to mass produce and release the caterpillar-killing wasps.

But that money was frozen as part of a 90-day review period. Hughes’ lab had to stop work in five African countries and laid off 40 to 50 local staffers.

Hughes said it’s good to try to root out waste at USAID and thinks too much money is spent on consultants — but he doesn’t want research funding cut. He said more money should go toward science, which can help American farmers. (The same ones who have depended on food purchases from USAID.)

“We need a global surveillance system for problems that could come here — because they always come here — and then respond to them effectively based on training we’ve done in places like Kenya or DRC, etc.,” he said.

In an emailed statement to Marketplace, a State Department spokesperson said the review is aimed at “restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests.” Programs that serve those interests will continue. Those that don’t will not.

The manufacturing sector has been pretty sluggish in recent years, partially thanks to high interest rates and weak customer demand. But there are some signs that the manufacturing sector has been getting busier lately.

Up until last month, the manufacturing sector had been contracting for more than two years, according to the Institute for Supply Management. In the last few months, however, orders of manufactured goods have been growing.

“What appears to be happening is our conservatism on investing in capital and long-life durable goods is easing a little bit,” said ISM’s Tim Fiore.

It helps that interest rates have come down some, he said. And the equipment and other goods companies bought early in the pandemic might be getting old.

“People need to replace capital, people need to replace consumable goods,” he said.

It’s still too early to tell whether the recent uptick in manufacturing activity is a long-term trend, according to Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, a senior manager of business cycle indicators at the Conference Board.

For instance, some companies might be making one-off orders because they’re worried about new tariffs — “making sure that I’m going to get the goods before the prices go up, before tariffs go up,” she said.

Either way, Zabinska-La Monica thinks an uptick in new orders today means more spending on production and hiring in the future.

Gambling is inescapable these days, with options everywhere from your phones to convenience stores. If you love this, credit Massachusetts. If you think this is a force for bad — blame Massachusetts.

“Scratch & Win” is a new podcast from Boston-based GBH News about how we got here with our gaming/gambling across the country. It turns out Massachusetts has a major role to play through the lottery. Ian Coss is the host of “Scratch & Win.” He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Sounds like the Bay State was, what should we call it? A cauldron of innovation when it comes to gambling and lotteries?

Ian Coss: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. A really important thing to understand is that early on, when the state lotteries got rolling in the ’60s and ’70s, these were incredibly conservative agencies. They were terrified of breaking the public’s trust, of getting infiltrated by the mob. So they did not try a lot of new things. What happens in Massachusetts is that the state lottery winds up in the hands of this state treasurer who was kind of a vaudeville guy. He’d literally grown up the son of a vaudeville stage hand. He loved to sing. He had this sort of showman personality.

This is Bob Crane, that state treasurer, singing at a nursing home back in the 1970s. He had this whole group called The Treasury Notes that used to go around and perform.

You can see how the culture in Massachusetts around innovation, experimentation and really entertainment, was very different from the start.

Brancaccio: We think of like drawing ping pong balls in a random drawing when you think of the lottery. But of course, another part of it is the scratch ticket.

Coss: Scratch tickets are the bread-and-butter game of all state lotteries. That’s not just Massachusetts. It’s something like two-thirds of all lottery sales, and that’s $100 billion industry, if you want to call it an industry. And scratch tickets start in Massachusetts. It really is the first and most important of the innovations that happened here. And I spent some time at a convenience store in Quincy, Massachusetts. I met this man who’s a mechanic, who did not want to share his name, but he would come there every day on his lunch break and spend literally hundreds of dollars.

One day when I ran into him, he’d already spent $300 and won nothing. He said he does this because he’s dreaming on hitting the big one so he can retire. He’s 75 years old and has nothing saved for retirement.

And that’s really — I mean, the scratch ticket, if you think about it, that is instant gambling, anywhere, anytime, in the palm of your hand. It started in 1974 in Massachusetts.

Brancaccio: Instant gratification. And how does that vignette help us understand where we are today nationwide?

