Spring's a big time for buying and selling homes ... normally
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It is a confusing time to be shopping for a house.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First, stock futures are pointing up this morning after some better-than-expected results from technology companies. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer reports. Tech futures rose after the latest earnings reports from Meta and Microsoft. Meta revenue was up 16% year-over-year. The average price per ad was also up. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is making good progress on AI glasses and Meta AI.

Microsoft reported quarterly net income of more than $25 billion, an increase of 18% for the quarter. Investors were also buoyed by reports from Chinese state media that the U.S. had reached out to Beijing to set up talks over tariffs. A social media account affiliated with state media said there's little downside in exploring that.

I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. Indeed, index futures are up with the Nasdaq up 1.7% at the moment, S&P futures up 1.2%.

As we use President Trump's 100 days as an invitation to review the overhaul so far, what does a political scientist think who whispers in the ear of corporations trying to navigate these uncertain times? We're joined now by Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the political risk consultancy, the Eurasia Group. Ian, great to have you back. David, always good to talk to you. You've written this, but say it aloud for us. The tariff policy is the most surprising.

What is the greatest act of geopolitical self-harm I've seen in my career as a political scientist? All right. But what about as a bargaining tool for the Trump administration to get some countries talking about their trade policies and other arrangements? It works that way to some extent.

It should work that way. And the U.S. is, of course, the strongest economy. It's the most powerful country in the world. But for example, if the United States is trying to get a whole bunch of countries that are aligned to work with the Americans to push the Chinese hard to further de-risk, to decouple, specifically in areas that are important for national security, the worst way to go about that is to pick on your friends at the same time.

And on the subject of prompting or forcing negotiations by jacking up tariffs, does that work with China actually in practice? No, no, it's going to work with a bunch of weaker countries, smaller countries, countries that desperately need a deal with the U.S. With the Chinese, they aren't even talking to the United States about trade. And the fact is that they can take a significant hit. This is going to be about 2 percent

of their GDP, but they are convinced that they can outlast the Americans politically in terms of pain they take. And they also see themselves as major long-term beneficiaries as other countries around the world hedge more towards China. And as the Americans refuse leadership in multilateral institutions with the global South and lots of other areas where the Chinese are the number two player, they'll become more dominant.

One last question here. I guess it gets at the new world of trade and new alignments that emerge. Does it matter outside of India when you see that workers in India will put together the iPhones?

that Chinese people have been assembling and then Americans have been buying? Yes. China has an economy that has not been performing very well. So the fact that the United States and other countries have been trying to de-risk and now Trump is leaning into a very tough, basically a trade embargo position on the Chinese, that's going to be a benefit to India first and foremost, but also Vietnam and countries across Southeast Asia. That I think is going to be a long-term structural move.

Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy. Always good to catch up. David, a pleasure. And here's President Trump yesterday on his tariffs, China profiting from the things Americans buy, and the possibility of hardship at the toy store ahead of Christmas and Hanukkah. They made a trillion dollars with Biden, a trillion dollars, even a trillion one.

with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. You know, somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

It is now the month of May, and we can now look back at the stock market's performance for this turbulent April. Enormous swings with tariff turnarounds, but in the end, the S&P for the month of April lost only seven-tenths of one percent. The Nasdaq lost eight-tenths of a percent for the month.

So the stock market's been volatile, so is the housing market these days. While a surge of people entered into contracts to buy new places to live in the month of March, if you compare existing home sales in March to a year earlier, sales were down in many regions, including the Midwest and the South. In the West, they were up, and the Northeast was holding steady year over year, using data from the National Association of Realtors. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more.

In some ways, this spring's housing market is deja vu all over again. We're still in this stalemate phase that we've been in for a long time. Chris Albiati, senior housing economist at ApartmentList, says affordability, or the lack thereof, is still the main issue. We're really not through the crazy price increases that we saw a few years ago, right, where we saw

The median monthly mortgage payment double in the course of a few years. Today, home prices are still growing, though much more slowly. And mortgage rates have come down a little. The challenge is, of course, that housing conditions are easier to navigate, but economic ones aren't. Allie Wolfe, chief economist at Zonda, says uncertainty in the economy is a huge factor in the current housing market. People are wondering... Is my job safe?

Will the economy go into a recession? What do these tariffs mean for me? If you're trying to make the biggest purchase of your life, do you really want to do it if you have no sense of what the next six months look like? For a lot of people, she says, the answer right now is no. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. And in Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio. You're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media.

If there's one thing we know about social media, it's that misinformation is everywhere, especially when it comes to personal finance. Financially Inclined from Marketplace is a podcast you can trust to help you get serious about your money so you can build a life you've always dreamed of.

I'm the host, Janelia Espinal, and each week I ask experts important money questions, like how to negotiate job offers, how to choose a college that you can afford, and how to talk about money with friends and family. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcasts.