In this uncertain economy, gold shines

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Speaker 1 Tell you what, we are going to beat the rush on all those first 100 days. Stories, Where does this economy stand on this Friday? Day 95.

Speaker 1 From American Public Media, this is Market Play.

Speaker 1 In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Friday, today, the 25th of April.
Good as always to have you along, everybody. Day 95, it is a hair over three months.
On with it.

Speaker 1 We are going to get Sadib Brett. Is it Politico? Catherine Rampell is at the Washington Post.
Hey, you two. Hey, Kai.
Hey, Kai. Catherine, you get to go first on this no-notice question.

Speaker 1 Where does this economy stand on day 95?

Speaker 2 Teetering on the brink, I guess. If you look at the hard data so far, things look okay, like consumer spending and things like that.

Speaker 2 But then you look at how people feel about the economy, what their plans are for the economy, whether businesses say that they can invest in this economy, and it's a much uglier picture.

Speaker 1 Sadib, same question.

Speaker 3 I have to agree with Catherine here.

Speaker 1 We are

Speaker 3 at a turning point. And we often talk about how monetary policy works with a lag.
Well, tariff policy works with a lag as well.

Speaker 3 It's just not as long and not as variable, but there is a lag, and we are going to see the effects of that very soon.

Speaker 3 The dizzying nature of where we are and the dizzying nature of what American companies are dealing with right now is going to ripple through the economy.

Speaker 3 So we're not in a great place, but we're not in a disastrous place yet.

Speaker 1 So let's talk, Catherine, about some stuff we got this morning. Consumer sentiment.

Speaker 1 First of all, consumers are cranky. They've been cranky for a long time.
That's fine. But as we know, how they're feeling doesn't affect their spending.
But here's the thing that really got me.

Speaker 1 We, consumers, think inflation is going to be at 6.5% by the end of the year. That is, if not catastrophic, not really very good at all.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, no, it's the worst number, the highest number in terms of inflation expectations since 1981, when inflation was itself much, much higher than we are seeing today.

Speaker 2 So that's very disturbing. There's a lot of concern in those data, in this consumer sentiment data also, about deteriorating job prospects, deteriorating income prospects.

Speaker 2 There's a lot that consumers are worried about. It's largely driven by the trade wars and the tariffs, but it's not exclusively driven by those things.

Speaker 2 And I think consumers are right to be concerned because, as you point out,

Speaker 2 we don't know what the tariffs are going to be from day to day or minute to minute, and nobody can plan.

Speaker 1 Sadib, the other thing in this data that really hit me was that 44% of consumers think we're going to be financially worse off in a year. And yet, and this goes to the lagging data, right?

Speaker 1 The markets are calm-ish today.

Speaker 1 The White House says everything's fine. Are consumers smarter than the White House and smarter than the markets?

Speaker 3 We will see.

Speaker 3 A lot of consumers take their cues from the mood that's generated by the markets. And it's been an up and down mood.
That is also what happens in these moments of tremendous volatility. People

Speaker 3 start to think, oh, maybe things are going to be okay. If we take another leg down, then it's harder to recover from each of those,

Speaker 3 particularly when actual economic conditions are changing.

Speaker 3 The signs are all there in

Speaker 3 what's going to happen in the ports on the west coast, what's leaving China

Speaker 3 on ships. The signs are all there that

Speaker 3 the the economic hurricane is coming and we're just waiting for it and thinking, well, maybe it will change course, but there's not a whole lot right now that's suggesting it is going to do that.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, all right, Catherine Rampell, we're going to get to something that we talked about before the gong. You and I were chit-chatting, and Sadip, we were all sort of kibbetzing.

Speaker 1 And one of the things we talked about were all these secret deals that President Trump says he has made trade-wise.

Speaker 1 He says he's talking to the Premier of the President of China, President Xi, and China says, no, that's not true.

Speaker 1 I will put this as

Speaker 1 delicately as I can. How can we believe anything on trade coming out of this White House when plainly the President is not telling the truth.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell Well, it's a really bad situation when the public should probably be trusting the Chinese leadership more than American leadership in public comments about the state of global affairs.

Speaker 2 That in and of itself is kind of worrying. But yeah, we cannot trust this administration when they're talking about tariffs.