Coss: Lotteries, they kind of did the political work and a lot of the cultural work of bringing gambling out of the shadows of society and into the open. You know, back in the ’60s, gambling was something you associated either with Las Vegas or the mob. And lotteries, by taking this thing that was vice, that was in the shadows, putting the state’s stamp of approval on it, it really brings it out into the open. And that’s what sets the stage for casino expansion in the 1990s, for states to get into sports betting, and really everything that we’re living in today.

Elon Musk, the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, says that tens of millions of people over the age of 100 are marked as “alive” in the U.S. Social Security system.

This week, he tweeted a spreadsheet showing how many people in the system are in each age bracket. More than 1.3 million people are marked as between the ages of 150 and 159, while almost 2,800 are listed as 200 and older. 

“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” tweeted Musk, implying that the Social Security Administration could still be distributing benefit checks to these people. 

President Donald Trump also expressed concern that people are receiving “fraudulent” payments. 

“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,” Trump said. 

But data on the Social Security Administration’s website shows that only about 89,000 people over the age of 99 are receiving payments on the basis of their earnings. And there are only an estimated 108,000 centenarians living in the U.S., according to United Nations data, while the oldest known human being lived to the age of 122. 

The idea that millions of centenarians are still receiving benefits is “preposterous,” said Eric Kingson, a professor emeritus of social work at Syracuse University and an expert on Social Security. 

“This is part of an orchestrated attack to undermine Social Security,” Kingson said. 

SSA Acting Commissioner Michelle King recently left the agency over DOGE’s attempts to access Social Security recipient information, and dozens of probationary SSA employees have been offered job reassignments. 

Social Security has records on millions of people, but that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving payments, said Charles Blahous, a former public trustee for Social Security and Medicare who served as deputy director of President George W. Bush’s National Economic Council. 

“There are many people who were born more than 150 years ago for whom Social Security lacks information about their death, just like we lack information about a lot of things involving people who lived that long ago,” Blahous said. 

The SSA also says it has a special code in place to stop payments from going to people over the age of 115.

Wired magazine reported that the number of people in the 150-year age bracket may have to do with the programming language used by the SSA, known as COBOL, or the Common Business Oriented Language. The 65-year-old system can still be found at government agencies, businesses and financial institutions. 

Basically, when there is a missing or incomplete birthdate, COBOL defaults to a reference point. The most common is May 20, 1875, when countries around the world attended a convention on metric standards. Someone born in 1875 would be 150 in 2025, which is why entries with missing and incomplete birthdates will default to that age, Wired explained. 

Another explanation for some centenarians being on the books: Social Security benefits are provided to qualified widows and widowers, who have to wait until they reach a certain age to receive payments, said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University.

If there was a large age gap between a couple, and one partner who’s now deceased was born over 100 years ago, the SSA would still need to maintain the information of that deceased person, Kotlikoff said. 

The SSA does make mistakes, though. A report from the agency found that between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, the agency sent out nearly $72 billion in improper payments, which were mostly overpayments. That’s about $9 billion a year. 

It might sound like a lot of money, but it’s a very small amount relative to the $1.5 trillion in benefits the Social Security Administration paid out last year, said Richard Himelfarb, a political science professor at Hofstra University. 

That $9 billion is less than 1% of expenditures, he pointed out. It’s also a tiny fraction of last year’s federal deficit, which stood at more than $1.8 trillion.

“If you want to save money, if you want to really reduce the deficit,” Himelfarb said, “you’re going to have to do more than find waste and fraud and abuse in Social Security.”

The U.S. added a record amount of solar power generating capacity in 2024. That helped push the share of power that comes from renewables up to 24%.

All of that is according to a report out Thursday from Bloomberg’s energy research arm and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

The burst of growth in solar power was helped along by tax credits supported by the Biden administration. Now the industry is figuring out how it might navigate a future without those credits.

The solar industry is no stranger to challenges: tariffs on imported panels, labor shortages, long waits to connect new projects to the grid. 

“Many here call it the solar coaster, kind of up and down and up and down,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

In 2024, the ride was mostly up. Tax credits were available and regulations stayed fairly steady, she said. And when that’s the case, “People are willing to either invest their personal capital and put something on their home or literally hundreds of millions of dollars and build something,” said Hopper. 

Whatever happens to the tax credits, solar has something going for it in the energy market, said Dennis Wamsted at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

“We’ve gotten to a point where it’s just incredibly cheap to build, and it provides electricity that has no variable fuel cost,” said Wamsted. 

Electricity demand is growing again in the U.S. for the first time in about 15 years as more data centers, manufacturing plants and electric vehicles suck up more power. So, Wamsted said, solar’s speed of deployment works to its advantage.

“You can build a solar plant in 12 to 18 months. If you want to build that as a gas plant, it’s going to take you four to five years,” said Wamsted. 

And unlike a natural gas plant or even a wind turbine, solar arrays can be set up pretty much anywhere, said Tara Narayanan at BloombergNEF.

“You can also have solar projects that are a lot smaller, and can, you know, be on a field, can be in slightly less sunny parts of the country,” said Narayanan. 

So if Congress rolls back tax credits that have benefited the solar industry, other factors, Narayanan said, may work in its favor. 

But, the industry is still on that solar coaster, said Abigail Ross Hopper at the Solar Energy Industries Association. 

“It feels a little bit like, you know, when you’re kind of going fast around a corner, and you’re banking up on the side, right? It feels a bit like that,” said Hopper. 

And, she said, they’re waiting to see if they’ll go up or down.

In late January, critical government data sets used by health researchers and economists disappeared from government websites in response to executive orders and memoranda from President Trump’s administration. Though some of those tools came back online, the purge sparked a data downloading frenzy among researchers and academics worried about the future of federal statistics. 

David Van Riper, director of spatial analysis at IPUMS, an organization at the University of Minnesota focused on making government data easier for the public to use, spoke with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about the importance of government statistics. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Kai Ryssdal: This will sound like a silly question, but I don’t really think it is. Why does what you do matter?

David Van Riper: So, I think of Federal Statistical data sets like an X-ray. They provide information about the population throughout the U.S., diving all the way down to individual neighborhoods. You know, thinking of it as an X-ray, we can really hone in on various parts of the body and figure out what’s going on in our communities.

Ryssdal: Okay, so given that the state of play here with access to federal data is in flux — it does seem like some of the data has come back — some of it, maybe not. My question is, was there a moment in the last three and a half, four weeks when you woke up and said, “Oh, shoot, this is bad?”

Van Riper:  Yeah. So I went to bed on Thursday, January 30, kind of thinking that the next day was going to be a kind of a regular work day and I woke up on the 31st and got to my office and started looking at Slack and social media, and started to realize that, “Oh, a lot of the Centers of Disease Control data are not available anymore.” And started to realize that, “Oh, this could become a problem for people who rely on these data to carry out their day-to-day jobs.”

Ryssdal: Say more about those problems.

Van Riper: Yeah, so you know, a lot of people have built workflows. They kind of build these data sets into their day-to-day operations. They’re continually going to federal statistical websites to look up documentation, to download data files, and all of a sudden those were no longer accessible. And if you didn’t have those data sets downloaded to your local computing system, you started to get real nervous about how you were going to access those data, potentially long time into the future. 

Ryssdal: You and your colleagues, in point of fact, actually spent some frenzied moments there in sort of late January, early February, downloading basically everything you could.

Van Riper: We did. We wanted to make sure that we had all of the data and documentation, especially that we needed for our particular data products. We were also, you know, getting inquiries from groups around the country asking us if we had grabbed, you know, data set X or data set Y, and we were in communication with other organizations and people who were also kind of grabbing and downloading as much data as they could.

Ryssdal: We don’t know what’s going to happen with federal data. The management of it right now is chaotic at best. And I guess that leads to this question, what happens if, in six weeks, somebody flips a switch and this data just vaporizes and never comes back?

Van Riper: I think the research community has done a lot of work in the last, you know, three weeks to download as much data as they could as it’s come back online. Right now it’s mostly we’re going through a process of documenting who has what data. Going forward, though, if federal statistical products are delayed or are no longer provided, if they’re canceled, it’s going to be like we’ve taken that X-ray machine away from a doctor. We’re not going to know what’s going on in communities and being able to measure whether or not specific policies are having the expected impact, you know, those, those statistical data sets are really fundamental for that measurement.

