In this uncertain economy, gold shines

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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? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.
In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. 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.
We are going to get Sidi Bredi's at 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.
Where does this economy stand on day 95? 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.
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.
Sadiq, same question. I have to agree with Catherine here.
We are at a turning point. Would it have been news if you didn't, Bill? Would it have been news if you didn't? We're 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. It's just not as long and not as variable, but there is a lag, and we're going to see the effects of that very soon.
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. So we're not in a great place, but we're not in a disastrous place yet.
So let's talk, Catherine, about some stuff we got this morning. Consumer sentiment.
First of all, consumers are cranky. They've been crankyy 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 we we consumers think inflation's going to be at six and a half percent by the end of the year that is if not catastrophic not really very good at all no it's the worst, the highest number in terms of inflation expectations since 1981, when inflation was itself much, much higher than we are seeing today.
So that's very disturbing. There's a lot of concern in this consumer sentiment data also about deteriorating job prospects, deteriorating income prospects.
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.
And I think consumers are right to be concerned because, as you point out, we don't know what the tariffs are going to be from day to day or minute to minute, and nobody can plan.

Sudeep, the other thing in this data that really hit me was that 44... we don't know what the tariffs are going to be from day to day or minute to minute, and nobody can plan.

Sadiq, 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? The markets are calm-ish today.
The White House says everything's fine. Are consumers smarter than the White House and smarter than the markets?

We will see. 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 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, particularly when actual economic conditions are changing. The signs are all there in what's going to happen in the ports on the west coast what's's leaving China on ships? The signs are all there that 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. All right, Catherine Rampel, we're going to get to something that we talked about before the gong.
You and I were chitchatting and Saditing and we were all sort of kibitzing. And one of the things we talked about were all these secret deals that President Trump says he has made trade wise.
He says he's talking to the president of China, President Xi, and China says, no, that's not true. I will put this as 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? 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.

That in and of itself is kind of worrying.

But yeah, we cannot trust this administration when they're talking about tariffs.

We can't. First of all, I think they don't know what their objectives are.

Right. And from day to day, those changes, is it about raising revenue?

Is it about actually through tariffs?

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

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

Right, right, right, right.

That a deal was imminent.

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.

You know, