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Can't really do economics without a little bit of math, I am sorry to say. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Tuesday, today the 29th day of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We are going to start today with a formula, but in keeping with the policy of this program and the preferences of its host, we are not going to make you do any actual math.
The formula du jour goes like this. C plus I plus G plus X minus M equals GDP. In layman's terms, C, consumption, consumer spending on goods and services, plus I, investment, that's business spending, plus G, that's government spending, plus X, which is exports, minus M, imports,
Now, why, you ask, did I bother with that? Well, I bothered with that for two reasons. Number one, we get an update on gross domestic product tomorrow. Justin Ho is going to talk about that in a minute. But also, we get an update on gross domestic product tomorrow.
We got a look this morning at the latest trade gap figures. Trade deficit, right? Net exports. It hit a record high in March, the Census Bureau tells us, as imports were up sharply. Marketplace's Sabri Benishor explains what's going on and what it's all going to mean.
Everybody's been stockpiling. It's been steady for the past several months. Janae Seiko is president of Copper Hill, which advises companies on how to minimize tariffs. Large manufacturers started super early. Before the election, we certainly saw a spike in imports. Not just businesses. Everybody else who can has been stocking up on stuff, too.
So we saw purchases of electronics, for example, jump 30% in the week after the tariff announcements. Mark Matthews is executive director for research at the National Retail Federation. Last month, we saw car sales rise by, you know, 8% year over year. All of that pushed the trade deficit to a record high in March. But now that the tariffs are here and the stocks have been piled, masses of businesses are doing something else. They're holding their breath. We
We are beginning to see ships leaving China half empty or more. Whatever hasn't been put on a boat already is locked up somewhere else. I was talking with a number of clients who have rerouted shipments into Mexico. They're holding in Japan. They're holding in Singapore. They've moved things into Europe.
Ashley Hetrick is supply chain lead at professional services firm BDO. All of them very much taking a wait-and-see approach before paying duties on those items to bring them into the United States. And while they are waiting and seeing, they are figuring out who's going to pay these tariffs, which in a long and twisty, turny manufacturing supply chain is not a simple question. Again, Janae Seiko at Copper Hill. They might be delaying or slowing down to the degree they can,
to get commitment and agreement with their customer on some type of passing along of the tariff or the sharing of the tariff. According to the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents the country's largest retailers, the next few weeks are going to be critical in determining what companies do and whether we're going to see shortages in the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, if not sooner.
In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace. Okay, so GDP, remember the formula, right? C plus I plus G plus net exports. That net exports thing that Sabri was just talking about is going to play big in the GDP number we are going to get tomorrow. And as Marketplace's Justin Ho reports, even though it is still early days, the president's trade policies are already showing up.
Some of the economic data we get comes out really close to the time period it measures. This Friday's jobs report, for instance, will cover the month we're currently in. But tomorrow's GDP report will reflect what happened more than a month ago, back in the first quarter of this year. It is a backward-looking indicator because it takes into account everything that's already happened.
That's Jennifer Lee, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. The first quarter was before the president's so-called Liberation Day. Back then, it was mostly fears about tariffs that were driving business decisions. Everyone was trying to buy up what they can, when they could get it at a still decent price before the tariffs really kicked in.
All of that importing has been leading to record trade deficits, and trade deficits are subtracted from GDP. Now we're starting to see the actual impact of the tariffs themselves rather than the fear. There's a range of surveys from the regional Fed banks that are starting to point to increases in business input costs. That's Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank. He says those higher costs are likely to cut into business investment, which is an important component of GDP.
Businesses are going to be more cautious towards building a new factory, buying new equipment that they're going to be using for the next couple of years. Uncertainty is causing businesses to put off hiring decisions, and that could have an even bigger impact on GDP, says Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY.
That leads to essentially a slowdown in employment momentum and in income growth, which in turn will prevent consumers from spending in the face of these heightened prices stemming from tariffs.
Daco says given less business investment and less consumer spending. The end result is likely to be the U.S. economy moving from a 3% pace of growth in 2024 towards a pace of growth that's likely to be very close to stall speed by the fourth quarter of this year.
In other words, Stokke says the odds of a recession are rising. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, President Trump's most recent tariff walk back cars this time lifted the mood. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.
We're going to go to the data to set up this next story. Both kinds of data, by the way, hard numbers and softer consumer impressions kind of data. The hard data came this morning with Jolt, the job openings and labor turnover survey, which showed there were 7.2 million job openings in this economy in March.
about a million fewer than there were a year ago. The softer data is how people are feeling about how many jobs are out there. According to the Consumer Confidence Report out today from the conference board, in April, fewer people believed jobs were plentiful compared to March, and more people feel like jobs are hard to get, again, compared to March. The difference there between plentiful and hard to get?
is what economists call the labor market differential, which, yes, we know, requires some explaining. Here's Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes.