Ryssdal: So it’s, you know, it’s interesting. I went to your website, and I went to the mission statement, and the first sentence in the mission statement is, “democratizes access to the world’s social and economic data for current and future generations.” That seems unobjectionable. And I guess I wonder, as a guy now who’s been doing this for decades, right? What do you make of this current moment?

Van Riper: Um, I think it’s definitely concerning, right? I think we’ve never seen such a widespread removal of public access to data that you know should be made available to the public. You know, it’s all paid for by our tax dollars, and without that public data, you really have to rely on other channels of communication, which might be biased or which might be, you know, telling you a story they want you to hear. But we as a population aren’t allowed to see the data to make our own assessments of what’s going on.

OpenAI said ChatGPT now has more than 400 million weekly active users, up 30% in the last couple of months. The growth comes as chatbot competition has been heating up with the release of highly capable but purportedly much cheaper to build models from Chinese company DeepSeek. The success of those free, open-source models has raised questions about how artificial intelligence companies can sustainably monetize their products and whether they can recoup the billions of dollars invested.

Four hundred million weekly active users is nothing to sneeze at, said Eric Seufert, an independent tech analyst at Mobile Dev Memo. 

“But the problem is, consumers are just going to migrate to whichever model or whichever app they feel best serves them,” said Seufert.

About a month ago, DeepSeek topped Apple’s download charts. This week, it’s the latest version of xAI’s Grok. Then there’s Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. 

Large language models have become a commodity, said Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of cognitive science at New York University and author of “Taming Silicon Valley.”

“Everybody’s using the same formula to make essentially the same kind of thing, which makes it hard for any of them to say, you know, their product is distinct from anybody else’s,” said Marcus.

Which means companies are likely to compete on price, said Ted Mortonson, tech strategist at Baird.

“You’re going to see a race to zero in the near term,” he said.

Most companies already offer a free tier, and they’ll be under pressure to keep lowering prices for advanced features, said Mortonson.

Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X that the company was losing money, even on its pro subscriptions, which cost $200 a month. 

Computing costs should come down as semiconductor efficiency improves, said Doug O’Laughlin at SemiAnalysis.

“As hardware improves, yeah, we see cost downs of like one-tenth, one one-hundredth,” said O’Laughlin.

But consumer chatbot memberships aren’t likely to drive profits for AI companies, said analyst Andy Thurai at Constellation Research. What will is tailoring AI systems for industries that will pay a premium for productivity gains, like health care, law and finance.

“It’s about the business use case and the business problems you solve,” said Thurai.

And, AI companies might also look to make money the way most apps do, with advertising.

Walmart held its quarterly earnings call Thursday morning at 7, to be exact, in Bentonville, Arkansas. And if you were listening in, you would have heard CEO Doug McMillon bragging about the highlights of the retail giant’s business.

Its advertising sales grew 29% last quarter on an annual basis. Its third-party marketplace grew 34%. Its membership income grew by double digits too. Notice, though, that none of those things is actually retail sales.

Walmart is the quintessential big box. Right?

“Not anymore,” said Michael Baker, who heads consumer research at investment firm D.A. Davidson. “They’ve done a pretty good job the last couple of years investing in these alternative businesses.”

Baker said those “alternative” businesses include taking a cut of revenue from third parties who sell through Walmart’s website. Walmart also sells ads on said website. It offers shipping services too.

One reason Walmart can do all that, said Cuihong Li, a business professor at the University of Connecticut, is that it’s really big.

“They have the scale. They have the infrastructure. And they have the expertise,” said Li.

Walmart has thousands of trucks, warehouses and stores — plus a fancy web platform — all initially built for its sprawling retail business.

“When you build up all of these resources that may have excess capacity, if you can sell that on the marketplace, it makes sense,” said Jason Miller, a professor of supply chains at Michigan State.

He said this isn’t an original idea. For instance, Amazon has allowed third-party sellers on its platform for decades. Walmart is following suit.

“Some of these resellers may be selling niche goods that Walmart itself would never want to stock in inventory and sell itself,” said Miller. “And what it does is it gives the consumer a broader product portfolio.”

Baker of D.A. Davidson said there’s a reason Walmart is leaning into its advertising, logistics and marketplace services.

