It's "Will they?" or "Won't they?" day for the Fed
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Marketplace listeners get special access to one month of Gamma Pro free with promo code marketplace. Gamma, how good ideas get into the universe. Don't hold your breath for lower interest rates today. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. The Federal Reserve wraps up its meetings in about four hours with Chairman Powell's public briefing. Let's bring in from Austin, economist Julia Coronado, founder of Macro Policy Perspectives. Good morning.

Good morning. So you're going to be at the edge of your seat in anticipation. What will happen? The suspense. Will they lower interest rates today? Not really. Nobody really expects them to cut interest rates today or probably really anytime soon. So we're going to get a whole lot of wait and see from Chair Powell.

That's going to make the president of the United States mad. He wants lower interest rates like China gave itself today, lower interest rates because of tariffs. Yeah, there's a couple of tensions the Fed is facing. On the one hand, we are likely to see growth slow because of the trade war, and that would tell the Fed that they should lower interest rates. On the other hand, we're going to get a burst of inflation and inflation is still above their 2 percent target. So that tells them to wait and gather information.

So the real content today won't be interest rates up or down, you say, flat, but how the Fed views the economy, how they're assessing things at the moment. And I think they're just going to tell us there's a range of possible outcomes. And as the data come in and tell them how bad the inflation is,

burst is versus the hit to the economy, they will weigh those forces and make their decisions accordingly. They really can't foreshadow what they're going to do or when they're going to do it. Economist Julia Coronado is also a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. Thank you. My pleasure. Again, China cut its interest rates by one quarter of one percentage point today to stimulate the economy weighed down by U.S. tariffs and ongoing distress in the property sector there.

China and the U.S. have announced plans for talks between the U.S. Treasury Secretary and China's vice premier later this week in Switzerland.

Who doesn't want to get more done in less time, whether it's doing the dishes or running a business? Productivity is the name of the game. Economists love their productivity. More leads to more profits, but also sometimes higher pay or cheaper goods. The McKinsey Global Institute has been looking for the secrets of productivity by going company to company. Eight thousand firms in the U.S., U.K. and Germany and has been finding mostly slackers.

What we find instead is that a rather small fraction of what we call productivity standouts are the ones that are overwhelmingly responsible for the productivity growth. Olivia White is a director at the McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of the report. A key lesson therein, the star firms that really boosted productivity didn't do it by nipping and tucking little improvements here and there, but often went big with overhauls.

It wasn't that we found the firms that were really shaving away at efficiency and maybe having fewer workers were the ones who did better. It's the ones who were thinking big and thinking about creating new opportunity and new value for everybody. On that word, everybody, the study found wage growth paychecks went up by more than double at the productivity star companies versus the productivity not so greats. ♪

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Weight Watchers wants to slim down its debt, entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to avoid paying 1.2 billion it owes and to get cash to build up its telehealth business to make money writing prescriptions for weight loss drugs.

To understand what Weight Watchers is going through, look to no other than Oprah Winfrey. She joined the company's board a decade ago and became its spokesperson. Let's let 2016 be the year of our best bodies. That lasted until, well, last year when Oprah announced she's now taking a prescription weight loss drug. Lots of people are doing the same. In the first three months of this year, Weight Watchers sales for things like nutrition guidance and group workshops fell 10%.

The company does offer prescription medications through a telehealth plan, and revenues from that part of its business grew 57% last quarter.

Weight Watchers wants to invest to expand its telehealth business. It says restructuring its finances through bankruptcy will eliminate burdensome debt, some dating back decades, and save as much as $50 million a year in interest payments alone. I'm Neva Safo for Marketplace. Canada's new prime minister visited the White House yesterday. Mark Carney won his recent election promising he would stand up to President Trump.

The first meeting seems to have produced little movement on U.S. import taxes on Canadian goods and now vice versa. Marketplace's Kimberly Adams has been reporting from Canada today. Canada's hard-hit truckers.

At a truck stop and rest area just north of Toronto along Highway 400 in Ontario, Steve Austin pulled a red and white big rig in for a bit of a break. The company he works for usually delivers goods from the U.S. to northern Ontario, but these days... Business is really, really slow. I've had a couple three-day weeks, and the days I'm working are six, seven days, and I'm used to 11, 12-hour days. It really is hurting.

He says the trade war is costing him half his paycheck. According to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, Canadian trucks move about 80 to 90 percent of American exports to the country. The CTA surveyed its 5,000 members about the impact of the trade war so far and... About 10 to 15 percent of our members have already laid people off, meaning that there's no freight to move.

Stephen Laskowski is the CTA's president and CEO. And well over 30 to 40 percent are saying they're close to laying people off. He says there was an initial boost in business when the president announced his tariffs and businesses tried to stock up before the new taxes hit. Now our members are sitting and waiting for calls. There is little demand right now in a lot of sectors. So a lot of trucks are sitting.

Truckers are seeing big drop-offs in traffic from the automotive and agriculture sectors, but hauling Canadian goods within Canada is holding up a little better.

At the truck stop, Dale Johnstone tells me his business slowed down a bit at the start of the trade war, but now moving mixed freight between the greater Toronto area and central Ontario. Actually, I'm pretty busy. I got a full load that I got to get back up to central Ontario with this afternoon and get it unloaded. But Johnstone knows his bosses and the rest of the industry are worried about the future. Steve

Steve Austin, who's been driving trucks for 49 years, says the slowdown has him thinking about retiring a little earlier than he planned. Your president is changing his mind every other day about tariff on this and tariff on that. So we're just hoping it just all settles down.

Until then, he'll be on the road doing what work he can get. Along Highway 400 in Ontario, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace. And Ford announced today that given tariffs, it's already raised the prices of three models made in Mexico. The Maverick small pickup, the smaller Bronco, the Sport and the electric SUV, the Mustang Mach-E by as much as $2,000.

We have the Federal Reserve briefing coming up about 2 o'clock in the afternoon Eastern time, about 11 o'clock Pacific. We'll keep an eye on that. Don't miss the coverage in the Marketplace afternoon show with Kai Risdahl. It's the Morning Report from APM, American Public Media.

Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis? Five years ago, it seemed like Wall Street was working on it until a backlash upended everything. So there's a lot of alignment between the dark money right and the oil industry on this effort. I'm Amy Scott, host of How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace. In this season, we investigate the rise, fall, and reincarnation of climate-conscious investing.

Listen to How We Survive wherever you get your podcasts.