Business

Housing starts – the number of new homes that began construction – dropped 9.8% between December and January.

Now, there is a caveat: cold temperatures across much of the country might have slowed down some construction. 

But it’s not the only sign that homebuilders are feeling not so great at the moment. Their confidence in January dropped to its lowest level in five months, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

The trade group found its members are especially worried about tariffs and mortgage rates that remain close to 7%.

The NAHB did its survey right around the time that President Donald Trump proposed – and then paused – 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico. 

That really weighed on homebuilder sentiment. But builders are hoping for some good news too, said Odeta Kushi, deputy chief economist at First American.

“They’re also thinking that there might be a better regulatory climate for building,” said Kushi. 

That’s the case for Bart Frisbie, president of Sterling Homes in Vermont, a state where lawmakers have loosened some permitting laws in the last few years to encourage more housing construction. 

Frisbie has a couple projects in the pipeline, including a brand new 32-home neighborhood. 

“We’re optimistic that the market is going to keep on rolling forward,” said Frisbie. 

But, a lot of his lumber comes from Canada. So if President Trump puts an import tax on that, “it will increase the price of houses dramatically, and that’s the last thing we need, is to raise prices,” said Frisbie. 

Because a lot of prospective homebuyers are staying on the sidelines with mortgage rates around 7%, said Susan Wachter, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Builders are meeting price resistance in the market, and there’s not much that builders can do, because their costs are going up,” said Wachter. 

Still, there’s a strong need for new housing. We’re about 1.5 million units short, said Danushka Nanayakkara at the National Association of Home Builders.

So, the demand is there, “the question is, the affordable, the entry level housing, the lack of that is pushing people out of the housing market, and that’s the issue right now,” said Nanayakkara.

If rates stay elevated and tariffs make building materials more expensive, she said, that issue won’t go away.

In the last few months since the election, more than 40% of consumers said they’ve changed their spending habits to align with their morals, according to a new Harris Poll.

A quarter of shoppers have stopped buying from their favorite brands. And about a third said they have no interest in supporting the economy this year and are looking for ways to opt out. 

More Democrats said they’ve changed their spending habits recently than Republicans, according to the Harris Poll.

Timothy Werner, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin’s McCombs School of Business, said that makes sense given who’s in power in Washington.

“During the first Trump administration there was a campaign called #GrabYourWallet” — to try to get people to not spend money at any companies associated with Trump — “and you saw no kind of dynamic that was on the other side being supportive of him,” said Warner.

When people are angry with a company over its politics, he said it’s typical for them to stop shopping there, at least for a while. Whereas, when people support a company’s politics, they aren’t as likely to shop there more.

The NAACP issued a “Black Consumer Advisory” over the weekend urging Black consumers to prioritize businesses that have doubled down on DEI initiatives instead of canceling them. Economic boycotts are increasingly common, said Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability.

“As our politics have become much more polarized and much sharper, you have consumers now who are taking a look very closely at what companies are involved with,” said Freed.

The idea of opting out of the economy entirely, though? That feels new, at least to Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema.

“Just stepping back for a second and thinking about how important consumerism is to America’s [gross domestic product], you know, it’s 70 cents on the dollar,” said Gerzema.

So if a third of consumers were to stop spending, even just for a little while, he said — that could have a big impact. 

But Timothy Werner at UT Austin said it probably won’t.

“Especially as attention spans shorten and news cycles shorten, the effects of these things are really very short lived,” said Werner.

And, for businesses, getting involved in politics through donations and lobbying is often worth it. 

“Companies who spend more on lobbying secure more government contracts, they pay lower effective tax rates, they generally benefit from lighter touch regulation,” said Werner.

That can affect their bottom line in a way consumer boycotts rarely do. 

Amazon is reportedly set to showcase its new and improved Alexa at a product event February 26. But the more capable voice assistant — which has been teased as “coming soon” for about a year now — likely won’t be available for at least another month. Meanwhile, Apple has been making Siri incrementally smarter as it slowly rolls out Apple Intelligence. A major upgrade was expected to come later this spring with iOS 18.4, but might also be delayed.

Amazon and Apple, once the innovators in virtual assistants, are now seen as playing catch-up to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

When Apple unveiled Siri at an event back in 2011, the tech seemed revolutionary. Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software, gave a demonstration that included using voice to check the weather and set alarms.

Thirteen years later, Sean Saulsbury, a software entrepreneur in Oceanside, California, said that’s about all he uses Siri for: “Simple reminders on my phone. Just, ‘Remind me to do this or remind me to do that.'”

Siri has gotten updates over the years: You can now set two timers at once as of a 2023 update. But Saulsbury says the tool still struggles with basic requests.

“Like, I’ll get an email and I’ll tell it, like, ‘Hey, read me this email, the one that I have open, you know, read me this email,'” he said. “And it just reads me the the titles of the last five emails I’ve gotten.”

Alexa from Amazon, a Marketplace underwriter, can set timers well. But Grant Berry uses his eight Echo devices to control home electronics like his lights or alarm system.

“I’m able to say what to do exactly using very precise language,” he said.

Berry is a professor of language science at Villanova University who also worked on Alexa technology for Amazon. He said improvements in natural language processing, the way computers understand human language, have helped voice assistants like Alexa become more conversational over time. But they’re still more rigid than modern AI chatbots.

“Alexa can tell you jokes,” said Berry, “but they’re all really bad dad jokes. Ask her what her favorite color is.”

She’ll say, “I like Ultraviolet. It glows with everything,” every single time.

“And, you know someone hard coded that in, yeah, had to have,” said Berry.

Most people don’t need standup comedy from their voice assistants, but Berry notes using more sophisticated AI language models, like those powering ChatGPT, will make it easier to communicate with devices the way we do with people.

“It is natural for us to omit information or reference back to things that have been previously stated,” he said.

You might ask, “Hey Siri who is the president of France?” Then just use a pronoun instead of a proper name to follow up: “How long has he been president?”