Speaker 2 We can't, first of all, I think they don't know what their objectives are, right? And from day to day, those change. Is it about raising revenue? Is it about actually through tariffs?

Speaker 2 Is it actually about using tariffs as a negotiating tool to open up markets and the tariffs are going to go away?

Speaker 2 There's a lot of contradictory messaging, I think, because there isn't a lot of clear thinking within the White House about these issues.

Speaker 2 And then you think about how other countries are responding to this.

Speaker 2 It's very difficult to negotiate with someone who does not know what they want and potentially is misrepresenting the state of play so far. The Chinese government said it was fake news

Speaker 2 that a deal was imminent.

Speaker 2 But, you know, in the meantime, the markets recovered somewhat because they heard about this sort of vaporware of a deal, and the news cycle moves on.

Speaker 1 You know, Sudeep, I don't know if you saw this. It crossed the wires a little while ago.

Speaker 1 President Trump on his way to the Pope's funeral said to reporters on Air Force One, he was asked, what do you want out of a China trade deal? And what he said was, something substantial.

Speaker 1 So as Catherine said, this is Vaporware. There's nothing to wrap your arms around.
And I don't care if you're Japan or South Korea or the Europeans or the Chinese, you can't negotiate with nothing.

Speaker 3 That's right. And the remarkable thing about this moment is that American businesses for 15 or 20 years have been clamoring for more from the White House to put pressure on China for fairer trade,

Speaker 3 to prevent IP theft and intellectual property theft. All of that really does matter to American businesses.

Speaker 3 What they were not expecting was to have a deathbloke the global trading system as it sits right now and have no real clarity about

Speaker 3 what's going to come next. You can't look day to day, hour to hour at the messages coming out from the president or the White House and have any confidence that

Speaker 3 there's some system

Speaker 3 to where this is going to come out in the end. It's possible that the truce will be declared within days, but it does not seem likely, and there are no signals that that's going to happen.

Speaker 3 And that has got to be very worrying if you're actually trying to plan weeks or months in advance to keep the economy afloat wherever you are sitting in the economy.

Speaker 1 Catherine Rappel, last question to you. You said we're on the brink.

Speaker 1 It's not looking very good.

Speaker 1 It's worth a mention here that given our fiscal situation, lots of debt, and given the risks of inflation with a stagnant economy, Congress isn't going to be able to help us, and the Fed is not going to be able to help us.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Congress doesn't seem keen on helping us, right? Fair point.

Speaker 2 Congress wants to increase deficits quite a bit more through tax cuts and some

Speaker 2 budgetary games that the Senate in particular is playing right now,

Speaker 2 which I'm sure listeners will hear a lot more about in a couple of months. But the Fed, I think, wants to help.

Speaker 2 It just won't have the tools to deal with the situation that we're heading into, which is likely to be higher prices and slower growth.

Speaker 2 And the remedy for one of those issues is the opposite of the remedy for the other. So the Fed is in a very difficult position.

Speaker 1 Catherine Pell

Speaker 1 from the Washington Post and Sudip Reddy at Politico on day 95. Gang, thanks for your time.
Have a nice weekend.

Speaker 3 Thanks. Thanks, guys.
See you.

Speaker 1 Wall Street at the end of the week. It was calm-ish.

Speaker 1 We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 1 In times such as these, uncertain, scary, chaotic, the gut instinct is to look for something stable, something secure, something safe, a safe haven, if you will.

Speaker 1 For us, business and economically minded as we are, that has traditionally been U.S. Treasury bonds and the dollar.
Not so much anymore for both of those, as we've been covering.

Speaker 1 But there is one investment that's been solid, the asset that people have been taking to the bank since before there were banks.

Speaker 1 Gold has been on a steady march upward since January, hit an all-time high this week, in point of fact. So at a moment when nearly everything else is looking so dull, why is gold so shiny?

Speaker 1 Our special correspondent Stacey Vannick Smith has the story.

Speaker 4 In the heart of New York's Diamond District, in a little second-floor shop, Oshri Reuven is sifting through some of the business that has come in this week.

Speaker 5 On the desk right now, I have a sort of type of jewelry,

Speaker 5 an earring that went missing, you know, a lot of different cool rings. This ring here had a gold coin inside.