“All fall into this heading of alternative businesses, and all have higher margins. They’re pretty profitable,” he said.

Baker said Walmart can use that profit to keep prices low at its retail stores. That could come in handy, he said, “at times when the core business might be a little bit more, you know, impacted by some external factors.”

Because at the end of the day, retail is still Walmart’s core business. It sells more stuff to Americans than anyone else.

Inside a warehouse in Rancho Dominguez in south Los Angeles County, four Isuzu trucks are in various stages of repair. These trucks were originally headed for the scrap yard or abroad, where they’d continue to be driven and pollute for years to come.  

“Instead, now they get at least 10 more years of operation as a zero-emissions vehicle here in California,” said Jakson Alvarez, the co-founder of Evolectric, a company that retrofits medium-duty diesel trucks to all-electric.  

California — along with states such as New Jersey, Massachusetts and New Mexico — is working to electrify the trucking industry to cut pollution. That effort so far has focused on swapping out old diesel-powered trucks for shiny, new electric ones.

But thanks to businesses like Evolectric, there is another option: giving old trucks a new, electric life.  

Alvarez said that converting these trucks costs between $80,000 to $110,000 — about half as much as buying a new electric truck. “This solution is especially ideal for those smaller fleets.”

Small businesses often spend tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the vehicle to maintain their diesel trucks and keep them running, he added. Converting to electric can help those businesses save money on fuel and on maintenance in the long run.  

“Calculations we’ve done could be 70% lower than a diesel truck,” said Alvarez.

Evolectric’s clients now include a few small recycling businesses and a construction contractor, as well as major industry players such as Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola. 

But a challenge has been training the needed workforce — including Marlon Guillén, who’s tightening bolts for a new inverter he’s installing in one of the Isuzus.

The 24-year-old recently graduated from LA Trade Tech College, where he studied diesel engine tech. Now, he works for Evolectric.  

“So far where we’re at, the trade schools, they don’t really teach electric stuff,” he said. “They do teach basic low-voltage diagnostics and stuff, but when it comes to higher voltage stuff, they don’t really teach it.”

Marlon Guillén is a technician at Evolectric. (Erin Stone/LAist)

Converting these trucks isn’t quite as simple as swapping out a diesel engine for a lithium-ion battery; technicians add a lot of high-voltage wires. The motor goes in the middle instead of the front of the chassis.

The company, now running for five years, spent its first several years engineering the optimal design. It’s one of the first companies successfully converting medium-duty trucks.  

“It’s just that satisfaction and feeling that you get once you complete it, once you finally have that final build and it’s running, it’s a good moment,” Guillén said.

And for Guillén, it’s also the start to a good career.  

On Friday, the National Association of Realtors will give an update on existing home sales. But we also got some news about the market for new homes: A survey from the National Association of Home Builders found that contractors’ expectations for future sales volume fell to their lowest level in more than a year.

That’s largely thanks to uncertainty about tariffs and their potential impact on materials costs.

Homebuilders rely on imported goods to make homes, including lumber, metals and appliances.

“And if their costs go up, that will translate into prices probably being higher than they would otherwise,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics.

Higher input costs could discourage new construction, which has been adding much-needed supply to a tight housing market.

“Would-be homeowners have faced a lot of hurdles for several years,” Vanden Houten said. “And a lack of new supply would only make those hurdles higher.”

Another factor that could affect supply is the availability of workers. If the Trump administration continues to crack down on immigration, “that could be another obstacle for homebuilders, who may wish to expand supply, but not be able to have the workers to do so,” said Charlie Dougherty, senior economist at Wells Fargo.

As a result, Dougherty said that home affordability probably won’t improve much over the coming year.

The rapid and widespread reductions in the federal workforce are ongoing, and some have experts worried about what the layoffs and firings will mean for the nation’s food safety.

This week, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety division resigned saying, according to multiple reports, that the cuts will damage the FDA’s ability to safeguard our food supply.  

We still don’t know the full extent of layoffs at the FDA, which oversees the safety of most of our food supply, but they are widespread, noted Darin Detwiler, a food safety expert and consultant teaching at Northeastern University.