Asking Siri that series of questions yields mixed results and often refers users to use ChatGPT, which tells me Emanuel Macron has been president of France for 7 years and 9 months. 

OpenAI’s chatbot can carry on spoken conversations, as can Google Gemini, but today’s top AI systems are typically thought of as typing-based said Larry Heck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and interactive computing at Georgia Tech who has worked on voice assistants for Microsoft, Google and Samsung.

“I really don’t think that we’ve used voice in the way that many of us have dreamed about,” said Heck.

He wants an AI conversation partner he could ask for help, say, brainstorming his trip to Italy.

“(Where) the AI says, ‘Oh you know you’re interested in staying in a medieval castle in Tuscany. Oh, you know I found a few places. These are kind of cool. What do you think about these?'” he said.

Heck noted that currently, even the most advanced AI systems can only engage in so much back and forth. They typically find an answer, or confidently make one up, instead of asking follow up questions.

That’s not great if you want a voice assistant you can trust to make purchases or appointments — potentially at a monthly fee as Amazon is reportedly planning.

But even if voice assistants do improve, users like Saulsbury might not bother.

“Right now it’s hard for me to think of what I would do, because I’ve been frustrated with it,” he said.

Maybe set yourself a reminder: “Hey Siri, remind me to try you out again once you get updated.”

In less than a month, if everything goes according to the plans that President Donald Trump announced last week, the U.S. will impose 25% tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. (Here is your obligatory reminder that the cost of any tariff is paid by the importer and ultimately, by extension, the U.S. consumer.)

Recent research from S&P Global found that the impact of higher tariffs will be uneven. In other words, some businesses will pass along the cost but others might not. Which side of that dichotomy a business falls on depends on who its customers are.

Take Mavericks Manufacturing Partners in Escondido, California, which makes metal components for the energy and defense sectors. Steel is set to get hit with higher tariffs next month and the price aluminum is already rising, said CEO Chris Blench.

“The tariffs don’t even have to be in effect. It’s just the threat of them. And that’s creating a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” he said.

As a result, Blench said he’s going to have to ensure that the prices he’s charging his clients account for that uncertainty.

So now, when he writes up a bid for a project: “We’ll just have that one little asterisk on the material component that says, you know, depending on the price of that particular material at the time of award, we’re going to pass on whatever our cost is,” he said.

Blench said he can do that because his customers — largely the Defense and Energy departments — are so big they’re not going to sweat the increase.

And besides, his competitors do the same thing.

“We’re trying to compete on our efficiency and other credentials of our businesses. But when it comes to the raw materials, if the price goes up 25%, all of the other competitors are going to be passing that along,” he said.

Not every business has the leverage to do that.

Satyam Panday, chief U.S. and Canada economist at S&P Global Ratings, said if your customers are small businesses, “you would probably want to think twice, before doing that, in your renegotiations of the contract. You probably have to share the costs.”

There’s also a third kind of business, one where passing along the cost of tariffs might not make sense at all.

“You know, beer has always been this affordable luxury. It should be very accessible,” said J.C. Hill, the owner of Alvarado Street Brewery which operates a few locations in the Monterey Bay area of California.

Because he sees beer as an affordable luxury, Hill doesn’t want to pass along any cost increases to his customers. Especially after all of the inflation in recent years.

“And in the past we have been able to raise prices to not take that hit directly. You know, before inflation. And I think now, people are less likely to want to pay more,” he said.

Hill is expecting the price of aluminum cans to rise, along with the price of stainless steel fermenters, kegs and other equipment.

He’s keeping an eye out for used equipment and said he doesn’t want to have to do anything drastic, like lay off employees.

“It might just be one of those things where we just have to wear it on the chin. And hopefully ride it out,” he said.

In the meantime, Hill said his goal is to keep growing the brewery’s capacity a little bit every year, so he can cover his costs by selling more beer.

“Marketplace Morning Report” watches one documentary a month for our Econ Extra Credit project, to analyze films focused on business, economics and other themes. During this Black History Month, we’re watching the 1992 documentary “Color Adjustment,” directed by Marlon Riggs, which looks at the depiction of African American people during the first 40 years of television.

Karsonya Wise Whitehead, founding executive director of the Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice at Loyola University Maryland, spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio to pick up where the film leaves off, with a survey of today’s media landscape. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: From “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” early on, to “The Cosby Show,” what Americans tended to see if they weren’t watching the news were images of Black people that were, I mean, the film shows, comforting to white people, intended not to dwell on injustice and conflict. And beyond that, the documentary shows how mass culture like TV could be a mainstream values reinforcement device. Here’s a clip. It’s cultural critic Patricia A. Turner in the documentary:

Patricia A. Turner: The most successful shows depicting the African American experience in America are shows like “Cosby” that reaffirm the American dream and hardcore middle-class values, where you work hard, you are rewarded with good looking children, good looking wives, nice cars, nice households, and that image is the one that’s perpetuated.

Brancaccio: Professor Whitehead, here in 2025, what do you think: different or similar now?

Karsonya Wise Whitehead: I don’t think it’s changed as far as we would like it to change. I think that the problem that happens in the media is that when we see progress, so what they call redemption, there’s always regression. So when we look at all the trends that happen the media, yes, you can find the shows that kind of speak to your experience. I’m talking about the greater representation, the greater media representation that people are flocking to. Some of the images, you’re either completely washing the images out. We don’t talk about race at all, where you have a very diverse cast, but they don’t deal with the fact that race is a constant in our society. Or you have this amazing erasure of Black folks from the narrative, saying it’s just about the story, so we don’t actually have to have diversity. Or you go so far to the left that you’re trying to figure out where the greater things that can apply to what we’re dealing with at this moment.

Brancaccio: Now, we’re coming up, I was just looking at the calendar coming up, really, on five years since the murder of George Floyd. And among the many industries that responded in the wake of that was the entertainment industry. Promises to bring in more diverse content creators, showrunners, you know, important people, people toward the top, as well as the rank and file. You’ve seen the surveys, is that happening?

