Cents and sensitivity

On the program today, interest rates and older workers. Between them, honestly, pretty much the future of this economy.
From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl.
It is Wednesday, today, 29 January. Good, as always, to have you along, everybody.
We are going to go back to Tennessee, our series, The Age of Work, about the changing and aging demographics of this economy in the second half of the program. But we begin today in the halls of monetary policy power in Washington, D.C., Fed Chair Jay Powell's press conference.
I think our policy stance is very well calibrated, as I mentioned, to balance the achievement of our two of our two goals. Policy stance and Fed speak, of course, means interest rates.
Two goals means maximum employment and stable prices. We want policy to be restrictive enough to continue to foster further progress toward a 2% inflation goal.
At the same time, we don't need to see further weakening in the labor market to achieve that goal. Cutting to the chase, reading between the lines.
Pick your metaphor. No change in interest rates today.
Powell says the economy is doing fine. They're going to want to see more data before they decide when or to be clear whether to cut interest rates again.
Now, about this particular moment in this economy. Economic forecasting is really difficult beyond just a month or two out.
So in the current situation, there's probably some elevated uncertainty because of significant policy shifts in those four areas that I mentioned, tariffs, immigration, fiscal policy, and regulatory policy. So there's probably some additional uncertainty, but that should be passing.
We should go through that. And then we'll be back to the regular amount of uncertain.
Ah, yes, the regular amount of uncertain. It should be noted here

that question number one to the Fed chair today was about President Trump and his demand,

that's the president's word the other day, for lower interest rates. Powell was not interested.

I'm not going to have any response or comment whatsoever on what the president said.

It's not appropriate for me to do so. He has not heard directly from the president,

Thank you. was not interested.
I'm not going to have any response or comment whatsoever on what the president said. It's not appropriate for me to do so.
He has not heard directly from the president,

the Fed chair said. Wall Street on this Wednesday? Traders, honestly, they're a little cranky even

before Powell started talking. We will have the details when we do the numbers.
jay powell told me once in an interview if i could name drop here for just a second that one of his rules to live by is to control the controllable, which is to say, set aside as best you can that which you cannot control. And fiscal policy, things that Congress and the White House are in charge of, tariffs, immigration, deficits, that falls squarely in the Fed's no control category.
What the Fed does control is monetary policy and specifically the federal funds rate. How the economy actually responds to that rate, though, and interest rates generally, that's a little more complicated.
Marketplace's Matt Levin is on the interest rate sensitivity beat for us today. Housing is supposed to be the most interest rate sensitive sector of all the sectors.
So when the Fed cuts interest rates, people expect mortgage rates to also go down. But when the Fed did cut its rate three times over the second half of last year, mortgage rates went up.
Fed cut short term rates by 100 basis points and longer term rates like mortgage rates went up 100 basis points. You look historically, that's not typically what happened.
Michael Fratt and Tony is an economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association. Housing wasn't all that sensitive to the Fed, partly because mortgage rates are tied to what the federal government pays to borrow money.
And those rates are going up. Global bond investors getting honestly concerned about deficits, debt.
It's not just bond vigilantes, harshing Jay Powell's mellow. When the Fed sets rates, it's really setting the interest rates banks pay to borrow from one another.
And those rates ripple through the rest of the economy. But Thomas Urano at Sage Advisory says nowadays, businesses don't have to go to banks.
They can go to private credit or private equity. The number of people who are willing to extend loans right outside of the banking system that has seen prolific growth over the last five years.
Consumers have also proven pretty interest rate resistant. Olusanola at Fitch Ratings says that since the pandemic, the big spenders are rich enough to avoid borrowing money to buy stuff.
When you think about the sensitivity of high-income households,

and they do the bulk of the spending, not much this time around.

To be clear, Sonola says the economy overall is still sensitive to the Fed,

just not as sensitive as he thought it was. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.
Tariffs came up in Jay Powell's press conference today, and as he usually does, the Fed chair steered well clear. There are, after all, a great many unknowns about what President Trump is going to do until he does it.
Canada, Mexico, China, they've all been in the tariff mix. Tariffs were threatened against Colombia over the weekend, and then they weren't.
Uncertainty is one way to put all that. So we got our tariff regular on the phone, Gretchen Blau.
She's a customs brokerage manager at Logistics Plus in Erie, Pennsylvania, to hear how things are going. Just a lot of wait and see, a little bit of confusion mixed in, a lot of answering questions for customers that we really can't answer, just kind of trying to, you know, reassure them that we're all in the same boat.
No pun intended, but just it's kind of frustration on our part because we like helping people. And when we don't have answers, we feel a little frustrated.
People need some options. One thing we've run into already is the quotas for steel and aluminum.
They're on a quarterly basis. After so many kilograms of steel from the UK, Japan, and the EU are in the U.S., the quota shuts down and then the 25 percent steel tariff kicks in.
Well, since there was so much anticipation of the confusion in January, people put a lot of their steel in bonded warehousing. So when they took it out at the beginning of January, it's caused the quota to be closed already three weeks into the first quarter of the year.
Depending on how desperate they are for this deal, they might have to pay the 25% duty or possibly export it back out of the U.S. and explore their options from there.
I'm considering turning off the notifications on my phone because it gets a little stressful here and there. But that's not really an option because we do have to try to keep up with what's going on from a practical sense that we need to be able to tell people, you know, what to do, how to make plans if it's possible.
Once there's any kind of policy as to the tariffs,