Speaker 4 Reuven owns Global Gold and Silver, which buys up gold jewelry and coins and trinkets from people and sells them, mostly to be melted down.

Speaker 5 There's a beautiful charm bracelet here with a lot of cool charms, shoes, horseshoes.

Speaker 1 Oh, typewriter. Typewriter.

Speaker 4 Reuven's business has doubled in the last eight weeks. People are flocking to his shop, hoping to cash in on this moment.

Speaker 5 Maybe 20 minutes ago, a gentleman brought in a watch that was 18 cow that was dismantled.

Speaker 4 And this is the moment to cash in. Gold prices have risen almost 30% this year, which means each of the little plastic containers brimming with jewelry sitting on Reuben's desk is worth a lot.

Speaker 4 This is like thousands of dollars that we're looking at.

Speaker 5 Yes, I'll even wait for you. But you have here,

Speaker 5 let's see what I've got.

Speaker 5 You have about 191 grams of gold, so a little over $11,000.

Speaker 4 It's $11,000 like in this. This is like one of those very small Tupperware.

Speaker 5 Tupperware bin, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 Like a little tiny one. That's like a big break.
It is the size of a block of cream cheese, an $11,000 block of cream cheese. But it is not just jewelry owners cashing in on gold's glow-up.

Speaker 4 Institutional investors and even central banks are stockpiling gold right now. Juan Carlos Artigas heads research at the World Gold Council.

Speaker 3 Trade policies from the U.S. administration

Speaker 3 have generated uncertainty.

Speaker 4 And that uncertainty has investors looking for a safe haven. The Trump administration's tariff policies will likely raise prices, push inflation up.

Speaker 4 And that makes putting money into savings risky because it could lose value sitting there, to say nothing of locking those dollars away for 10 years in a U.S. government bond.

Speaker 4 And volatile markets mean buying stocks right now is more of a gamble than usual. So where's an investor to turn?

Speaker 3 Gold has been a safe haven for centuries, right? We estimate that there's more than $250 billion

Speaker 3 traded in gold every day. That is a really large number, right?

Speaker 4 Right now, investors are going back to the future.

Speaker 4 guarding themselves against the ups and downs of policy whims, tariffs, global markets, by stashing their cash in an asset used by pharaohs and silk road traders thousands of years ago.

Speaker 5 Gold is something that right away over the counter you could get paid for it.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, at Global Gold and Silver, all of Oshri Reuven's containers full of jewelry have got me thinking about some of the orphaned earrings I have collecting dust in my jewelry box.

Speaker 1 What about like the little gold hoops?

Speaker 4 Like are those actually worth much?

Speaker 4 You know, asking for the sake of journalism.

Speaker 5 So, this is about one gram of 14-karat gold. Uh, that's about $60.

Speaker 4 Still, $60. You could at least get lunch in New York for $60.

Speaker 1 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 4 Or a couple of strong Friday cocktails at the end of a very long week. Solid gold in my book.
In New York, I'm Stacey Vannick-Smith from Marketplace.

Speaker 1 President Trump has said time and time and time again that his tariffs are going to get consumers and companies to buy American, consumers and companies here and consumers and companies abroad.

Speaker 1 And one of the industries he's mentioned is cattle ranching. So we decided to see whether American beef has found greener pastures.
Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy.

Speaker 6 My name is Nathan Bradford. I'm a primary cow-calf operation here in the state of Oklahoma.
I'm the owner and operator of G-Line Ranch.

Speaker 6 So pretty much all my life, I've been ranching. You know, we finally bought our first ranch in about 2003.

Speaker 6 You know, of course, it's taken 20, 20-something years really to get to this point. And

Speaker 6 it's not been an an easy deal. Had a lot of challenges.
We dealt with extreme drought conditions. We dealt with high hay prices.
And, you know, then no water. Oh, man, it was just

Speaker 6 three-strand fence. Cattle constantly out.
My brothers and I, we just seemed like all we ever did was chase cows.

Speaker 6 It's a good time to be in the ranching business, honestly. Terrace right now for the rancher, in my opinion, has worked a little bit in our favor.
Never seen it like this. I mean, we're getting

Speaker 6 $2,100 for 500-pound calves. I remember when we would just get, you know, seven, maybe $800 on them 500-pound calves.
Now it's $2,100.