Whitehead: It happened. I always use this past tense, because one of the things that happened after the, unfortunately, state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd, you had companies, you had businesses, you had organizations who began to understand the power of both the African American gaze and the power of the African American dollar. So it was this push that if there was not more representation, if the stories were not more fully represented on the screen, then we were not going to support them. We were going to say there was an issue. We know there was a concern around being canceled, there was a concern around being boycotted, that you had the entertainment industry begin to respond to. My concern is that now that we’re five years out, now that we see this, kind of this push in a different direction, will the entertainment industry continue to be the place that uplifts multiple perspectives, whether it’s having more people of African American descent who are behind the camera, who are in the production room, who are writing the stories? It’s not just being in front of the camera with that one or two actors showing up. It’s about being able to be a part of the creative process all the way along.

The crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government follows a steady rollback of similar efforts in the private sector. Now, the NAACP is calling out some of those businesses and asking Black consumers to respond by leveraging their purchasing power.

The NAACP issued a “Black Consumer Advisory” over the weekend, calling for accountability for the businesses that have rolled back their DEI initiatives and encouraging Black consumers to prioritize shopping in places that are sticking to them.

“Black consumers have $1.8 trillion of spending power,” said Keisha Bross, director of opportunity, race and justice at NAACP.

The organization is researching and building resources for consumers to track where companies stand, she added. “What we’re saying is, ‘You have a choice that you can make and how you choose to use your dollars.'”

While the NAACP is calling out companies like Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s, Bross said that the realities of the economy make it hard for people to avoid some companies altogether.

So rather than calling for boycotts, the group wants shoppers to be intentional. And many already are, according to a recent survey from the Harris poll, which found consumers of all political stripes are already changing their shopping behaviors.

“It seems there is a group of consumers that are sort of breaking up with the economy. 43% of them have shifted their spending in the past few months to align with their moral views,” said John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll. “That goes up to 66% of Black consumers, 65% of Black women, and even 69% of under-35 black consumers.”

Some shoppers are boycotting stores and products that don’t align with their political views, but others are going out of their way to support the companies that do — a buycott, if you will.

“Things like buycotts are going to be one of the results that I think are going to shake out, with respect to those companies that are actually going to remain true to what they claim they were in the first place,” said Americus Reed II, a marketing professor at the Wharton School.

Reed predicts we are at the beginning of a larger movement, where consumers demonstrate with their wallets that when companies move away from their DEI commitments, “then you’re going to pay a long-term price for that with respect to the credibility and authenticity of your brand,” he said.

Of course, many of these same companies are facing similar pressure to drop DEI efforts, and have to decide which backlash will cost them more.

The number of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic was so large that it ended up impacting the nation’s Social Security fund — which had a net increase of $205 billion. That’s according to a study out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The early days of the COVID pandemic were scary — and for good reason, said Hanke Heun-Johnson, a research scientist at USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

“So we had a lot of excess deaths — there were 1.7 million excess deaths during the pandemic,” she said.

Heun-Johnson co-authored the study and said many of those deaths were in people older than 65 “and were drawing retirement benefits, or were going to withdraw retirement benefits, and they had already paid into the system.”

They paid in but stopped collecting when they died. All those uncollected funds added up. This isn’t the first time a public health crisis has left an economic mark on the social safety net, according to Gopi Shah Goda, director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution.

“There is actually an old study about how smoking affects Social Security. Increased rates of smoking reduce the cost to the program, because there are premature deaths associated with smoking,” she said.

While the COVID study looked specifically at excess deaths, the pandemic impacted Social Security in other ways too. Many people with long COVID drop out of the workforce, for example, pointed out Goda.

“The labor force participation rate directly influences the payroll taxes that are going into Social Security, as well,” she said.

Overall, Goda said that the $205 billion boost to Social Security won’t change much in the long term; the government pays that amount in benefits every couple of months.

Shakila Hotak turns the keys in her red Toyota. In Afghanistan, where Hotak is from, women are not supposed to drive, especially under the Taliban. But Hotak isn’t in Kabul anymore.

She now lives in Houston, which is where she was resettled as a refugee two years ago. She supports herself with a factory job that pays $11 an hour. 

Speaking in Dari, Hotak says through an interpreter that before getting her driver’s license and car, she used to commute to her job by bus. 

“I was taking two buses,” she says. “One bus, they dropped me to the pharmacy, and after that, I took another bus … to my place of work.” 

Her commute was roughly two hours each way. Now that she has a driver’s license and her own car, it’s around 35 minutes. And she has the freedom and time to do other things, like form friendships and take herself to the doctor.

“I’m leaving my home and I’m going to work, and also I go to hospital,” she says. “I drink tea, something like that. And also … I go to chat with my friends, gossip.” 

Learning how to drive and getting a license is a must for refugees and immigrants, many of whom come from countries where public transportation is more widely available. That’s why YMCA International Services in Houston has helped these drivers learn the rules of the road — for free and in their native language. 

During a class in late January, Innocent Tuyiringire led orientation for the driver’s ed program.

“Buenos días a todos. How are you doing?” he asked the class.  

This training walked students through the process of obtaining a driver’s license. It’s part of a program that launched in 2021, and it’s helped around 550 people, according to YMCA.

Tuyiringire asked the class why they’re attending the event. “First question is: Why do you feel like you need driver’s license?” 

One woman said in Spanish: “Driving is obligatory. Everything is far.” 

Another woman said, “There’s a lot of jobs that require a license.”

For many in Houston, driving is crucial for their economic self-sufficiency, which is why Tuyiringire teaches these students about things like insurance and child car seats and what to do when they hear sirens.

Joanne Pantaleon, who supervised the program, said her clients were hired for new jobs and kept their jobs after getting their license through this program, which was especially popular with women.  

“A lot of people talk about empowering women,” Pantaleon said. “You empower women by allowing them to get out of the home and doing things for themselves and not depending on their husband to do day-to-day activities.” 

She said she’s particularly happy that so many Afghan women signed up.

