Where's the job market headed?
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End of the week, almost the end of the month. Where does this economy stand anyway, huh? From American public media, this is Market Flash. In Los Angeles, I'm Colin Risdell. It is Friday today, the last weekday in May. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Inflation, trade and tariffs, the general economic zeitgeist. If that sounds like a recipe for the next seven minutes of live radio,

It is. Catherine Rempel is at The Washington Post. Courtney Brown is at Axios. How are you two? Hey, Kai. Hey, Kai. Catherine Rempel, let me start with you. And we will start with the data out this morning. PCE, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, 2.1 percent. The headline year over year, two and a half percent. The core minus food and energy. Would I be overstating things if I said this may be the last really nice reading on inflation we're likely to have? Do you think?

It may well be, you know, look, if I knew what the future brought, I would obviously be a much richer woman than I am right now. But it may well be because this report is largely backward looking. It is before a lot of the tariffs took place or at least, um,

before companies started having to bring over stuff that was tariffed, given that a lot of companies are holding off on buying things. And those tariffs will raise prices. Some of the costs will be absorbed by the suppliers. Some of them will be absorbed by businesses in the domestic supply chain, and some of them will be passed on to consumers. So it is quite possible that

that should these tariffs hold, and that's a whole other can of worms, that we will soon see higher prices. Yes. So, Courtney Brown, on that topic, and let me warn you and the listening audience out there, I'm going to cite two social media posts from the President of the United States in this six minutes that we have now left.

One of which, Courtney, was this morning when he went off, one might fairly say, on the Chinese, accusing them of violating trade deals and all kinds of things. And it's going to be very, very bad, which gets us to your newsletter this morning from Axios when you pointed out how whipsawed this economy is by the tariffs, by the court decisions, by the president doing things he's not allowed to do.

And I guess my question is, rubber's got to meet the road sometime, right? This is the follow-on to the Catherine question, right? It's going to hit us at some point.

But when? That's why I'm asking you. That's why I'm asking you. I think no one knows. Isn't that so frustrating? We have no idea when it's going to hit and exactly what is going to hit. Because, you know, I talked to someone at the ports this week and they said it best. You know, one day, it's a great day to bring goods in from overseas.

The next day, it's the worst day to bring goods in from overseas. So it's the trade agenda this week went from changing on, you know, like a couple days. Now we're on like a day by day basis, businesses, consumers, suppliers, no one knows what the trade outlook is going to look like in the next 24 hours.

Catherine, I want to detour briefly into the Fed minutes, which came out this week. The Central Bank, of course, its meeting of May 6 and 7. These are minutes, not transcripts. But it did say in there that the Central Bank is worried about, and this is a quote from the minutes, the difficult tradeoffs it's going to have to make given the stagflationary pressures that these tariffs present. Isn't that the Fed's old job, making difficult tradeoffs? Yes.

Yes, definitely. They have this dual mandate of maximum employment and staple prices. And to some extent, those two objectives can be at odds. The problem is that the thing that is roiling the economy now that we keep talking about, that we do not know where it's headed, is tariffs, which actually make both of those objectives harder to achieve. And that's because tariffs will raise prices and they will also reduce

slow down the economy, which means potentially fewer jobs, higher unemployment, etc. So, you

you know, if you're trying to deal with the consequences of one side of this problem, i.e. the higher prices, you might raise interest rates. If you're trying to deal with the other side of, you know, the other major set of consequences from tariffs, which is the potential slowdown in recession, you would cut interest rates. So the Fed always

always has a really challenging job. I think in the past few years, they've navigated those two parts of their mandate very, very well. And as one economist I spoke with recently put it, they were very close to

Yeah, yeah. And then somebody flipped the plane over. So. So, yeah, it's really hard. I do not envy them their position. Courtney, what do you make just sort of tangentially on the president inviting Chair Powell to to a meeting yesterday at the White House?

It happened. We didn't get much detail of exactly what they talked about except for the pretty generic statement that the Federal Reserve put out. But it seems like Trump has been talking about him

Yeah. And telling him what he thinks he should do, which is lower interest rates. That's not the Fed's position, but the two men were in a room. They had a chat and maybe one day we'll find out exactly what was said. One day Powell will write his memoir. All right, Catherine, the second reference to a social media post by the president of the United States today goes to you. He went off on the congressional budget office. It,

An incredible number of factual errors in there, lies because he knows better. Here's the thing I wanted to point out. He said, number one, the tax cuts will pay for themselves in the big reconciliation bill that's working through Congress. And that, of course, is not true because no tax cut has ever paid for itself. But the other thing he said, which I need you to sort of elucidate a little bit on here, he's predicting like 9% economic growth, which is, you know, fill in the blank.