“These are technical experts, nutrition experts,” he said. “Their jobs are extremely important in terms of outbreak response and disease investigation.”

Frontline food inspectors and investigators have been laid off or fired; some because they were newer employees on probation.

“This is going to result in slower recalls, weaker enforcement and — quite honestly — a rollback of public health protections,” said Detwiler.

The FDA did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. The USDA, which handles some aspect of food safety nationally, said in a statement that the agency is “committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”

But many experts and former food safety officials are unconvinced.

“I worry about if there is reduced oversight over the food supply, that there will be an increase in foodborne outbreaks,” said Howard Sklamberg, a partner at the law firm Arnold and Porter who spent years in a variety of positions at the FDA.  

“Will it occur tomorrow? No, but over time, if you reduce the oversight, you reduce the ability to create and implement standards,” he said. “Does that affect the safety of the food supply? Yes.”

In the meantime, the federal government’s ability to respond to any crises in our food supply is reduced, per Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and former associate commissioner at the FDA.

“This will put a lot of pressure on state food inspectors, and quite a lot of food inspection does take place at the state level, but it’s coordinated, and standards are established by groups that have FDA at the very core,” he said.

That’s not to say that there isn’t anyone minding the food supply; there are still thousands of people working at the FDA and other food safety agencies.

Plus, “food safety people that work in the food industry — and there are thousands of us, right — are going to keep doing their jobs, right?” said Donald Schaffner, a food microbiology professor at Rutgers. “So that is not going to change.”

There are already independent groups that keep an eye on food safety along with the government, Schaffner said. Plus, food companies have every incentive to protect their reputations and avoid any health scares.

The Trump administration said it has pulled federal approval of congestion pricing in New York City. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sent a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hocul informing her on Wednesday. In response, Governor Hochul has said that she will not end the tolling program until a court tells her to.

New York became the first city in the country to implement congestion pricing in January.

Anyone who drives into Midtown or lower Manhattan now has to pay a toll — $9 for most cars during peak times, more for trucks. That money is set to fund much-needed repairs to the MTA, the city’s public transit system.

Since congestion pricing went into effect, the MTA says there’s already less traffic, and recent polling shows about 60% of New Yorkers think the program should remain in place.

But Trump said he’s concerned it’s posing “significant burdens” to city businesses, commuters and residents. The MTA says it’s already filed papers in federal court to try to keep congestion pricing in place.

A new executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday seeks to give the White House more control over government agencies that operate independently. The list of agencies the order is expected to impact includes the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, among others. There is, however, An exemption, however, has been made for the Federal Reserve’s handling of interest-rate policy.

Sarah Binder is a professor of politics at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about what the executive order could mean for the independent agencies and the Federal Reserve.

An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

Kai Ryssdal: With the understanding that Congress did set up these agencies as independent agencies, I guess the first question is, can the president do what he is purporting to do here?

Sarah Binder: Well, the president can do it if nobody stops him, right? It’s a power grab this time at the expense of what we call these independent agencies. The question is, will anyone in Congress stand up to him? And, at some point, this will certainly end up before the federal courts, and so will the courts be able to constrain the president? That we just don’t know.

Ryssdal: Help us understand, would you, why Congress decided decades and decades ago that this economy needs independent regulatory agencies to help this economy run.

Binder: Well, keep in mind that the very first of these independent agencies were really the end of the 19th century, and it was a period like today of pretty high partisanship, intense electoral competition, frequent shifts in party control. So [the Progressive movement was] looking for ways to insulate these sort of implementers of law from politics and especially from presidential whims. And so the solution is Congress says, let’s find a way to insulate the decision-makers — who the leaders are and how they wield their power— but also the decision-making, like how much review is done by Congress and the president and the courts over these agencies.

Ryssdal: It will not surprise you, even though this order purports to cover the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the SEC and a bunch of them, my eyes went to the Federal Reserve, and that section that is in this order saying, “This covers the Federal Reserve, except for its monetary policy operations.” The catch, of course, with the Fed is they do lots of other stuff that stabilizes this economy, right? They are famously the lender of last resort in a crisis. And I guess I wonder how concerned you are about the gray areas that have to do with the guts of this economy.

Binder: Well, that is quite problematic because it’s really hard to say. Even on something like emergency lending, like, where does monetary policy start and where does supervision and regulation, where does that begin? So emergency lending, stabilizing a financial crisis, well, that’s also part of the Fed’s ability to try to control inflation. So it’s hard to say where are the boundaries of where the president is going to be sticking his nose into those decisions. And of course, we expect that Congress tells the Fed you are in charge of financial stability — at least one of the agencies in charge of financial stability — and the Fed uses monetary policy to meet that regulatory goal. So I think there’s a lot of question marks from that executive order about how much autonomy the Fed really can keep with letting the president and [the Office of Management and Budget] anywhere into its decision-making.

Ryssdal: Step back for a minute here then and talk about the other and the many institutions of this economy that are now going to be subject to much more direct presidential control. What is at stake for this economy?

Binder: Well, the first thing at stake is that it will make it harder for the Fed to keep its eyes on and try to control inflation, which still isn’t down to its 2% target, but also some general sense of financial stability that banks are being regulated across the board, big banks, small banks, community banks, but evenhandedly. And I think whenever you have some stronger tinge of presidential control, people are going to wonder, like, “Is that a legitimate exercise of power? Am I better off? Do I know what’s going to happen in the future?” And certainly, in an economic realm, that’s put at risk by injecting presidential and partisan interests into the decision-making of these agencies.

Ryssdal: Do you think this is a legitimate exercise of presidential power?

Binder: Well, I think it grabs power from Congress, who set up the rules of these agencies in the first place. I think, in my view, it is patently unconstitutional, right? Because the executive order would allow the executive branch to decide, how are you going to spend that money? Those are decisions that Congress either gives to the agency or certainly sets the budget for many of them, and expects those monies to be spent in the ways Congress directs. So grabbing that power seems to be you’ve taken an equal branch’s key authority, you’ve just taken it away.

Ryssdal: Let me take you sideways for a second since you went there. Are you surprised that the Article 1 branch, that is to say that Congress is letting its power be taken so easily by the Article 2 branch, the executive?

Binder: Well, when I teach undergrad Congress, we always start, “It’s Article 1. Why is it there? It’s the most important institution.” But it has to stand up for itself. The Constitution, it doesn’t protect itself. It’s not self-enforcing. And so this is not the first time that Congress has sort of stepped back and watched as presidents have encroached on their powers. Sometimes Congress does it on purpose. “Hey, president, here’s some power to give sanctions. Here’s some power to negotiate trade deals” and so forth.

Ryssdal: Tariffs also, by the way, right?

Binder: For sure, and Congress does that explicitly. Much of this is Congress’ doing, but certainly this is Trump really, really going much farther than we’ve ever seen other presidents do.

Etsy, the affordable, artisanal merchandise company saw shares fall 8% this morning. That’s because it had a worse-than-estimated fourth quarter, even as consumer spending grew at the end of last year. Etsy expects this quarter to be in the doldrums too — though it’s not all Etsy’s fault.

Etsy made its reputation from offering stuff like handcrafted candles and custom wedding guest books. But it also started offering cheap, mass produced stuff. And that market is crowded with competition.

“The trick is that on Temu, the price is lower. Same thing with Amazon,” said supply chain consultant Brittain Ladd. He said he thinks Etsy has likely peaked, “and so it’s going to be very challenging for Etsy to do something that’s so special that it pulls all those other customers away.”

Etsy’s strategy so far is to double down on the artisanal stuff, said Sky Canaves, a retail analyst at EMARKETER.

“That focus is likely to appeal to a smaller audience, and so we would expect to see their sales continue to contract in line with that,” she said, because this trend of consumers seeking cheaper prices isn’t going anywhere.

Economics professor Brett House at Columbia Business School said years of high prices have put more strain on consumers.

“Credit card defaults are up, credit balances are up, and people are likely cutting back on some of their discretionary spending,” he said.

The weird part is the fourth quarter is typically a strong one for consumer spending because of all the holiday shoppers. But this season was different.

“They also saw the election results in November and the increased policy uncertainty that came along with that,” House said.

There is another way out, though. Consultant Brittain Ladd said the best next move for Etsy might be getting acquired by Michael’s or eBay.