“Culturally, the women from the Afghan community stay at home. The fact that 100 Afghan women came to us to learn how to drive tells me that they’re on the path to integration.” 

At Farhnaz Azimi’s house in west Houston, she sat cross-legged in her living room on a red carpet. Cartoons were playing for her youngest. 

Through her son Hafiz, who interprets Dari, Azimi said she’s been “at home all three years” that she’s here. 

Her life has largely revolved around her home while her husband works and many of her seven kids go to school. She said she decided to get her driver’s license to run her home by herself — buy groceries, go to the gym and one day maybe get a job. 

She’s a step closer to that with the new Texas driver’s license she got through YMCA’s program. She pulled it out of her purse, smiled and said she was “so happy” when she received it.

Azimi is among the program’s many beneficiaries, but it won’t be taking new students anytime soon. 

Weeks after President Donald Trump took office, YMCA International Services in Houston suspended the program and furloughed employees because of the pause on refugee resettlement. YMCA wouldn’t comment further.

“That sense of empowerment is immeasurable, and not just being able to drive the car. But actually, that is the vehicle that connects them with the outside world, to independence,” said Zenobia Lai, executive director of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative. 

Lai, who has worked in refugee resettlement, said programs and classes don’t just give people the chance to flee violence.

“The refugee resettlement program is actually a beacon of hope about America, what America is. We are losing a lot by cutting the program.”

Without a change in policy, program cuts and layoffs are likely to continue.

This week will be chatty for Fed officials, with remarks scheduled from Federal Reserve bank presidents, governors and others. A topic that’s sure to come up: inflation and how tariffs might affect it. 

In fact, it’s already come up. On Monday, Fed governor Christopher Waller said he thinks tariffs would only modestly increase prices and he favors “looking through these effects when setting monetary policy.” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee — in previous remarks and on “Marketplace” — has warned that tariffs could increase inflation.

At the heart of the debate is the question: Do tariffs lead to one-time price increases, or do they lead to more persistent inflation?

To predict how tariffs might affect inflation, economist Stephanie Kelton at Stony Brook University said we need to know exactly what the tariffs will be.

“It’s so tough because we’re trying to have a conversation about something where there’s just, you know, nobody knows,” she said.

We don’t know if all the proposed tariffs will go through or if they’ll lead to a trade war and more taxes on trade. So first?

“The Fed is going to try to look past that transitory inflation spike that’ll be created by the tariffs,” said Ken Kuttner, a professor at Williams College and a former Fed staffer.

Unless consumers think that price spike is just the beginning. “People start thinking, well the price of tomatoes went up, everything else is going to start going up. So we’re returning to an inflationary environment,” he said.

“Returning” is a key word here. Years of inflation have primed us to think higher tomato prices mean higher prices for cars and clothes. And with tariffs, that might appear to be true, since they cover many categories of goods whose prices will rise kind of all at once.

Randy Kroszner, a former Fed governor, said a sign that workers believe this is inflation would be that they ask for pay raises.

“Typically, the Fed will respond to something that it sees as an ongoing process. You know, if wage increases continue to be very high and that adds to cost of production and that will lead to higher prices down the line,” he said.

It’s why, regardless of where the tariffs land, the Fed’s messaging will be important.

“If the inflation rate starts to move up for whatever reason, the Fed is going to feel compelled to respond in some way,” said Stony Brook’s Kelton.

Maybe with a longer pause in cutting interest rates or even a hike to signal to consumers that it is serious about getting inflation down to 2%.

Samsung just announced it’s going to cancel more than $2 billion of its stock. Meaning the electronics company bought back a bunch of its shares, and now it’s just going to make them disappear.

The upside of canceling shares is that it lets companies make their stock more valuable. But canceling shares can also be a bad sign, especially after a company hasn’t been performing well.

Usually, when companies buy back their own shares, they hang onto what they buy so they can give them to employees, or resell them later when they need a little money.

Connel Fullenkamp, an economics professor at Duke University, said canceling bought back shares is a bold statement.

“Traditionally, this has been a way for companies to try to signal to the markets, ‘Hey, we think our shares are undervalued,'” said Fullenkamp.

Canceling shares kind of solves that problem, said Ari Shwayder, who teaches economics at the University of Michigan’s business school.

“The overall value of Samsung is still what it was, but the number of shares that exist in the world is less, and so the value per share will go up if the number of shares goes down,” said Shwayder.

And investors have a reason to prefer share cancellations to, say, offering a dividend, said Paul Shea, who teaches economics at Bates College.

“You don’t pay a dividend tax rate on it,” said Shea. “You pay a capital gains tax rate, which is lower for most people.”

But, Shea said, the billions of dollars that Samsung spent to buy the shares it’s canceling is billions it did not spend on acquiring other companies or building new plants. 

“So that could be a negative signal, but it could also just be that this is not a time where there’s great opportunity for expansion,” said Shea.

Shea said the cancellations would make him more nervous for a younger company that’s never turned a profit. With an older, more stable company like Samsung, he said there’s nothing wrong with returning money to shareholders this way.

The last few years have been rocky for the live-streaming platform Twitch. Despite enjoying an uptick in viewership during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, a report from The Wall Street Journal last year suggested the company has yet to turn a profit for Amazon, which purchased Twitch in 2014.

Yet Twitch remains a big deal for the millions of people who stream on it, which the website TwitchTracker estimates at over 7 million users last month. Making it as a streamer can be exceedingly difficult; an analysis of a 2021 data leak of creator payouts suggested that fewer than 1% of streamers actually make minimum wage.

“Being there every day, streaming during the same time segment, there’s always the thought of, ‘If I stop or if I take a sustained break, then everyone will leave,'” said journalist Nathan Grayson, co-founder of the website Aftermath. “They’ll find somebody else to either follow or watch or, crucially, give their money to.”

In his new book, “Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen,” Grayson chronicles both the platform and the streamers who made it what it is today. The following is an excerpt looking at the experience of one streamer who attempted to capitalize on a moment of virality.