In economics, there's this metaphor that's meant to explain where unemployment is headed. Northwestern economics professor Ki Rabo Jackson says it's called the bathtub model. Job openings is water going into the tub. Layoffs, retirements, that's water leaving the tub. In an ideal world, you'd have a tub that's two-thirds full. That's the right mix of job openings and exits. Water's not sloshing over the sides. That's what was happening a few years ago when it was really hard for companies to hire workers.
But you still want enough water to feel comfortable, get clean, soak for as long as you like. And when the labor market differential shrinks, like it's doing right now, Jackson says that means the water is draining faster than it's filling up. Which kind of is telling us that overall we expect the unemployment rate to go up and the market to sort of deteriorate to some extent. The labor market differential acts as a proxy for the unemployment rate. When it goes down, it indicates that the unemployment rate is likely going up.
Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at the conference board, says that's because the consumers surveyed, they aren't economists. They're making these calls based on their feelings, but also their observations. So they look around how their family, their friends, their colleagues are doing in terms of the labor market. Right now, both the survey data and the hard data still look OK-ish. In other words, the water in the bathtub has gone down a few millimeters.
But economist Guy Berger at the Burning Glass Institute points out, if you look at what consumers are expecting six months from now, they think it's going to get a lot worse. People are also telling you, you know what, I actually think the bathtub is going to drain a lot faster the next few months. And if people are expecting more bad news about the economy, they might pull back on their spending. You're much less likely to buy a rubber ducky today. If you think a few months from now, you're just going to be left naked and shivering alone in the tub. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace.
Retirement. Pretty easy to define, I think. You work for a long time and then at the end, ideally, you get some hard-earned time off.
How about this, though? Many retirements, people taking a big chunk of time off closer to the beginning or maybe middle of their careers than to the end. They are apparently becoming more popular with younger workers. And Isabella Kwai wrote about them in The New York Times the other day. Isabella, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Great to be here. These many retirement things, what are they?
Yes. Well, a mini retirement is a self-funded break that people take away from traditional full-time employment. You may have known it to be more a sabbatical, but these days, some people prefer to call it a micro or mini retirement instead because it's not always through an employer and they might be funding it through their own savings and not coming back to the same job. And
And it's also younger people, right? It's not people at 65 or whatever the retirement age is, right? It's people who are sort of in their careers who are saying, I need not to do this for a while.
Yes, it's people who are, you know, they could be in their 20s, 30s or older, but it's people who are not at the age that we would think would be traditional retirement age. And it's not just about being tired of working. What they want is a way to make it more sustainable to work and enjoy their lives in these mini breaks instead of saving it all for the very end.
Are they leaving their jobs to do these and sort of seeing what happens on the back end or have they been laid off? I mean, the folks you talk to.
It's a real mix. So of the people I spoke to, there were some of them who just felt like they were in a job that was unsustainable and overworked them. So they quit and decided to take some time before applying for a new one. There's others that, you know, take an unpaid leave. And, you know, after the article came out, one person wrote to me and said they'd been laid off
twice in a row. And so they took an unplanned mini retirement for over a year, but it ended up putting them on a pathway to an entirely different career. And, you know, it ended up being a really transformative time. This is all a reflection of the importance nowadays on work-life balance, right? There's no more of this, you know, work until you're dead thing. It's you got to live too, right? Yeah.
Exactly. And, you know, obviously, it's easier to do this if you are in a more financially stable place. That being said, I think even this concept appearing online more is a sign that, you know, especially after the pandemic, a lot of younger workers are rethinking their priorities in life. You know, they're thinking, do I...
you know, live to work or work to live. Is this career for me? Is there a way in which I can, you know, get food on the table and pay the bills but not have to work myself to the bone? And I think the mini retirement is a reflection of those anxieties and some people trying to find a different way to do things. Do these folks, when they come back to the labor market, do they suffer for having been away or does it work out positively for them in one way or another?
So in some research around this that surveyed some professionals who came back, they reported coming back to their careers with a greater sense of things like confidence, boundaries with work, but of course,
Leaving any career for some time, what also came through was people are aware it's a financial risk. This could set them back in terms of career progression, but it brings other benefits and they want those benefits. Have you inquired at the good offices of the New York Times whether you might be able to do one of these? Because I'm thinking about calling my boss.
