Consumers couldn't turn frowns upside-down for long
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Everything's fine from American public media. This is Market Plan. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the 24th of June. Good as always to have you along, everybody. First things first, the ceasefire in the Middle East does seem to be holding. Second things second, stock and bond traders the past couple of days do seem to be taking the news out of the Middle East in stride.

And third things third, oil markets seem to be very relaxed. Brent North Seed crude the past two days. Remember, that's the global benchmark. Down 15 percent, a hair under $68 a barrel at the close today in New York. But market forces cut both ways. Marketplace's Sabri Beneshour reintroduces us to the idea of risk premiums.

From Singapore to New York, the folks who buy and sell oil are betting Iran will not close the Strait of Hormuz. And oil prices show it. Samir Samana is with the Wells Fargo Investment Institute. Yeah, I mean, you're pretty much right where you were the day before Israel attacked a couple weeks ago. The cost of moving that oil around...

We are now at around $2.95 a barrel, which is a 118% increase. Matt Wright is a principal freight analyst at Kepler. One thing about shipping costs for oil tankers is that the price swings are kind of wild. Like they can move by 20% and that wouldn't be news. There is typically much greater volatility in freight rates than there is in the underlying commodity price, whether it's crude or refined products or anything.

That is very normal. But 118% that is not. One reason for the increase has to do with scheduling. Like turning a ship, scheduling a ship is slow. Oil pickups are booked 15 to 20 days in advance. So when the missiles started flying 11 days ago, some of those appointments were canceled. Now shippers are trying to squeeze in extra trips to make up for that. So vessels are going to have to come into the Mideast Gulf and pick up cargoes with a sort of shorter window than is normally done.

That means more demand for ships, and that means higher prices for shipping. On top of that, you've got insurance rates on these tankers, which went up and are still up. Tim DeNoyer is vice president at ACT Research. Well, certainly the risks are still elevated in the Persian Gulf.

The risk to the global oil supply may have come down, but the risk to any individual ship in the Persian Gulf, still there. Could get seized, could get hit, who knows? I think those risks are starting to decline, but I think it might take a little time for the market to really reprice those risks.

Between insurance and demand, global trade intelligence firm Kepler estimates the cost of shipping oil is probably going to come mostly down within a couple weeks, assuming the ceasefire holds. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace. We interrupt our commodities market coverage to bring you news of the politics of the American economy.

Fed Chair Jay Powell was on Capitol Hill today for his semi-annual update to Congress. Lots of questions about lots of things. You could probably guess what they were. This particular and revealing exchange did catch our ear, though. California Democrat Juan Vargas asking the question. It's not missed on you. You know that we want you all to lower the rates. You know that both sides, right? You get that. The answer could be yes or no.

Honestly, I'm not sure I do know that. Well, from our side, we'd love to see the rates go down. And I've heard from a number of my colleagues on the other side, we'd love to see the rates go down.

I talk to a lot of members who say privately, you're doing the right thing. I hear that from a lot of members privately. In any case, we have to do, you were appointed and confirmed, my colleagues and I, do what we think is right. Love that long pause right at the top there. Powell is talking to the Senate tomorrow. It is a very safe bet he's going to very much say the same stuff he said today. Wall Street on this Tuesday, like I said, everything's fine. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Jay Powell wasn't the only attraction on Capitol Hill today. There's the GOP's big tax cut bill still being chewed over in the Senate. You've been hearing lots about that. Crypto made an appearance, too. You might remember last week the Senate, in a rare actual bipartisan vote, passed the Genius Act, which could lead to something called stable coins becoming more common in this economy. And there was a GOP proposal today to change how and by whom most cryptocurrencies are regulated.

Marketplace's Matt Levin explains what's going on there. So even if you've never bought Bitcoin and your eyes glaze over anytime someone starts talking about the blockchain, you should care about what federal agency regulates crypto, just like you probably should have cared who was regulating mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps before the 2008 financial crisis. Chris Brummer is a professor at Georgetown Law.

When things work well, regulatorily, the entire economy does well. But when things don't work as well, and if you have bouts of financial instability, your life can be made harder as well.

The total crypto market cap is now over $3 trillion globally, but there's still major debate over who should regulate it. Under the Biden administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission took the lead regulating certain aspects of crypto, mostly by suing crypto companies. Summer Merzinger, head of the Blockchain Association and Industry Lobbying Group, says they need more than a piecemeal approach. Crypto is trying to interpret a bunch of different

opinions across federal agencies, you know, the judicial system and trying to find the regulatory paths. The industry wants most cryptocurrencies regulated by the Commodities Futures Exchange Commission, known as the CFTC, and not the SEC. It's complicated, but they basically argue because of crypto's decentralized nature, it's economically more like a barrel of oil or bushel of wheat than Apple stock.

Corey Frayer at the Consumer Federation of America says there's an ulterior motive. The CFTC just isn't equipped.

by expertise, by staffing, by budgeting to handle an enormous securities industry. About 700 people work for the CFTC. The SEC has about 5,000. There are two proposals in the House and Senate. They'll have to pass both chambers before being sent to President Trump. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. We're going to do a little consumer check-in now, and the consumers being checked in with are you. So...

How you doing? To judge by the Consumer Confidence Index from the conference board this morning, maybe not so great. The index fell this month, just as it has fallen every month of this year, save May. Consumers are more downbeat, both about the right now and about the future. Some of the reasons why are probably obvious if you read the headlines. Other reasons, though, maybe less obvious. Daniel Ackerman has that one.

Tariffs, a new tax and spend bill, conflicts in the Middle East, it's all just a lot for consumers, says Tuan Nguyen, an economist at RSM. We are living in a period of elevated uncertainties, and uncertainty is the number one enemy of consumer confidence. But alongside this swirl of uncertainties that consumers can't do much about, they're also more and more worried about their jobs. Kayla Brune is lead economist at Morning Consult.

The labor market has been seemingly doing this very long, prolonged, gradual kind of slowdown. The labor market is by no means in a bad place. There aren't widespread layoffs, but continuing jobless claims are near their highest in three years. Bill Adams is chief economist at Comerica Bank.

Consumers are seeing some more softness in the job market, fewer jobs available, and a harder time finding a new job. He says younger job seekers are having a particularly tough time, which could mean...

Less willingness to make big discretionary purchases near term. We've seen some of that already in the May retail sales report, which was down on the month. There was some good news in the data. Kayla Bruhn of Morning Consult says consumers are less worried about rising prices. We have been getting cooler inflation ratings and consumers do seem to be noticing that.

Of course, the end of the 90-day pause on most tariffs could shift the mood again next month. And with everything happening so fast, Bruin says we gotta read the fine print attached to these datasets. The conference board survey ran through June 18th. So it's not capturing the U.S.'s involvement in the Israel-Iran affair. Bruin says her group's more recent surveys show consumer confidence has kept sliding since then. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

The woes of the American shopping mall have been much documented over the past decade or more. From the death of the big boxes like Sears and JCPenney to our new shopping habits inspired by the pandemic, there are less than 1,000 malls left in this economy. That's down from 1,200 a decade ago. It's not all doom and gloom, though. As Laura Hackett reports now from Blue Ridge Public Radio, communities are finding creative ways to fill the vacancies left by those disappeared anchor stores.

Instead of an old Charlotte Roos store, a pack of 10-year-olds are learning how to wrestle in the Asheville Mall. While shoppers stroll by, these kids are doing bear crawls and push-ups on a big foam mat. This used to be a popular fast fashion stop. Now it's the headquarters of Mountain Peak Athletic Center, a boxing and wrestling gym, where spectators can grab a $5 beer from the fridge and hang out by the ring.

Owner John Jastrzewski says the former retail space is a perfect fit and price for his growing business. It was a long time that it was vacant, so I'm assuming since we were asking to rent it, they were willing to negotiate whatever they can get because they were getting zero. As many retail chains shutter brick-and-mortar sites, malls are pivoting to include more local flair.

In Asheville, that means a tattoo parlor, a food bank, and even a wedding venue.

Brad to be Autumn Davis will get hitched here this summer. Yeah, it's fancy. I mean, this is a full-blown wedding. We just happen to be in the center of a mall. They're going to have their own entrance in the back. It's going to be lining lights and lace and chauffeurs walking people in. There's also an artist collective. They call themselves the Mall Rats. We're looking at...

the mall as a canvas and what can we put in it. Eric Mace is a leader of the group. And this summer, they hung a fish sculpture, an artistically bent gardening hoe, and other whimsical creations in an empty hallway outside of the closed JCPenney. There's a lot of discussion about how malls in their original heyday, like they were community centers. I think it's just that perfect time to start to talk about, well, what else could a mall be?

Portland, Oregon, is trying to answer that question, too. Locals sometimes call the Lloyd Center a, quote, dead mall. But it has an artist collective, too, coincidentally also called the Mallrats, led by Nathan McKee. You know, it's anything from people who screen print their own T-shirts to letterpress cards to zines, ceramicists. It's all over the board.

He says the artist's group wants to get people off social media to gather and create in person. You know, when you're like online all the time, it can mess with your psyche. You know, like once you're like focused only on likes and how many people, you know, tap the screen. He says people have fond memories at the Lloyd Center.

Whether, you know, you were a mall rat or not, you have this like wave of nostalgia of just the sound of it and the look of it and the escalators and elevators and the ice rink. But sometimes nostalgia is not enough to keep a mall alive. In the U.S., between 10 to 20 malls shut down every year. And that's why some communities are rethinking these spaces in a big way to reimagine the property entirely.

The biggest surprise for me is that never once would I have ever imagined that the mall would turn into a school. Trevor Ivey now runs an elementary school in an old Macy's in Sumter, South Carolina.

He says as a teenager, he would often come to the mall for corn dogs and arcade games. I'm born and raised in this community. The mall used to be the place to go. Decades later, it's still a place to go, just for kindergartners figuring out what school is or seven-year-olds learning to read. I think at the heart of our project is this idea of community revitalization. And that means the mall is still relevant, but just in a different way.

In Asheville, North Carolina, I'm Laura Hackett for Marketplace. Coming up. It's become, for lack of a better word, a trend to want to speak at Harvard Business School. A little trend analysis straight ahead. But first, let's do the numbers. ♪

Yeah, here you go, the really happy music because everything's fine. Dow Industrials ascended 507 points today, 1.2%, 43,089. The Nasdaq jumped 281 points, about 1.4%, finished at 19,912. The S&P 500 packed on 67 points, 1.1%, 6,092. So we was talking about shipping rates.

So some global shippers. Mattson down 0.7%. Maersk dropped 1.7% today. Oil down. Airlines up. That's the paradigm. Delta rose 2.7% today. American grew 4.3%. JetBlue up 4.1%. Oil companies, you asked? ExxonMobil down 3%. Chevron declined 2.2% today. Defense contractors...

Well, they fell after that feeling settled in that the Iran-Israel conflict might not drag on. Northrop Grumman down 3.2 percent today. Lockheed Martin down 2.6 percent. RTX once upon a time. Raytheon down 2.7 percent on the day. Bonds up yield on the 10-year T-Tone 4.29 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Dell. Introducing the new Dell AIPC powered by the Intel Core Ultra Processor.

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This Marketplace podcast is supported by Greenlight. As a listener of Marketplace, you're likely already building smart money habits for you and your family, trying to instill important lessons on saving and spending and the economy overall, and the younger folks in your life. But what about the older generation? Your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles? As they age, they may need more support in managing their finances too.

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Take care of your whole family, from kids to grandparents, with Family Shield from Greenlight. Sign up today at greenlight.com slash marketplace. If your job at a healthcare facility includes disinfecting against viruses, you know prevention is the best medicine. And maintaining healthy spaces is the best medicine.

starts with a healthy cleaning routine. Grainger's world-class supply chain helps ensure you have the quality products you need when you need them. From disinfectants and cleaning supplies to personal protective equipment, so you can help deliver a clean bill of health. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, clickgrainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. While the labor market here is, as of now, holding firm...

That is not necessarily true in the rest of the global economy. China, in particular, young workers there to get even more granular. The unemployment rate in China for 16 to 24-year-olds was almost 15% last month. The obligatory note here is, grain of salt with that, the real number could well be higher. But whatever the data, with more than 12 million brand new college graduates entering the Chinese workforce this month...

There's a lot of competition for the jobs that there are. Our China correspondent, Jennifer Pack, talked to some would-be workers.

I'm checking out a job fair at Shanghai's Donghua University, which has 50 firms looking to fill just under 900 openings. It's a tiny job fair by China's standards. But Donghua ranks among the top 100 Chinese universities, which means its graduates have a leg up in the job hunt, in theory. In practice, going to a top school is not enough, says supply chain management grad Gao Shengqi. It's been almost a month.

I've been looking for jobs for about a month, and most of them are not suitable. There were many jobs I thought I could do, but the employers said no. And the jobs where the employers wanted me, I didn't want because the jobs weren't that good. Not good because the pay he's hoping to make is at least $11,000 a year, but the offers were 20% less. That would make it hard for me to have a life in Shanghai.

Just outside the job fair, I meet Miao Jiahao, who has a master's degree in law. Like many graduates in China, he began job hunting early last fall. I've applied for over a thousand jobs. There were not many replies, just a dozen or so. I've had two job offers, both unrelated to law.

But he really wants to work in his field. The biggest hurdle, he says? There are too many law graduates and not enough suitable jobs. Then he excuses himself because he has an interview. He goes off to a quiet corner to take the video call on speakerphone. Good luck.

It's a group interview, which is common in China when there are many applicants. The interviewer gives each applicant 90 seconds to introduce themselves in front of the whole group. Talk about pressure.

Candidates here are all well aware of the high youth unemployment. That's why arts theory major Huang Yanhan is trying to get a head start. She's not graduating till next year, but she's poking around the job fair. I'm worried because the job market is overall not good. Plus, I'm majoring in liberal arts, so some employers will have higher requirements for us.