we're going to be, you know, really jumping in and helping out our customers

because that's what we're going to need to do.

Gretchen Blau, Logistics Plus, Erie, PA. We're going to pick up now where we left off yesterday with our new series, The Age of Work, about what it's like to live in an economy that is getting older.
The U.S. population, as you probably know, is on the cusp of a massive demographic change.
The share of working age people shrinking compared to the wave of retiring baby boomers. Neela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, joined me in Cumberland County, Tennessee, this past fall to see what that looks like in a place where the change is already well underway.
Economists love to say this, demographics are destiny. And so what Cumberland represents is that tension between an aging population and a workforce who is struggling to keep up.
Cumberland County has one of the oldest labor forces in the country. That's according to ADP's data.
But it's happening for maybe not the reasons you'd think. Yes, the local population

is aging, but it's also a retirement destination for people looking to escape northern winters. A lot of those people moved to a retirement community in Cumberland County called Fairfield Glade.
We've talked about that. Today, though, we're going to look at two companies in Crossville, the town next door, very much aimed at the local population.

Save a lot. though, we're going to look at two companies in Crossville, the town next door, very much aimed at the local population.
Save-A-Lot. Save-A-Lot is a very community, community grocery store.
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too.
I'm Kai. Nice to see you.
How are you? Nice to meet you, sir. Owner Melvin Davis is standing by the bread racks and the shopping baskets when we get there.
I've been a grocer for 40 years. Times is flying by.
The place isn't huge, just four check stands and pretty narrow aisles compared to some of the big grocery chains. How's business? Good, I imagine.
It's steady. It's steady.
We just had good Samaritans here and picked up $3,500 worth of product right off the shelf to take to North Carolina in the morning. To help with the rebuilding efforts.

It sure has.

But it's great.

You're going to hear from Cumberland Good Samaritans, that organization he mentioned,

a little bit later in the program.

But the main reason we came here to Melvin's Grocery Store is because of the service that

he provides five days a week.

Senior discount day is 7 a.m. to noon.

Do you see a lot of that traffic?

We do. We do.
Our seniors seem to get up a little earlier in this area. We need to have something for them to do.
They joke about not buying green bananas, but they're steady shoppers. You have to think about that one for a second, and then you're like, oh, that's really dark.
So inflation, how has that affected your client base, your seniors?

And are they noticing that prices aren't going up as fast?

Everybody's noticing.

Okay.

They've noticed the price increase.

Have they noticed the fact that it's not going up quite as much, or are they focused still on the price increase?

In my, I mean, I started out as a bag boy, and so I've been doing it a long, long time.

And, you know, I've sold a box of crackers for 49 cents for four decades. That box of crackers is almost $2.
I make less money at $2 than I did at 49 cents. You know, so I watch my customers come in.
They're very, very careful what they shop for, what they're buying. You know, they'll go buy the meat case, and they're like, I'd like to have that roast, but I'm not going to spend the money.
Those crackers are not going to be under 50 cents ever again. Probably not.
Your clientele that's coming here, right? I mean, we've been spending some time over in Fairfield Glade with some retirees who have some disposable income. Are you seeing them come and share some of that with you? We have a great mix.
This program is set up for low income and fixed income, but we're servicing a little bit of everybody. Melvin's got about 22 employees, some of whom have been with him for 40 years.
The youngest are high school kids making minimum wage $7.25 an hour. I've always felt like most small towns are letting their biggest resource slip away from them.
You've got graduating classes of 200, 300 seniors, and they just disappear. And I think you should grab them at their freshman year and start taking them around and showing them all the business in town.
Forklift drivers, mechanics, technicians, and show them that there's work here. In my business, the downside is the margins are so lean that once they finish working for me, I wish I could keep them, but they got to go on.
I think you want some basket. There we go.
Sorry about that. The people who work and shop in this store are facing the same economic forces all of us have been dealing with the past couple of years.
Higher prices and labor shortages. But there is something else happening here specifically.
Demographic changes, both from the local population aging and the new people moving in. Now, would you like to walk through the store there? Yeah, let's do that.
All right. Show us what's going on.
I want to introduce you to Miss Teresa. Hi, Teresa.
How are you? That's all right. How are you? Nice to meet you.
How long you been here? 40 years. Is Is that right? 40 long years.
You were kidding, were you? Nice to meet you. I'm Mila.
Good to meet you. How long have you been here? 40 years.
Is that right? 40 long years. You were kidding, were you? I was 18 when she came.
Yeah. Why'd you stick around? I love doing what I do.
Now, as you go through the store, what happens is you find a family of workers and you drill down. So now we have Teresa, Teresa's sister, Teresa's mama's in here.