Speaker 6 These cattle prices will come down at some point when I don't know. And how far I couldn't tell you.
But I do know we'll have lesser prices and we're going to be dealing with higher inputs.

Speaker 6 And I don't know how we're going to be able to absorb that and stay in. So you really have to brace yourself for what's to come next, right?

Speaker 6 And so that's what we are doing right now, trying to make sure we stay sustainable, something that's been very, very hard and challenging for us to do.

Speaker 6 When you think about the black rancher in today's time,

Speaker 6 there's not really many of us out here.

Speaker 6 And I remember back during the worst snowstorm or freeze freeze that we had ever experienced here in the state of Oklahoma, which was around 2020, I believe.

Speaker 6 My kids, we had heifers calving out and in the snow and in the freezing.

Speaker 1 And they

Speaker 6 stood their ground. They made it happen during a pandemic.

Speaker 6 And I just think about, you know, my daughter and my wife in the house, keeping everything warm.

Speaker 6 And when you look at the experience and the knowledge that a black family that I, you know, that I have that done that, there's not a lot out there with that kind of experience.

Speaker 6 And so it's very important for me to make sure that we are trying to build something that's going to be sustainable because at the end of the day, we could be the last black ranch.

Speaker 1 Nathan Bradford, G-Line Ranch, near Bowley, Oklahoma. Tell us about your economy, would you? Marketplace.org.

Speaker 1 Coming up.

Speaker 7 It's beautiful. It's like an old friend.

Speaker 7 I feel like I should pull over and give it a kiss.

Speaker 1 Loose lips, sink ships. First, though, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 1 Dowindustrials up 20 points, essentially flat, closed at 40,113 did the blue chips. The NASDAQ up 216 points, 1.2%, 17,300 to 82 for the week gone by.
The Dow up just shy of 2.5%.

Speaker 1 Yes, I did skip the S ⁇ P. Tacked on 40 points, 710%, 55.25.
NASDAQ for the week, up 6.7%. The S ⁇ P 500 rose 4.6%.

Speaker 1 Here's a sentence you will read in many companies' quarterly reports these days, quote, macroeconomic uncertainty stemming from global trade policies.

Speaker 1 That one happened to come from Skechers. The shoemaker withdrew its full-year guidance and reported weaker than expected revenue.
Sketchers down more than 5% today. Bond prices went up.

Speaker 1 The yield on the tenure, T-Note thus went down 4.25%, 4.25% on the tenure. You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 1 A little bit farther down the org chart, though, is Waymo, which is now doing, we learned, about 250,000 paid robo-taxi rides each and every week.

Speaker 1 That is five times as many as it was doing a year ago. Autonomous vehicles are increasingly showing up on our roads.

Speaker 1 And as Marketplace's Kimberly Adams reports, the White House has big plans for more.

Speaker 12 On Thursday, the Department of Transportation rolled out its new automated vehicle framework with the goal of making it easier and faster for companies to get AVs on the roads.

Speaker 3 This is no longer science fiction. You now have autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 100 million miles autonomously on public roads.

Speaker 12 Jeff Farah is CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association. He says 25 states representing more than half the U.S.
population have AV regulations on the books.

Speaker 3 But what's been lacking is a federal policy framework that clarifies the rules of the road.

Speaker 12 One of the Department of Transportation's changes in the new framework would expand a program that allowed imported AVs used for research and testing to be exempt from some safety rules.

Speaker 12 Now, American-made AVs will get that perk as well. Melissa Otto is with SP Global.

Speaker 13 We're in an environment now where the focus on autonomous vehicles is looking to be focused much more around U.S. companies based on some of the tariff dialogue that's happening in the market.

Speaker 12 But even if government and industry are ready to speed up adoption, most people still aren't quite there yet.

Speaker 3 Only 13% of Americans are saying that they would trust a fully self-driving vehicle to ride in one.

Speaker 12 Greg Brannon is director of automotive research for AAA.

Speaker 3 It's not an overall mistrust of the technology. We have hypothesized it is primarily around the fear of letting go.