Well, that's the thing. I mean, after hearing, you know, dozens of people tell me about their mini retirements, I definitely inquired and I think we may have a benefit similar to this. But, you know, it's interesting even for me thinking about work-life balance, right? I do think, you know, if you, like myself, have worked for a long time, it's sometimes hard to figure out when is the right time to take a step back, you know?
it definitely brought up some, you know, thoughts on, Hey, this, this could be something I could do, but yeah, I think it's also each to their own. Right. But it's an important conversation to have. Isabella quiet, the New York times, Isabella. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Coming up. I make 5,000 decisions a day at work and all of them have to be right. No pressure though. First, let's do the numbers.
Dow Industrials up 300 points today, three quarters of one percent, finished at 40,527. The NASDAQ added 95.6%, 17,461. The S&P 500 up 32.6%, 55 and 60 there.
General Motors down 0.6%. Today it is the latest company to drop or walk back earnings guidance for the year. Why, you ask? Because tariffs. Hello, Delta. Americans Southwest have done it, as well as parent companies of Frontier and Alaska Airlines. Bonds up, yields down on the 10-year 4.17%. You're listening to Marketplace.
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And because you're a listener, you get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com slash marketplace. That's gusto.com slash marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. When we talk commodities around here, it's usually the biggies. Oil, copper, gold of late. But the global economy is an omnivore and it needs natural resources of all kinds in massive quantities today.
Which takes us right now to the great state of Wyoming, which happens to have the world's largest known deposit of a mineral that, once refined, goes into things like glass and batteries, baking soda and detergent, too. Trisodium hydrogen dicarbonate dihydrate, if you want to get chemical about it. It's called Trona in everyday use, and it is also Wyoming's biggest export. So when dozens of Trona mine workers were unexpectedly laid off late last year,
It came as something of surprise. Wyoming Public Radio's Caitlin Tan has the story now of a mechanic in a high desert town.
James Kincaid opens the door of his two-story, yellow-paneled home in Green River, a rural community built on the backbone of Wyoming's mining economy. Hi, James! Hey, girls, stop. His dogs, Ruby and Pearl, wait inside. Inside, not much is hanging on the walls yet, except... This is a Kansas whitetail deer.
Hunting is a family love. It was Wyoming's wildlife that partly inspired the Kincaid's 1,000-mile move last fall, but also it was his dream job. I was doing what I love to do. I love to tear stuff apart and put it back together. Kincaid worked on the machinery that moves trona, a translucent mineral, from underground to the surface.
He hired on in October for $45 an hour with Genesis Alkali, which was one of the top players in the global industry. You know, the HR lady kept asking me, she says, are you going to be out here for a long time? I said, until you fire me, yeah. And then two months later, it's like, here it is.
Genesis laid him off and 29 other workers, pointing to a global Trona market downturn. That was confusing to Kincaid because he'd been hearing about expansions and hirings in Wyoming's Trona mines. He thought he had a career-long job. It wasn't the layoff that upset me the most. You know, the layoff, I've been there before, but I wasn't a thousand miles and mining a house, you know, so...
The layoff notice came just a few days after the Kinkades closed on their first house with enough room for his three kids. This is my daughter's room. How big is the house? Freaking huge. I don't know, it's 2,100 square foot, I think it is. But it's also a $2,100 mortgage. Kinkade scrambled to find a new job. He applied to at least 30. My wife and I are stubborn enough that we're going to make a go at it.
Wyoming touts itself as an outdoor wonderland, hoping the wide open spaces and mountains will draw in workers for the big industries like coal, natural gas and Trona. And with Kincaid, at least it worked. I absolutely just love it up here. I met with Kincaid in early January. And since then, Wyoming's governor said the Trona layoffs were just a bump in the road. The state is still banking on the industry. And the state is still banking on the industry.
And so is Kincaid. President Trump is championing industries like coal and mineral extraction. Kincaid felt like if he stuck it out, eventually something would come through.
Hello. Hey, James. How was the last week of work? Oh, we stayed busy. Kincaid got a job with another local Trona company this spring, and he's back doing what he loves, tearing stuff apart, putting it back together. Yesterday, we worked on a hydraulic cylinder that needed to come out. Come out from underground. We're talking a 300-pound piece of equipment. I thought you just...
you just pick up and manhandle, you know, but you gotta, you gotta find ways to get creative as far as rigging this stuff up. Now that he finally got work, Kincaid says he'll be able to afford not only his mortgage, but time off for a hunting trip. His big reason for moving to Wyoming in green river. I'm Caitlin tan for marketplace. He's faded from the scene mostly, but Elon Musk's legacy in the federal government and the federal workforce is
is going to be much like one of the sayings around his rocket company, rapid unscheduled disassembly. And while Musk and the Trump administration have been cutting tens of thousands from the federal workforce, there's also been an effort to hire more of one very particular kind of federal worker, air traffic controllers.