And we've worked all the nieces and the nephews, all the grandkids, all the sons, all the daughters. It's a labor pool, man.

Your family is like a whole labor pool in and of itself.

This is an extended family business.

My mom is the 79-year-old back there, and she said a while ago,

I have to leave to go to the doctor.

And I said, that's okay.

Seniors, go to the doctor.

So she has to leave. So you gave your mom time off to go to the...
Yes, she'll be leaving here in a minute. We did run into Teresa's mom, Eula, a little bit later as she was unloading produce.
Keep me young. I was just going to say, can I ask you how old you are? 79.
And in this family business, a lot of things still get done the old-fashioned way. They use a buzzer system to call bag boys instead of the intercom.

Workers get paid with actual physical paychecks.

No direct deposit here, thank you very much.

There's something special about walking in and getting your paycheck.

But as much as things have stayed the same in this community grocery store,

the community around them is changing.

That's after the break. But first, let's do the numbers.
Dow's industrial is off 136 points today, three-tenths percent closed at 44,713. The Nasdaqq shed 101 points, about a half percent, 19,632.
The S&P 500 slid at 28 points, again about a half percent, 6,039. T-Mobile climbed six and a third percent today on better than expected fourth quarter earnings and revenue.
The telecommunications company also issued optimistic full-year guidance as it reported strong customer growth figures, AT&T gave back about seven-tenths of one percent.

The electric vehicle maker Rivian slowed 2.3 percent. Research firm Bernstein initiated

coverage of the company with an underperform rating. Bernstein said the automaker seems to

be years away from making a profit. That cannot be good.
Bonds rose yield on the 10-year T-note,

down 4.53 percent. You're listening to Marketplace.
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I'm Kai Rizdahl. We're continuing with our reporting this week from Cumberland County, Tennessee, a place with a high concentration of older workers because a lot of retirees are moving to the area, and that is changing the local economy.
But the demographic changes happening here are eventually coming for all of us. Hi, guys.
Hi. Hi.
How are you doing? That's Mickey Eldridge. She's the executive director of Cumberland Good Samaritans,

a social services organization that's been around for 45 years. She has been running it for 25.

You remember how earlier Melvin Davis at Save-A-Lot Grocery said somebody had picked up $3,500

worth of goods for hurricane victims in North Carolina? Well, here it is. Over here, we just

purged this. We're sending a lot of food right now.
We're buying a lot of stuff heading out to hurricane victims. When a big disaster hits, Cumberland Good Samaritans collects and distributes donations.
And in the months after Hurricane Helene, they sent two to three trailers a week to people in affected rural communities. Their main focus, though, obviously, is closer to home.
When a client comes in to Good Samaritans, they're just telling us what their needs are. They don't walk in the door unless they're having trouble either paying their rent or utilities or if they've gotten a job, maybe they need help getting steel-toed boots or, you know, a uniform that they're not going to have a paycheck for a while.
And so they need help getting squared around until. But then we look at the bigger picture and ask, what else do you need? Would you do me a favor and characterize need in this place as broadly as you want to define it? Well, need depends on the person that walks in the door.
What we do is take them and look at how we change their circumstance or situation. I have job developers.
If somebody needs more income or just income period, if they're job searching, it may be that it's a single parent or grandparents that have taken on raising grandchildren. We have a lot of grandparents that we work with.
They fund all this work through donations and revenue from a thrift store. I have 25 employees and about 100 volunteers.
We have a lot of programs. But most of my volunteers are seniors, and most of them just want to continue to be productive and make a difference in retirement.
I was wondering, you talked about you see a lot of grandparents coming in, trying to make ends meet. How did they become grandparents who were raising their children? Can you fill out that story for us? Well, you're in an area, and it's not uncommon, I don't think, to the rest of Tennessee or any other state in the nation.