Speaker 12 Brannon says almost two-thirds of U.S. drivers are still afraid of AVs.
In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 What do you get when you take a 53,000 ton boat that's longer than three football fields laid end to end and you sink it?

Speaker 1 What do you get is a maritime business opportunity without compare, Irina Jorov reports.

Speaker 4 Chris Corcentino was four years old when he sailed from New York to Germany for his dad's Army assignment aboard the SS United States in 1959.

Speaker 7 I remember being in the playroom with my brother.

Speaker 7 They had hobby horses with wheels and we would get on those little hobby horses on one up against the wall and wait for the ship to hit a swell and then we'd roll down to the other side.

Speaker 4 The ship was taken out of service in 1969 and it sat for decades at various ports around the country.

Speaker 4 But last year, Florida's Okaloosa County purchased the ship and it's now anchored in Mobile, Alabama. Its next life is going to be underwater as the world's largest artificial reef.

Speaker 4 But before it's sunk, workers must strip anything non-metal off the ship and clean out contaminants like old fuel.

Speaker 4 Eventually, the giant ocean liner will be towed and then sunk off the coast of Destin, Florida, says Okaloosa County's natural resources chief, Alex Fogg.

Speaker 3 By creating a reef with something as iconic as the SS United States, it's going to bring a lot of people to the destination to go fishing and diving.

Speaker 4 The Florida coast is full of artificial reefs, from cement pyramids to even some smaller ships.

Speaker 3 So it'll be kind of that, you know, flagship, if you will, for our artificial reef program.

Speaker 4 In other words, it'll be a marketing bonanza. Fogg expects the SS United States alone will bring in about $5 million in annual economic impact to the region.

Speaker 4 And all Florida's artificial reefs foster an estimated $3.1 billion recreation and tourism industry.

Speaker 4 For now, as preparations for the big sink continue, the ship is generating a little tourism boom in Mobile, too.

Speaker 14 Now that the ship is here, we've done...

Speaker 14 In March, we took out 1,502 people to see it.

Speaker 4 Willie Jones is the captain of a riverboat called the Perdido Queen. Usually he takes people out for dinner cruises on the Mobile River, but his most popular tour now is to the SS United States.

Speaker 4 His little riverboat gets up close to the hulking ship.

Speaker 14 Most of these people are coming from out of town, so they're staying in the hotels, eating at the restaurants. It's been a big influx for everybody.

Speaker 4 Some 50 people climb aboard the Perdido Queen on a Friday afternoon. Jones blasts the horn as he departs.

Speaker 4 About 10 minutes later, the ship comes into view. John Robotai is our guide.

Speaker 1 All right, there she is, the SS United States.

Speaker 9 990 feet in length, making her 100 feet longer than the Titanic.

Speaker 4 Visitors come out to gaze at the imposing wall of black metal that rises before them. From the ship's deck, workers look like ants.
They wave at the tourists.

Speaker 4 Chris Corsentino, who sailed on the SS United States as a four-year-old, says this is his second time taking the tour.

Speaker 7 It's an old dame. It's beautiful.
It's like an old friend.

Speaker 7 I feel like I should pull over and give it a kiss.

Speaker 4 He's one of five people on this tour who had spent time on the ship when it was in service and who came to say goodbye before the SS United States descends to the ocean floor.

Speaker 4 In Mobile, Alabama, I'm Irena Jorov for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 This final note on the way out today comes to us from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, whence you will remember we did a bunch of reporting in the the dark supply chain days of the pandemic.

Speaker 1 Ships at anchor by the dozen down there waiting to get in.

Speaker 1 Well, come the first week of May, and Sudeep alluded to this at the top of the program, the CEO of the port of Long Beach, it's two separate ports down there, but that's a technicality.

Speaker 1 Anyway, he says, the Long Beach guy says that in the first week of May, the whole complex is going to see a 44% drop in container ship traffic from a year ago, which, when you think about it, makes sense because at current tariff rates, there is basically a trade embargo in place between the two biggest economies in the

Speaker 1 world.

Speaker 1 Our theme music was composed by BJ Ledeman, Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargalli. Donna Tam is the executive editor, Neil Scarborough is vice president and general manager.

Speaker 1 And I'm Kai Rizdahl. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody.
We will see you back here on Monday, all right?

Speaker 1 This is APM.

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