Breaking points are strange. Sometimes they take months or years of reflection, meditation, therapy. But other breaking points happen instantly, with the viciousness of a thunderclap. Emme “Negaoryx” Montgomery learned this the hard way.

On the wings of a viral moment in 2019, Montgomery’s star had finally begun to rise. To pursue her dreams of Twitch fame — or even just a middle of-the-road Twitch career — she’d given up a college education and a career in the entertainment industry. She’d endured countless long days and sleepless nights to get her numbers up.

All of that — years of unglamorous toil — built to a single, thirteen-second stream moment. In it, Montgomery, light brown hair swooped to the side and clad in a plain white tank top, playing the popular PlayStation action-horror game The Last of Us, gets taken by surprise when an arrow impales an innocent rabbit, splattering virtual snow with disarmingly realistic bunny blood. Already in a heightened state of emotion from a previous story scene in the game, Montgomery immediately covers her face with her hands and yelps in authentic sorrow. That’s it. That’s the entire clip.

Much like her dearly departed lagomorphic friend, Montgomery never could have predicted what happened next. Nobody could’ve. The internet builds its ever-evolving zeitgeist like a free-form jazz player: It selects pieces in an almost gleefully haphazard fashion, and somehow they fall into place without bringing the whole house down. In 2019, it was suddenly Montgomery’s turn to be at the center of it all. Her thirteen-second livestream moment had everything: tragedy, comedy, and spontaneity that simply couldn’t be scripted. Millions of people shared hundreds of versions of the “Last of Us dying rabbit meme girl” clip. Literally overnight, she went from having a regular Twitch viewership of a couple hundred to thousands, all waiting expectantly to meet the woman behind the meme.

Montgomery could not let this moment go to waste. She knew what was at stake. On Twitch, chances to “make it” are few, far between, and most importantly, fleeting. There are around 7 million streamers on the platform. After analyzing data from a 2021 leak that revealed payment information for everybody on Twitch, observers found that fewer than ten thousand — less than 0.1 percent — of streamers make minimum wage or better, let alone get rich. And things were likely better by then, compared to the timing of Montgomery’s big moment in 2019. But it’s always been a mighty exclusive club, and one that features a revolving door; back in 2018, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, then Twitch’s most popular streamer, took a two-day break from streaming. He lost forty thousand paying subscribers, totaling out to over $100,000. Much like livestreaming as a medium, even success on Twitch is ephemeral. For every Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassell — every pillar of consistency who has managed to stick it out for over a decade — there are countless big names and no names who’ve burnt out and fallen off almost overnight. This weighed on Montgomery, just as it weighs on every person who hopes to turn the pipe dream of playing video games for a living into a career.

“I just said ‘yes’ to everything because I thought I was never gonna get opportunities again,” Montgomery explained.

So, in the first half of 2019, she streamed and participated in events as much as humanly possible. During one event, a live charity drive for Red Nose Day, a campaign to end child poverty, she rubbed elbows with megastars like fellow streamers Imane “Pokimane” Anys and Rachell “Valkyrae” Hofstetter as well as movie star (who moonlights as a YouTuber) Jack Black. But she also picked up a cough she just couldn’t shake. Fortunately, she wasn’t sick. Her voice was just struggling after endless amounts of talking on-stream and off. But then, midway through the event, one of her coughs hit different.

“I coughed and felt something in my side,” Montgomery said. “I tried to inhale and wanted to scream. It was like somebody shoving the world’s sharpest sword directly inside me anytime I tried to breathe. I was like, ‘I’m on camera. We’re smiling and at a charity event, and I’m fucking dying. What is happening to me?’”

Montgomery had coughed so hard that she broke a rib. But she couldn’t stop. By this point it was the beginning of summer, and she had too many events on the calendar. Famous streamers were just about to host a reality TV−style broadcast called Streamer Camp, and she’d been invited to compete. It was an enormous opportunity to grow her audience and network with some of the biggest names in the business. How could she say no? On top of that, E3, an LA-based convention that functions as the nexus of all video game announcements, was set to take place immediately after in June, and Montgomery had landed a hosting gig. She couldn’t pass that up, either. So she decided to soldier on, broken rib and all. She’d just smile her way through the pain, she figured. She’d already done it once, after all. How hard could it be to keep doing it . . . indefinitely?

Then, while Montgomery was sitting on a couch and catching up with some friends, that nasty cough decided to rattle her rib cage again. Cough, cough, pop. Just like that, she’d broken another rib. The pain was so intense that her friends had to carry her to bed. The next day, a doctor told her there was really only one thing she could do to expedite her recovery: rest for a couple weeks. He asked her if she could take that much time off work. She said she could but she wasn’t going to.

“He literally laughed in my face and said, ‘Good luck,’” Montgomery recalled.

The day after, she was off to a premiere of the movie X-Men: Dark Phoenix for a stream sponsored by Fox. Mere hours after that event wrapped, she took a Lyft to the house in LA where Streamer Camp was being filmed and spent a week hardly sleeping and competing in livestreamed challenges alongside other streamers. She ended up leaving before everyone else, not because she had two broken ribs, which had not, you will be surprised to learn, miraculously healed, but because it was time to rush over to the LA Convention Center for the days-long, appointment-packed frenzy that is E3. Even once that ended, there was no finish line in sight. Next, Montgomery flew out to a charity summit in Memphis, Tennessee, and then to an event hosted by one of gaming’s biggest publishers, EA, in Germany, followed shortly by TwitchCon—an official Twitch convention—in Europe.

“All of my viewers were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Take care of yourself,’” Montgomery said. “I probably sounded like a crazy person to everyone, because I was like, ‘I can’t stop.’”

In the end, the physical toll was great. Montgomery said her body — already prone to pain from a spinal injury — remained “messed up” long after. But the mental toll was greater. There’s a price when you push yourself past your breaking point. You can only put so many cracks in your resolve before its foundation starts to crumble. Going into her nonstop summer, Montgomery was already in rough shape. Just before the Last of Us bunny kicked off a new chapter in her Twitch career, her stepfather had lost his battle with cancer.

Excerpted from “Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen” by Nathan Grayson. Copyright 2025 © by Nathan Grayson. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster LLC.

We start this story with a question: How low can unemployment go in this country?

It was 3.5% in February 2020, heading into the pandemic. In the pandemic recovery it fell as low as 3.4% (in April 2023) — a more than 50-year low. As of January 2025, the latest month for which we have data, it sits at 4% — still very low in historic terms. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been publishing modern unemployment statistics since 1948).

But could unemployment fall even lower than it’s been in recent years? To 2% ? Or 1.5%?

The question is prompted by a story I reported recently, in which I explained why unemployment couldn’t keep falling as rapidly in this most recent five-year period (2020 to 2025) as it had in the comparable period before the pandemic (2015 to 2025 — when it fell from 5.5% to 3.5%). I wrote that that would have meant unemployment falling to 1.5% — which I said “economists will tell you, pretty much can’t happen.”

And then I heard from fellow Marketplace reporter Stephanie Hughes, who asked a simple but probing question: “I know that below 4% is really good. But why can’t we get to 1.5%?”

And right off the bat, I found an economist — Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter — who said that it’s not unthinkable.

“We know from some states and cities in America that very low unemployment rates are possible,” said Pollak. “In 2024, South Dakota had an unemployment rate of just 1.9%.”

But at the national level, unemployment’s only ever fallen as low as 2.5%, for two months in 1953. (The unemployment rate referred to here is the “official” rate, U-3, with unemployed workers defined as those who do not currently have a job and have actively looked for work in the past four weeks.)

One reason the unemployment rate hasn’t gone lower, said former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, author of the Sahm Rule, now at New Century Advisors, is that certain demographic groups face barriers to full employment, including lack of education and training, and discrimination.

Black unemployment has historically been about twice as high as white unemployment. In South Dakota, unemployment on some Native American reservations is 80% or higher.

“There are mismatches of the skills that workers have, and the geographies of where they are,” said Sahm. “And that is the limit on the national unemployment rate, these pockets of structurally much higher unemployment.”

There is another kind of unemployment that keeps the rate well above 1.5%, said Betsey Stevenson at the University of Michigan: “Something that economists call ‘frictional unemployment.’ The flies in the ointment that prevent workers and jobs from finding each other right away.”

This is the unavoidable churn — in good times and bad — as workers leave one job to find another, or graduate from school and start looking. And we actually want some frictional unemployment. It’s a sign of a healthy labor market, said economist Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Being unemployed for a few weeks and finding the best match you can — you’re more productive, you’re contributing more to the firm, to the economy, it means that you’re earning a higher wage,” said Strain.

“If the unemployment rate got down to 1.5% or something like that,” Strain continued, “I’d be worried that for some reason workers were just scrambling to take the first job they could find. Or, has something happened that has led workers that are relatively harder to employ to exit the workforce entirely, such that only the most employable workers are left.”

We might over time develop better technology to match workers and employers faster, said Strain, which could reduce frictional unemployment a bit.

And that would be a good thing, said economist Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “When unemployment is low, that’s great for workers and the economy. But it actually can get too low.”

Economists tend to agree that anything lower than 2.5% to 3% risks extreme labor shortages developing in the economy.

“Firms who have job openings, they’re just basically poaching workers from other companies, because there’s hardly any unemployed people to hire,” said Shierholz. “That requires big wage increases, and then that translates into big price increases.”

In other words, inflation. The Fed would raise interest rates to fight it, driving unemployment back up again.

And it’s not only a hot labor market that can lead to super-low unemployment, said Betsey Stevenson: “A low unemployment rate could be associated with a very stagnant labor market, where there are no jobs, so there’s no point in looking,” she said.

This is Stevenson’s tech-driven nightmare scenario, where artificial intelligence and robots are able to do the work of most humans — cheaper than we can do it ourselves.

“Human wages are pushed so low that maybe people don’t even want to work,” said Stevenson. “Maybe they can’t even survive while working.”

So, bottom line: Unemployment could fall lower than it has in the last 70 years, maybe as low as 1.5%. But if it ever does, we should be worried that something is seriously wrong with the U.S. economy.

A lot of U.S. foreign aid money still appears to be frozen, despite a January waiver from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that should exempt critical lifesaving work. That includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the 2003 HIV and AIDS prevention program from President George W. Bush, which the State Department said has saved an estimated 26 million lives. In theory, the work should continue, but global health organizations, including those with the United Nations, said clinics have already had to close their doors.

Angeli Achrekar is deputy executive director for programs of the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS, also known as UNAIDS. She discussed the impact of the funding cutoff with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Nova Safo.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Nova Safo: While the administration has said work can continue on lifesaving activities, it’s not clear to organizations on the ground whether HIV treatment and prevention is lifesaving activity. Is that right?

Angeli Achrekar: In this waiver, comprehensive treatment, testing and prevention of mother-to-child transmission to ensure babies are born HIV-free are covered. These are activities that are covered. The problem is that we need to make sure that that waiver is fully implemented. That’s not currently the state of affairs right now. What’s also equally important is what’s not included in the waiver: prevention services that will absolutely be critical in the HIV response. We need to ensure that new HIV infections are halted.

Safo: Can you explain how aid flows? Because it’s not a question of, necessarily, the government provides the money and then it’s spent. It’s spent and then the government provides the money, right? Is that the crux of the problem here?

Achrekar: Funds flow from the State Department to the headquarters of these various implementing agencies, including [the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], the Department of Defense, and there are others, through cooperative agreements or grants to implementing partners at the country level. They also need to make sure that if they do not have the funds — which in this case, a lot of the funding has stopped — they need to be able to be reassured that they will indeed be reimbursed for those funds.

Safo: Are there groups now doing HIV prevention work, treatment work, that are closing shop?

Achrekar: Many of the implementing partners, many of the groups have indeed closed shop. We’ve also seen community drop-in centers, where people living with HIV and AIDS would normally go to get tested, pick up their lifesaving medicines — they will come to the clinic and the doors will be closed.