Higher because many employers in China have a bias that liberal arts graduates have few practical skills. A college degree used to give applicants a competitive edge, but that's no longer the case. Here's Gao Shangqi again, the applicant who holds a bachelor's degree in supply chain management. I've walked around the whole job fair and employers have really high requirements. Some jobs need a master's degree or higher.

The positions are in fashion, real estate, the automotive sector. You want the truth? A master's degree is not necessary for a lot of these advertised jobs. From his perspective, even a technical degree would be more than enough. In Shanghai, I'm Jennifer Pak for Marketplace.

Here's a not entirely hypothetical question. What do reality TV stars, TikTok influencers and Grammy winning musicians have in common? If you said an invitation to speak at Harvard Business School, you go straight to the head of the class. The real mystery here, though, is why do all those people want to make the trek to Cambridge?

Rory Satchin wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So before the Harvard Business School became an influencer pipeline, who was the average speaker? The average speaker was your standard CEO. So someone from HSBC, someone from the major consulting companies, kind of had attended an Ivy League school themselves, potentially business school themselves, but pretty dry. Without, yeah, I was just going to say, without casting aspersions, kind of a snoozer, right? Exactly.

Exactly. Without casting aspersions. Right. Well, I will now no longer be getting an invitation to Harvard Business School. Now, tell me about the influencers that are so eager to go to this stodgy old business school and do their thing.

So it's become, for lack of a better word, a trend to want to speak at Harvard Business School. Some say that it harks back to Kim Kardashian, who spoke at the school in 2023. And she posted a selfie with the Harvard Business School sign, which went pretty viral. Since then, the school has been pretty much in

inundated with requests from influencers, but also more high profile celebrities. So in recent months, we've had Phineas, Billie Eilish's brother speak there, Marcelo Hernandez from Saturday Night Live, Alex Earl, the influencer. So it's become a really hot ticket. Okay, but why? What do the influencers who are kind of by definition, they've already got a reputation and huge audiences, what do they get out of going to Harvard?

It's become a badge of honor. And aside from the branding opportunity of taking a selfie with the sign, I think it conveys a certain legitimacy. The same way that being on a panel or appearing on a television show was once kind of a badge of legitimacy. Now, now speaking at Harvard is the latest one.

And Harvard, of course, much in the news of late for something not at all related to this. But the Harvard Business School gets, you know, a profile boost out of this. Right. When Phineas or Kim Kardashian come to speak. Right.

Exactly. They're not doing it for this reason, but it's great PR for the school. One does wonder how Yale or Wharton or the Stern School at NYU or Stanford, right? How do they feel about all this? I dug into that a little bit to see if this was also a thing at Stern, also a thing at Stanford, and turns out not so much. So it's a very Harvard brand specific phenomenon. Yeah.

The Harvard Business School, I don't know what the tuition is, but it is certainly not cheap. If I'm an MBA student, other than the visceral thrill of seeing Alex Earle or Phineas or Billy or whatever...

I mean, do I get something out of this? The students, for the most part, seem really excited about the phenomenon. And a lot of the students I spoke to say that they like seeing someone with an unorthodox, non-traditional background because it kind of mirrors what's happening in the zeitgeist and in the business world today. Also, and this is kind of relevant, a lot of these influencers now run actual businesses.

businesses. It's not just being an influencer. It's the businesses that they run. Right. So taking into account Alex Earle's perspective on business. You probably should tell people who Alex Earle is. So Alex Earle is, I would say, one of the top influencers of the moment. But she also runs a business

The beverage soda company that she launched, Poppy, was just sold to PepsiCo for over a billion dollars. So paying attention to influencers' business empires is actually savvy. It's not silly. Right. So look, we've established that I am no longer going to be invited to the Harvard Business School. What about you? Have they called you yet since you did this piece? Yes.

I would have to run it by the Standards and Ethics Board, but yes, I have been approached. There you go. Well, we shall see. It definitely opened it up to the common folk. There we go. Rory Zatron at The Wall Street Journal. Rory, thanks a bunch. I appreciate your time. Thanks for having me.

This final note on the way out today, a housing market data point. The Kay Schiller Home Price Index was out today. And how you're feeling about it kind of depends on which side of the transaction you are on. Nationwide, home prices were up 2.7% in April. That is an annual increase. Obviously, that's for the sellers out there. For the buyers among you, that was the slowest rate of growth ever.

in almost two years. So you take your solace where you can get it, I suppose. Our digital and on-demand team includes Jordan Mangy, Dylan Mietenen, Janet Nguyen, Olga Oxman, Virginia K. Smith, and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital and on-demand. And I'm Kyle Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.

This Old House has been America's most trusted source for all things DIY and home improvement for decades. And now we're on the radio and on demand. I think you're breaking into this wall regardless. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I need to go and get some whiskey, I think. I would get the whiskey for sure. Subscribe to This Old House Radio Hour from LAist Studios, wherever you get your podcasts.