We have a lot of people that have struggled with drug or alcohol abuse, and grandparents have to step up and take over. And so, for the most part, those grandparents are already living on fixed incomes.
And, you know, Social Security was never intended to be your retirement. but for many people in rural areas,

Social Security is their retirement income

and they go get part-time jobs to supplement for what they need. How have the recent retirees, the people who are moving to Fairfield Glade and to Crossville from bigger cities, how has that changed the economy, if at all? Well, Fairfield Glade, in particular, has been a really great boost for Cumberland County because these are folks, and it's interesting because so many of them sold homes where they were and got a lot more out of them than they would pay for a home here, But they invest in the community.
They're involved in our churches. And I got to be honest, the reason we have so many successful nonprofits in this community providing services and making a difference in lives is because the retirees that have moved here still want to be productive and make a difference.
And they're very generous with their time, their hands, their money, and they're supportive of the community. And that's the paradox of the economy here in Cumberland County.
Retirees moving in have driven up the cost of living for the people already here. You remember Melissa Ellis, the musician and mom of four that we heard from on Monday? You know, what we were looking at, someday we'll buy a house.
And since 2020, with the massive housing market, you know, the jump, I cannot imagine any time in our near future, if ever, that's ever going to happen. But at the same time, all those transplanted retirees have created jobs, and they support organizations like Good Samaritans with their time and donations.

Let's go see the thrift shop. Can we do that?

It's got racks of clothing. Everything in this thrift store is donated.

And an endless variety of stuff lining the walls. Rugs, mattresses.
They got a lot of pair of tap

shoes. This is

what we call the workshop. When somebody

pulls up at a back dock and drops it

off, this is where it all starts.

Oh, wow. Look at all

of this. That pile's all clothing.

You've got a throughput problem because there's a pile

of clothing there that's 12 feet high.

And two or three times a year, we get it

worked down that you can see the floor. But I'm

telling you, I just keep telling my staff, that's job security. I need you.
I need you. I grabbed a couple of workers as they were sorting barrels of clothing from that big pile.
Can we chat for a moment? Would that be all right? Wait till my friend with the microphone gets here. Tell me your name.
Ann Lewis. How long you been here, Ann Lewis? I started last November 14th.
Oh, sir, you're a newbie. Yes, I'm a newbie.
My goodness, why are you here? Well, I had retired, and I found myself, after my husband passed, I found myself just sitting at home, not doing nothing. So I came down here, and I got the job, and I absolutely love it.
Like Mickey said, some senior workers are

here because they want to be. Some of them, but not all.
What's your name? Kathleen. What you doing, Kathleen? And they call me Cat.
All right, I'll call you Cat. What are you doing? I am sorting.
why do you do it?

because I have to pay for my

bills

my home

medical

and Why do you do it? Because I have to pay for my bills, my home, medical, and you can't live on Social Security.

You can't live on Social Security.

And I enjoy it.

Yeah.

Are you from around here?

I was raised here, went to kindergarten and high school, graduated here.

And it's like home. What was it like when you were growing up here? A lot different than it is now.
A lot different. Things have changed.
It's busier life as I imagine. Yes.
Demographic changes brought on by the aging U.S. economy have created both opportunities and challenges in Cumberland County.

And as we've been saying all week, the changes we're seeing here are just the leading edge of a shift coming for the U.S. economy as a whole.

Thanks, Kat.

I appreciate it.

What is your name? My name is Kai.

We're from Los Angeles.

Doing a story on, we work on a radio show about business and the economy. And we're talking about the workforce, the labor force, and how it's getting older and what that's going to mean.
And you're part of that older labor force. I am.
How old are you? I'll soon be next year, 77. You look great for 77, Kat.
Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's this job keeps me young, younger.
Good. I'll let you get back to it.
Thank you. Sorry to bother you.
No, that's fine. Thank you.
And enjoy Crossville, Tennessee. We have so far.
We've been here since Monday. Tomorrow, Neela and I are going to reflect a bit on what we learned

in Tennessee

to wrap up this leg

of our series

The Age of Work This final note on the way out today, you have heard me mention, I'm sure, David Brancaccio and our morning report and how you ought to listen to him. You ought to listen tomorrow, especially for the first in a series of stories as David and his wife, Mary, rebuild after the Eaton fire.
I look around and now all I see is all the hard work it's going to take to bring it back. And I'm wondering if I still have it in me to do it.
If I'm still young enough to do it. What do you do when the biggest investment of your lives turns to ash? Tomorrow on The Morning Show.
Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Justin Duller, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe,

Juan Carlos Torado, and Becca Weinman.

Jeff Peters is the manager of media

production, and I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

We will see you tomorrow.

This is

APM.