Safo: What happens if these disruptions are not resolved or if the aid stops flowing?

Achrekar: What happens is we will see an increase by tenfold of people dying from AIDS. Currently, it’s 630,000 deaths per year. We will see that increase to 6.3 million over the next four to five years. For new infections, currently, there are 1.3 million new infections a year. What we will see over the next four to five years is an exponential jump to 8.7 million new infections. That goal of ending AIDS by 2030 will not be achievable if all of this turns off.

In the flurry of executive orders and policy directives from President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team, several sources of government data have disappeared — especially those related to race and gender. 

Those federal clearinghouses relied upon by researchers and businesses have gone offline. And while some have come back, there is a cost when data goes away.

At tax and consulting firm RSM, data is crucial to help their clients decide how to do business. Joe Brusuelas is RSM’s chief economist and has already noticed some key pieces of data related to housing and consumer demand are missing.

“Gender, identity and race are things that I could have looked at a couple months ago. Now, it’s not available,” he said.

What data is and isn’t online is in flux, according to Amy O’Hara, president of the Association of Public Data Users. The risk of losing key federal datasets has researchers, think tanks and businesses scrambling.

“You can’t always buy a replacement,” she said, “and what is sold may not be accurate or comprehensive. And plus, a lot of times, the organizations that sell data, they have used public data to build their models.”

Buying the data that used to be free adds to the cost of doing business.

Maggie McCullough is CEO of PolicyMap, which sells custom maps and data, ranging in cost from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. But PolicyMap also relies on federal data to build many of its products.

“Without that data, you’re kind of just flying blind, right?” McCullough said.

And without detailed data, she said that it’s harder to invest, run a business or govern the country.

Our latest Economic Pulse check-in is a closer look at the long-term effects of fires on local economies. Our eyes alone tell us a lot about what the terrible California wildfires are doing to employment, as people struggle to find shelter. But what about job creation even years out from the incidents?

We have someone now who has studied this, and published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Raphaelle Gauvin-Coulombe is co-author of new research, and she’s a professor of economics at Middlebury College. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: There’s clearly disruption in the near term. That, almost, is obvious, right?

Raphaelle Gauvin-Coulombe: Yes, and we do find effects that last about three years after the fires. And we do find that an increase in fire exposure leads to a decline in employment growth that can last for about three years after the fire.

Brancaccio: And, it’s not that the business burned down and couldn’t hire. You think it has to do with flows of potential labor?

Gauvin-Coulombe: So, part of it is evidence of a shrinking labor force, because we see evidence that some people decide to migrate. But of course, we can imagine that some businesses are also demanding less workers in response to fires, especially in industries like services and tourism.

Brancaccio: But, professor, what about federal disaster aid, when FEMA comes in? I mean, that’s been shown in other disasters to be perversely a kind of economic positive with all the rebuilding.

Gauvin-Coulombe: And that’s exactly right. So if we look only at fires that receive a FEMA disaster declaration, which is a small portion of fires — and here, it’s important to note that a FEMA disaster declaration is a precondition for a wide range of federal assistance programs. So when we look at only the fires that got this disaster declaration, then we do not see any negative economic effects of fires.

Brancaccio: In other words, the federal money mutes the economic impact. And, in fact, you don’t see job creation go down.

Gauvin-Coulombe: Exactly. It’s able to offset the effect on both employment and migration.

Brancaccio: All right, now, for communities that don’t get a disaster declaration — and for many fires and sometimes other disasters, you don’t get one — other lessons for local communities, counties, states in your data about how to somehow compensate for the possibility that people will leave and that therefore jobs will leave?

Gauvin-Coulombe: That’s a difficult question. What we do find is that some communities tend to be more robust, even if they don’t receive financial aid, and that’s because some communities are more diversified economically, or have a more educated workforce. So we find that these communities are much more resilient against the economic effects of fires.

Sales of new vehicles dropped 25% in January, according to Cox Automotive. That’s not exactly surprising, as January is typically a slow period in the automotive market.

For those who are out shopping for new cars, they’ll likely see more vehicles available on dealers’ lots as inventories were up 14% compared to a year ago.

Dealerships were pretty barren for a while, after pandemic shutdowns and chip shortages messed up car manufacturing. But slowly and steadily, lots have filled back up.

“Higher inventory levels on dealer lots are really good for the buyers,” said Sam Fiorani at AutoForecast Solutions. “If you have more to choose from, dealers want to get them off the lot, and so they will negotiate.”

And they might throw in a lower interest rate loan or a rebate. And yet, average new car prices are still up there — 2.5% higher than a year ago. 

Erin Keating at Cox Automotive said that’s largely because of the kinds of vehicles carmakers have been building, and drivers have been buying. 

“In America, we really like our vehicles large. We like them to come with all the bells and whistles, and we want every variety in between,” said Keating.

Providing all those options is costly, so carmakers charge more. And they’re unlikely to bring prices down anytime soon, she said, especially if they’re hurt by more tariffs from the Trump administration

.

According to recent survey data, 75% of older adults want to age in their homes. However, between accessibility and care needs that emerge later in life, 44% feel a move is inevitable.

That’s not to say that aging in place is impossible, though.

Kirsten Harrison was searching for a local place for her mother to move into so that she and her husband could help care for her. When they found a 55+ housing co-op in Golden Valley, Minnesota, they realized that it fit their own needs as well.

“For people who can afford it, you can age in place,” said Harrison. “And we’ve now gotten into a community that we didn’t know we needed.”

Demand for housing may be down, but demand for electricity is headed up — both in the U.S. and around the world. Global demand is set to grow at about 4% per year through 2027, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. 

That’s like adding more than the equivalent of Japan to global electricity consumption in each of the next three years. 

In some rich countries, electricity consumption has remained relatively flat or declined in the last 15 years. But in 2024, that changed — and in the next three years, the IEA expects many advanced economies, including the U.S., to see power demand grow, driven in part by data centers and electric vehicles. 

