Some fraying in the job market
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and have a chance to walk away with a $75 gift card. Hiring was okay in the month gone by, but we're seeing some fraying in the job market when you look beyond the averages.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. There's news that hiring in America was still OK in the aggregate, with 139,000 more people drawing paychecks in May. That's a bit higher than expected. The numbers for the month before, though, were revised down. Let's untangle this with Christopher Lowe, chief economist at FHN Financial in New York. Morning.

Good morning, David. Yeah, it could have been worse, right? It's not terrible, but it's not fabulous. No, I think that's a really nice description of it. You know, 139,000 jobs added in May, that's just a little bit better than the 125,000 or so expected. But then you notice a 90,000 downward revision to March and April. And what that does is it means that job growth this year

five months of steady but sluggish numbers compared to some pretty heady job growth at the end of last year. Yeah, and if you look at sectors, yes, there's decent hiring still in health care, teachers still getting hired at the state level, but there's a whole bunch of sectors here where things are looking a little weak, and that's got to be in part due to uncertainty over tariffs. I

I think the tariff uncertainty is definitely part of it.

The fact that the borders are closed is also part of it. You know, you've got weakness, for example, in construction, which is seasonal and relies on a lot of migrant workers. You have retail's weakness. And retail is another category where hiring picks up in the summertime. And again, there are a lot of foreign workers who help in that sector. Leisure and hospitality growth is

decent. But business services, negative. Temp workers, negative. That's the kind of thing you don't want to see because it tends to be a leading indicator of a slowdown in economic activity. And then digging into the separate household survey, what we saw was a really significant drop both in the number of people working and in the labor force.

So the unemployment rate, just a touch higher. It still rounds to 4.2 percent, but it's been creeping incrementally higher now for three or four months. Economist Christopher Lowe, in fact, the chief economist at FHN Financial. Thank you. Thank you, David.

The influencer Musk, President Trump, public meltdown brings with it lessons in the duty of CEOs not to destroy shareholder value with their extracurricular activities. The Marketplace Morning Report podcast has that discussion now, if you missed it on the air. Musk offered a piece of de-escalation now, but President Trump knocked down a published report of maybe peace talks today. After Tesla stock closed down 14% yesterday, it's up 5% now.

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In the U.S., we collectively got swindled out of $12.5 billion last year. The Federal Trade Commission says consumer fraud up 25 percent in just a year. Online scams were one pervasive scheme. My Marketplace BBC colleague James Graham found himself in the middle of an online scam and tells us the story of what he's learning.

It all started with good intentions. I wanted to buy my brothers a present. This is my son, 12-year-old Eric. I went on the website and it gives really trustworthy reviews and it never arrived. The site suggested real posters at great prices but all we received was an email with a few links, supposedly to digital downloads. It turns out this was mentioned in the small print and

On the review site, Trustpilot, there were more than 80 reviews, all negative. Here are a few read by BBC producers. Complete scam. The site's designed and worded to mislead you into thinking you're going to receive a physical product. Says free worldwide delivery. Takes your address and then doesn't send the poster. We'd only lost $30, but I called my bank and sent a report to UK fraud body Action Fraud. In the meantime, I tried to look into the ownership of the site.

The global domain name system is managed by a non-profit called ICANN. It has a site called Lookup which gives some information.

This led me to a company called 2Cows in Toronto, which sells and manages domain names. It's actually one of the biggest in the world. My name is Reg Levy and I'm Associate General Counsel for 2Cows Domains. What steps are taken when a potential scam site has been reported? We work closely with law enforcement, with abuse reporters and with our partners in the industry to

to look at the domain and evaluate whether or not there is something going on and then identify who is best situated to take action. Often it is the hosting company because the domain name registrar cannot remove content from a domain name.

All we can do is remove the domain. So the content is still on the internet. In this case, the host was Shopify, the online payments giant, also headquartered in Canada. With Shopify, you have everything you need to supercharge your business. Shopify was also processing the payments. It has a complaints process. So I sent an email and got this reply, voiced by a producer.

To discuss this issue further, please contact the store directly. Please note there will be no follow-up from Shopify on your report. I wanted to ask Shopify if it was doing enough here, but despite sending several emails to its media team, I've still had no response. As a consumer, I've seen firsthand how hard it is to get smaller scam sites shut down. Perhaps the best strategy for staying safe online is vigilance.

Catcher Ada is from the UK consumer magazine, which... If a price seems too good to be true, then it probably is. Don't feel pressured into making any purchases and always do your research. As for my case, the bank refunded the money, but action fraud said there were no lines of inquiry for the police to pursue. The site is still up and people are still complaining on Trustpilot. In the UK, I'm the BBC's James Graham for Marketplace.

The blasts came from import taxes, but electronics giant Nintendo has managed to dodge some of the incoming. It launched its Switch 2 video game console yesterday as scheduled during a lull in tariffs. But after a successful launch will come new challenges, Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer reports.

Nintendo launched the new Switch during a 90-day truce in the Trump administration's trade war. Fans lined up for simultaneous launches in San Francisco and New York, barely blinking at the nearly $450 price tag. Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders were supposed to start in early April, but the company delayed that, saying it needed to assess the potential impact of tariffs. Nintendo

Nintendo moved production of the Switch from China to Vietnam at the end of the first Trump administration to avoid tariffs on imports from China. But the second Trump administration slapped steep tariffs on Vietnam. They're on hold for now, but if they snap into place later this year, that could affect prices during the holiday season. Consumers are already paying more for some Switch accessories.

Nintendo may try to hold down the price of the console since much of its profits come from online subscriptions and software for the Switch. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. It's a Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media.

Really quick before you go, please complete a short anonymous survey by going to marketplace.org forward slash survey. It should only take about 10 minutes. And as a token of our appreciation, you can enter your name to win a $75 gift card when you've completed the survey. You do all of us at Marketplace a huge favor by filling it out.