The Federal Aviation Administration's been dealing with a shortage of controllers for years now. The agency has said it hopes to hire 2,000 of them this year. It's boosted pay for some controllers in training to sweeten the pot. Also, it's simplified parts of the hiring process.
But as Marketplace's Henry Epp reports, it is going to take a while to produce results. The job of directing planes in and out of airports and through the skies comes with some financial perks. Stephen Abraham retired after 23 years as a controller at JFK Airport in New York City. By the time you're 26, you can make
The trade-off? The job is stressful. Yeah.
you really kind of don't get a second chance. Do that five or six days a week on shifts that sometimes start and end at different times every day. And he says it adds up. There's just mental strain and fatigue, and it just wears you out. Which is one reason why most air traffic controllers have to retire at 56.
Those early retirements and the strains of the work itself help explain why the Federal Aviation Administration is about 3,000 air traffic controllers short of its staffing target. The FAA did not agree to a recorded interview for this story. But in a written statement, it said that more than 8,000 people recently qualified to take an aptitude test, early steps in the process of becoming a controller.
Getting someone from there to working in a controlled tower means passing through some bottlenecks in the system. First...
running at full capacity. Michael McCormick heads the air traffic management program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Until last year, all future controllers had to go through that Oklahoma academy, even those with undergraduate air traffic degrees from Embry-Riddle. Then the Biden administration allowed some undergraduate programs to offer equivalent training. So that upon graduation, they can be hired
immediately into the FAA. The Trump administration has added more air traffic control programs to the effort. The University of North Dakota joined the program earlier this year. Craig Carlson, an associate professor there, says students train in a simulator that mimics an air traffic control tower. Virtual planes take off and land, and pseudo-pilots follow students' directions. They call up over radio frequencies that you key up like you would in a facility. It's pretty fun and pretty immersive.
Carlson says tuition deposits for the fall term have doubled. I think that's people wanting to come for the enhanced program. But it's going to take them about four years to graduate. So in four years is when I see the program at its full potential.
When those students finally make it to an FAA facility, they'll hit bottleneck two, mandatory on-the-job training. Robert Mann is an airline industry consultant. It can then take them between 12 months in a less challenging facility up to 24 months, sometimes longer, to finally qualify as a certified pilot.
There's a lot to learn, and every facility is slightly different. But the training takes so long, because of the workforce shortage, it's supposed to solve, Mann says. It's a catch-22 situation. If you don't have enough people, you don't have enough people to train people, and hence people don't get trained.
Man says he's skeptical that the FAA will be able to alleviate its shortage anytime soon. Students who do make it all the way through the training will find the work has benefits beyond the pay and pension, says former JFK controller Stephen Abraham.
After you've worked when it's really busy, you know when you've done a good job. Like, nobody has to tell you. The job isn't a lot of back-slapping and, boy, you're really good. But you know you've saved people time and kept them safe. I'm Henry App for Marketplace. ♪♪
This final note on the way out today, you heard this morning, I'm sure, the thing about Amazon planning to put how much tariffs are going to add next to total product prices on its website. Well, the president found out. He called Jeff Bezos. Tariff costs are now not going to be on Amazon. Casey Hunt asked Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council at the White House, about that today on CNN. We're going to play you his whole answer. Is this political interference in the free market? No.
No, no, no, no. First of all, I got to say that I'm really glad to have a president that if he notices something that needs to be fixed for American workers in the U.S. economy, that he could pick up the phone. They pick it up right away.
And then it gets to the bottom of it. The bottom line is that if we charge a tariff on a foreign country, then if they have inelastic supply to us, then the supplier in that country is going to bear the tariff, not the U.S. consumer. And the idea that Amazon is going to say that the tariff is passing through to the consumer means that they don't understand economics. And so you covered it as a debacle. I did think it was a debacle for whoever's doing economics at Amazon because they were assuming something that's contrary to basic economics about who bears the tariff.
And it was correct for Jeff Bezos to apologize for it and to correct the record that Amazon, whoever did it, made a big mistake. I wonder if they'll have a job tomorrow. Everything else about that answer aside, Kevin Hassett has a Ph.D. in economics. I do not. But believe me when I tell you it's consumers who pay the tariffs.
Our digital and on-demand team includes Jordan Mangy, Dylan Miethenen, Janet Nguyen, Olga Oxman, Virginia K. Smith, and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital and on-demand. And I'm Kai Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. 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.