But emerging economies will be responsible for 85% of the growth in global demand in the next three years, according to the report.

“We’re talking about orders of magnitude differences in developing countries, and so most of the energy investment and infrastructure is going to be in Asia, Africa, Middle East,” said Todd Moss, executive director of the think tank Energy for Growth Hub.

China, Southeast Asia and South Asia are some of the major drivers of demand growth, said Gautam Jain, a researcher with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“All these countries are obviously growing, and the middle class is growing, and these are countries that are actually much more exposed to climate change,” he said.

In countries around the equator, including India and Indonesia, he said, days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit are more frequent. “So there’s a need for more air conditioning.”

To meet additional demand for electricity, countries are turning to renewables and nuclear energy, said Eren Çam, an electricity analyst at the IEA.

“Basically stabilizing global emissions growth,” he said.

He forecasts that CO2 emissions associated with electricity generation will roughly plateau in the next three years.

More homes were for sale in January in the United States than at any point in the last five years, according to a new analysis from Redfin. Demand for homes, meanwhile, is the lowest it’s been since then. 

For the housing market, 2025 is off to a slow start. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand out there, but buyers were certainly moving very cautiously in January,” said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS.

She said there are a couple of reasons for that.

“The most obvious is that mortgage rates have just remained much higher than maybe some prospective homebuyers were hoping,” she said.

Many of them were expecting mortgage rates to come down after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last year. Instead, they ticked up.

“But I think the biggest is really people feeling a little bit uncertain about the overall economy,” she said. “There’s a lot of psychology and emotion that goes into homebuying, and we know that when consumer confidence falls, we also see the housing market soften.”

And consumer confidence has been falling.

“Right now, to put it simply, we’re going through a chaotic period of time,” said Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Imagine you work for a federal agency and you’re suddenly wondering how long that’ll be true.

“You’re not going to buy a house if you’re worried about a job, if you don’t know where your next paycheck is going to come from. You can’t make big purchases thinking about long-term future when your short-term future looks very uncertain,” he said.

In addition to uncertainty, there are cost barriers. For a long time now, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, “what people have been hoping for has been an improvement in affordability, and we haven’t seen that.”

If that improves — including if mortgage rates come down even half a point — she thinks buyers will come off the sidelines. Economic uncertainty and all. 

Over the last decade, college enrollment has been declining. A study from the National Center for Education Statistics says undergrad enrollment dropped by 15%, from 18.1 million to 15.4 million students, between fall 2010 and fall 2021.

With fewer students enrolled in classes, its gotten more difficult for many institutions to keep their doors open.

Karin Fischer is a Senior Writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. She wrote about what happens to a town when its college closes. She joined “Marketplace” host Amy Scott to discuss her reporting. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Amy Scott: An average of one college closed every week last year. I was kind of stunned by that number. What is causing this situation?

Karin Fischer: It was kind of a perfect storm of things. It’s the combo of the declining demographics and, you know, there was COVID relief funding that was keeping a lot of colleges going through the pandemic, and that’s all dried up and disappeared, and we just have a lot of colleges. So the competition for students is pretty great. And so a lot of colleges have been kind of in precarious financial states for a while, and this is just a sort of a tipping point for a number of them, unfortunately.

Scott: So you spent some time reporting in a town called Aurora, New York, where it’s small college, Wells College, closed. Can you talk about what happened to Wells and what it’s meant for the community?

Fischer: Wells, like many of these other colleges, had been having some financial troubles for a long time, and it actually it’s a liberal arts college, or was a liberal arts college and it was a women’s college, and it had gone co-ed in part to try to sustain itself. But then this spring, or last spring, in April, it just announced that it was closing, and it took everybody by surprise. The students started registered for classes, the faculty members, you know, had signed their contracts, and it took the community by real surprise as well. I mean, the college had just as recently as a few months earlier, assured them that their financial health was fine, and they just had never really contemplated, I think the community members, what it would be like not to have this college in the center of their town.

Scott: Yeah, and you talk about not only the economic impact, this is the town’s largest employer, but also the effect on just basic services in the community.

Fischer: Sure. I mean, you know, colleges and medical centers, they anchor communities. I mean, they do have this great economic impact. They create jobs, they buy things in the communities, but, you know, many of these towns have grown up around the college, and so they’re very interconnected. In Wells’ case, the college actually ran the water treatment facility, and so all of a sudden, the town just didn’t even know how it was going to continue to go on, you know, and have safe drinking water for its residents. But there’s also other ways. I mean, I think the people think of these places very much as cultural magnets. They are points of pride. They can be community gathering places, and all of a sudden that was lost to this town.

Scott: And the health center is hanging in the balance as well.

Fischer: Yeah. So, Wells is a very small college, and so it, years ago, in fact, had sort of merged its college Infirmary with the Community Health Center in town, and so they used the college’s infirmary space. And it was sort of a win, win. It, you know, gave the college onsite medical providers. But it also served as the only community health center for about 15 miles, which upstate New York in the winter, is not insignificant. And because the college housed the Community Health Center, now with the college campus’s future uncertain, so is the future of the Community Health Center.

Scott: And you write that this is not just limited to this town of Aurora. This is happening in small towns around the country. What kinds of solutions do you see to this problem of towns losing their economic lifeblood, really, in some cases?

Fischer: I mean, I think there are questions about what can you do ahead of time? Are there ways that communities and colleges can work together more effectively, ways that maybe, perhaps it could stave off some of these closures? Were there things that towns can do, for example, the zoning, that could help the colleges sell property or use it in more mixed ways. I think there’s also the feeling, and it came out very clearly, both in Aurora and Wells and some other communities that I talked with that also had pretty abrupt college closures that communication would be really helpful. You know, a lot of people said it’s one thing for the college to shut down, but for it to shut down so abruptly and take us by surprise that didn’t enable us to do any kind of planning for what was next. But I don’t think, unfortunately, there is any sort of magic bullet, some solution that’s going to make colleges finances whole, and, you know, avert other Auroras and other Wells from going through the same thing.