Higher electricity demand means higher electricity investment
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High electric bills can mean profits for somebody.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First, the person who is arguably the most influential single economic policymaker in the world, Jerome Powell, is in a Senate hearing room today. Yesterday, he told a House committee he's watching President Trump's tariffs percolate more into the economy before deciding if interest rates need to ease off. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer reports.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell was asked repeatedly yesterday, when's the Fed going to cut interest rates? Some members of the House Financial Services Committee asked if it could be as soon as next month. Powell was noncommittal, repeatedly saying the Fed needed to be cautious because President Trump's tariffs could ignite inflation. Tariffs take a while to work their way through the distribution chain, several months. And I would say we would expect to see meaningful effects, you know, kind of June, July, August.

And if we don't, you know, we'll be learning something. And that lesson could cause the Fed to lower borrowing costs. Powell says the Fed will also be watching the unemployment rate, and if it creeps up, that could lead to lower interest rates. But in the meantime, Powell said the Fed is well-positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace.

Two sounds across a big piece of the country this morning. The air conditioning grinding away and the ticking up of your electric bill. With hotter temperatures and online commerce and AI-driven data centers drawing so much power, investors are putting money into the power industry. The International Energy Agency forecasts global investments in electricity could reach 50% more than what's spent on bringing coal, natural gas, and oil to market.

Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has that. U.S. energy investments are moving towards electricity, especially from low-emission sources, according to the IEA. That will help the U.S. reach its energy needs in the long term, says Ed Herz with the University of Houston. But in the short term? We have more people coming to the party than we have places.

Upswings in demand from data centers and a flurry of investment have led to bottlenecks and delays in bringing new energy projects online. The size and scale of the new data centers are much, much larger in terms of their megawatt demand.

Steve Piper is with S&P Global Commodity Insights. And there's a mismatch between the construction lead times for data centers versus power generation. He says data centers can be built in 18 months. New electricity generation takes years.

And there's another challenge, a disconnect between where renewable energy is most abundant and where it's most needed. At hers again. We're not seeing enough investment in transmission because we can't build a solar farm in an urban area. More wires are needed to connect the new generation to consumers, and someone's got to pay for them. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.

And here's one more number, $18 billion. Two consumer groups have calculated the Trump administration's sweeping cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has cost consumers $18 billion in higher fees and compensation not paid as remedies for financial abuses. For instance, the CFPB

had been working to cap credit card late fees at $8 and fees for bank overdrafts at $5. The CFPB has yet to comment on the report from the two nonprofits, the Consumer Federation of America and the Student Borrower Protection Center. Trading shouldn't have barriers. When Robinhood started, it was built to make trading more accessible. Now, Robinhood offers more sophisticated trading tools—

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Club World Cup is happening right now across this country. This is not to be confused with the World Cup of National Teams, which happens next year, but instead a competition of pro teams from cities around the world, Paris Saint-Germain or Manchester City like that.

There's a billion dollars in prize money on the line, but the tournament is not generating the hype organizers had hoped for. Here's reporter Daniel Ackerman. Teams in the Club World Cup aren't competing for patriotic bragging rights, says Lee Eagle with NYU's Tisch Institute for Global Sport. They're the teams where players earn their living. It's different than when they go off and play for their national teams.

FIFA has held this kind of tournament before, but with only a handful of clubs, says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor emeritus of economics at Smith College. It was a very small event, maybe perhaps akin to the All-Star Game in baseball every year. Nobody cared a great deal about the outcome. Zimbalist says FIFA wanted to garner more interest and more revenue. This year, it expanded the field fourfold. But all that really did, he says, is dilute the tournament's star power.

With 32 clubs from around the world, including clubs from Africa and South America and Asia, there's not a lot of name recognition. Many of these teams are relatively unknown on a global stage because the world's biggest soccer stars tend to get bought up by the world's biggest and wealthiest clubs. It's very hard to structure a global competition where clubs from outside Europe would have a serious chance.

Stefan Szymanski is a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan. And he says with unbalanced competition and games during the workday to accommodate primetime viewing in Europe, the tournament is having trouble filling seats. To watch a small team, you know, to watch Auckland play Bayern Munich and get thrashed 10-0, who's interested in that? Players unions say the matches add to an already packed schedule without properly compensating the players.

At warm-ups this month, members of the Seattle Sounders wore shirts with the slogan World Cup Cash Grab. Lee Eagle of NYU says, with so many issues facing the tournament, there's a sense that this isn't working, that it's closer to a bust than a boom. But he says that's really just a short-term dollars and cents view. What that really leaves out is that there's a massive social component to a tournament like this. In

In U.S. cities hosting these games, Eagle says parents are bringing their kids, potentially inspiring lifelong fans. Plus, he says, It's a really good stress test for the stadiums, for cities, for what's coming next year. That would be the actual World Cup, the one young soccer players grow up dreaming about. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. And in Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio. This is the Marketplace Morning Report.

From APM, American Public Media. This Old House has been America's most trusted source for all things DIY and home improvement for decades. And now we're on the radio and on demand. I think you're breaking into this wall regardless. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I need to go and get some whiskey, I think. I would get the whiskey for sure. Subscribe to This Old House Radio Hour from LAist Studios, wherever you get your podcasts.