Well, maybe in nominal terms, if we have runaway inflation. That's a very niche joke. I'm sorry. No, that's not. Look, it is. He's been promising gangbusters growth from his agenda forever. He did this in his first term as well. He said we were going to have 6% growth, as I recall, and we did not.

And there are some things that he is doing that at least in the short run would likely increase growth. I believe that in the near term, cutting people's taxes, giving them more money to spend, among other things, could boost growth. You know, it's going to boost demand. But in the long run, that's a totally different question. And not only the CBO, but the Yale Budget Lab, Penn Wharton Budget Model, like every independent budget company

referee you can find out there says, no, even if there's a little bit of extra growth, there's no way that this bill will pay for itself. It will add a lot more to deficits and that will cause problems for

For other reasons, too, much later. Yeah. Including potentially slower growth many years from now if there's sort of a crowd out effect for private investment. Courtney Brown, last question to you. The question I asked up at the top of the program, where does this economy stand right now? You've got 15 seconds. Ready? Go.

We got 2% inflation. The rear view looks really good. The road ahead looks treacherous. It's like we seem to have dug these potholes that the car is about to hit. That's how I would sum up the economy right now. Nicely done. Courtney Brown at Axios on a Friday afternoon. Catherine Rimpel at the Washington Post. Thanks, you two. Thanks, Guy. Thanks, Guy. Have a nice weekend. Wall Street to end the week.

It's kind of a wash, actually. Details, numbers, when we get there. The thing about inflation, just thinking about that PCE reading we got this morning, is that rising prices affect everybody in this economy. But inflation is regressive. It hurts those on the lower end of the income spectrum harder, families with smaller budgets. They've got less room to absorb higher rents and more expensive food and everything else.

Marketplace's Kristen Schwab has been working on a series for us. It's called Lived Economies, about how Americans are getting by, how they understand where they are in this economy right now,

and how they feel about it. Today, parents in St. Paul, Minnesota, who are taking their economy day by day. Here's Kristen. Julie Yang and Daniel Tao only live a block away from the playground, but they drove the minivan to get here on this windy day because it's just easier with all the kids. They park and the little ones toddle out happy meals in tow. What's his name? Austin. Austin. Hi, Austin. Austin's about a year old. Then there's Tatum. Tatum.

He's still perfecting his name. Next, there's Isla. She just woke up, so she might be a little shy. Hi, my name is Harvey. And finally... Asher. That makes five kids ages one to eight. And soon, there will be a sixth. We're meeting in April, and Julie is pregnant with a baby boy due in June. Um, we're leaning towards Sachi.

Daniel always wanted a big family. Sachi will be the fifth boy. So we tried for my daughter to get her a sister, so maybe one day when she hears this, she'll know that, hey, we really did try, but it just wasn't in the cards for us, I guess. As you can imagine, Julie and Daniel have a lot going on. They're both around 40 years old. Julie is a nurse at a children's hospital. Daniel is training to become an electrician. He's in year one of a five-year apprenticeship. And he's also a nurse at a hospital.

And the kids have a lot of extracurriculars. Swimming, jujitsu, dance. Shuffling our kids back and forth from school to after school programs and back home from making dinner and

and getting them ready for bed and then getting back up again the next day and doing it all over again. So yeah, it gets busy. Every single day is busy. Eight-year-old Asher shows me a breakdancing move, a pose where he freezes on his head. Ooh, very cool. Meanwhile, Julie and Daniel trade off on playground duty. They're in five places at once, running over here to help Isla down the slide, running over there to make sure Tatum is holding on tight to the swings.

Julie tells me it's getting harder to keep up with the kids. It's also getting harder to keep up financially. The average annual cost of raising a small child has jumped about 35 percent in the last two years, according to a lending tree analysis of federal data. And remember, Julie and Daniel have a sixth kid on the way. When we just had the one or two, we were doing pretty good. And now it's like, OK, now we got to

No, we can't buy that new toy right now. No, each kid can't demand a different meal at dinner. Everybody's like, well, I wanted this, I wanted that. It's like...

You know, and then you cook it. Sometimes they're like, oh, I changed my mind. So it's like now we wasted food and that's money. Isla doesn't like meat. Asher doesn't like vegetables. And everyone is eating more as they grow, especially the boys. They're drinking so much milk that, you know, even though we go to Costco to get it, it's like $24, $25 a week.

$25 of milk. That's about what Julie and Daniel each make an hour. Their income and the size of their family means they qualify for some child care and food assistance. Right now, they rent a four-bedroom house from Daniel's sister for $1,600 a month. But with a sixth kid on the way, they'd like more space and a van that can fit the whole family, an eight-seater. That's going to cost nearly $50,000. It's like, oh my God, it's, you know, it's like...

It's like paying a mortgage if we get a brand new one.

I hate to make the discussion all about the kids, but I feel like they're really the center of your lives. They are right now. I think a lot of our friends don't get that because we're always like, oh, yeah, the kids this, the kids that. And they're like, what? That's my life. I'll drop them off and I forget that I'm still listening to Cocoa Melon and I'm singing along. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm in the car alone. Why am I still listening to this and singing this? It's just like mom goes to the bathroom, all four of them comes, and it's like a meeting in the bathroom, you know?

Daniel and Julie say they didn't worry so much about the financial side of raising kids when they started their family, because that was nearly a decade ago when the world was different. Between COVID and inflation, the economy they knew before is not like the economy that exists now. Like the cost of living just keeps going up.

Of course, she knew expenses would increase, but she never thought they'd skyrocket quite so much between kid number one and kid number six. In the last decade, prices have gone up nearly 30 percent, according to the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index. I feel like the more I think about it, the more depressing it gets for me just because I have so many kids, too. I'm just going by day by day right now.

sometimes hour by hour, which brings us to the end of playground time. Just like that, it's time to load up the van. Julie and Daniel need to head to Costco before dinner for another gallon or two of milk. In St. Paul Park, Minnesota, I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. ♪♪

Coming up... I think the people who built the pyramids were living in a less unequal society. The haves and everybody else. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's up 54 points today, a little more than a tenth percent. Closed at 42,270. Did the blue chips. The Nasdaq gave up 62 points, about a third percent. 19,113. S&P 500 down about a half point. Call it unchanged, 59 and 11.

For the five days gone by, the Dow increased 1.6%. The Nasdaq ascended to 2%. The S&P 500 pocketed one and nine-tenths of 1%. Bond prices went up, thus the yield went down 4.40% on the 10-year. You are listening to Marketplace. In honor of Military Appreciation Month, Verizon thought of a lot of different ways we could show our appreciation, like rolling out the red carpet, giving you your own personal marching band, or throwing a bumping shindig.

At Verizon, we're doing all that in the form of special military offers. That's why this month only, we're giving military and veteran families a $200 Verizon gift card and a phone on us with a select trade-in and a new line on select unlimited plans. Think of it as our way of flying a squadron of jets overhead while launching fireworks.

Now that's what we call a celebration. Because we're proud to serve you. Visit your local Verizon store to learn more. $200 Verizon gift card requires smartphone purchase $799.99 or more with new line on eligible plan. Gift card sent within eight weeks after receipt of claim. Phone offer requires $799.99 purchase with new smartphone line on unlimited ultimate or postpaid unlimited plus. Minimum plan $80 a month with auto pay plus taxes and fees for 36 months. Less $800 trade-in or promo credit applied over 36 months. 0% APR. Trade-in must be from Apple, Google, or Samsung. Trade-in and additional terms apply. ♪

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This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. We spent the first eight or so minutes of the program today talking about the week that was.

Now Mitchell Hartman's going to spend a couple of minutes telling us about the week that will be. Spoiler alert, it's going to be about jobs. We'll get April data on job openings, worker productivity for the first quarter. Then Friday comes the biggie, the May unemployment report.

April jobs was pretty good, given all the back and forth about the tariffs and the consumer agita and all those big market swings. May is expected to be more muted on the jobs front, but still pretty good. Here's Mitchell. Employment stayed on a pretty even keel, says economist John Lear at Morning Consult.

The job market has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of tariffs and tariff uncertainty. Lear predicts 150,000 jobs added in May and unemployment holding at 4.2%. The narrative out there was that

Policy uncertainty would lead to a pullback in investment and then a reduction in hiring. I don't believe that's the case. Partly because consumers haven't pulled back their spending much. So as long as companies are able to make money by employing workers, they're going to do that. And that's why workers continue to have reasonably solid levels of job security.

What's less solid now is optimism about finding a new job, says Andrew Stettner at the Century Foundation. The number of people on unemployment is up as compared to last year. Evidence that it is harder to find a job today, especially for young people coming out of college. We do see the job openings trailing downward. This could partly be an impact of AI.

Hiring at VC-backed companies has gone down significantly. Peter Walker at equity management firm Carta says hiring at tech startups in early 2025 was only a third of the level in 2022. He doesn't think companies are replacing current workers with AI. But a lot of them are saying, I have a team of five engineers. I don't think I need any more because every single one of those is more productive now using AI technology.

Add that up at startups all over the country, and Walker says eventually we'll see employment stagnate, maybe even shrink in the sector. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

According to Forbes, their annual billionaires list, there are 3,028 said billionaires on planet Earth, nearly a third of whom are in the United States. And over the past decade or so, 2016 to 2024 specifically, the wealth held by America's billionaires has more than doubled. And yet, even though most of us can name a handful of them, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and Buffett, most of them are a mystery, which...

When one considers how much power and influence they have, well, you see where that goes. Evan Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker, spent a good part of the past decade studying that slice of the American population. And the essays he wrote have come together in his new book. It's called The Haves and the Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. And when we spoke, I started by asking him about this moment that we find ourselves in.

You write in the introduction, in the preface to this book, as I worked on this book, you write, it was sometimes tempting to wonder if America was approaching the point of untenable imbalance. Kind of seems like we are.

It does feel that way. I have to say the disparities today are really historic. And in fact, if you talk to scholars who study inequality way back, I mean, back to the Neolithic period, they said to me, as one archaeologist did, he said, I think the people who built the pyramids were living in a less unequal society. And he said, we just this wealth has accumulated so fast that

That we haven't really had time for our law and our institutions and our minds really to adapt to it. All right. So look, if the rich in this society today are as rich as any people have been ever, why are they so afraid? Or to put a more exacting point on it,

And obviously this springs from the tech oligarchs in this economy and their interactions with the President of the United States. What is the point of having...

go-to-heck money, if I could euphemize, without actually telling people to go to heck. You know what I mean? They're just afraid, and that seems incongruous. I think that's a really important point. There's a way in which as the divide in a society gets so large that people begin to feel as if they can't afford not to end up on the winning side. And so they often will take steps to, in effect, ensure that the winners keep winning and

rather than figure out is there a way that I can take this accumulated advantage and maybe actually diffuse some of the tension. And the history on this is important. There was a time in America about 100 years ago, in fact, when some of the most powerful capitalists in the country began to look around and said the disparities have gotten so large that if we don't figure out a way –

to begin to ensure that some of the winnings are more evenly distributed, that we could actually lose the whole operation. Capitalism itself could be in doubt. And that really was a crucial turning point. You had people first like Teddy Roosevelt and then ultimately like Franklin Roosevelt, who said our goal here is to make the country sustainable. And that was part of a process of avoiding the worst consequences, which would be the unraveling.

And yet here we are having just had the richest man in the world defenestrate the federal government in the space of like four months wreaking untold havoc on literally tens of thousands of people's lives. And the people with actual political power, and I say this to you as a, I know we're a show on business in the economy, but you're an observer of the political process. The people with actual political power

are sitting on their hands watching it happen. What are we supposed to make of that? Yeah, we've watched something really unprecedented in American history. I mean, even at the height of their powers, when the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts were able to buy and sell members of Congress, you know, none of them had an office in the White House complex.

So what we've got today is a culmination of a generation of the accumulation of financial power in our politics that means that members of Congress, and look, you just have to call it what it is. The Republican Party today is flat on its back. It's supine in the face of what Trump and Musk did as over the course of this joint venture. Nobody was objecting. But this is where you're also beginning to see

that the public on a deep level is registering the fact that it is offended by this. I mean, the fact that Elon Musk's sales of Tesla dropped 71%, that is a sign of this underlying discomfort that Americans have with this kind of wholesale control of politics by the richest man in the world.

So having spent years now on this, as you say, a field guide to the ultra-rich and having obviously thought it through as you assembled these dispatches into a book, are you left hopeful or wanting about the future of –

well, the wealth gap is too easy, but about the dichotomy in this economy between those who have so much and the very larger part that have substantially less, and then what that means for the future of our political experiment. I'll tell you, I am concerned, but I'm also optimistic. And there's a really specific reason why, which is that you're beginning to see that Americans are noticing this reality. And I think what's becoming clear to people is

is that it's not about giving up on the aspiration to prosper and succeed in this country. It's about clearly recognizing who and what is standing in the way of actually succeeding. And I think some of the civil society outpouring of concern that we've seen just over the last four or five months during the Musk era in Washington, if we can call it that,

The protests, for instance, in Washington that were five times what the projections were beforehand, that is a sign that America historically has a way of finding its way back to a more sustainable path. But it takes a time and it takes sustained commitment on the part of the public.

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, also an author of many books, the most recent of which is called The Haves and the Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. Evan, thanks a lot. It's always good to talk to you. My pleasure, Kai. Thanks for having me. This final note on the way out today, it is not often, okay, never have we cited America Magazine as a source on this show. It's a magazine published by the Jesuits about the Catholic Church.

We saw this item there today that Pope Leo XIV has given about 5,000 workers at the Vatican what are called conclave bonuses. 500 euro, about $567 at today's rate of exchange for keeping the place running while the cardinals were trying to figure out who would succeed Pope Francis.

Our theme music was composed by BJ Lederman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Pargali. Donna Tam is the executive editor. Neil Scarborough is vice president and general manager. And I'm Kai Rizdahl. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody. We will see you again on Monday, all right? This is APM.

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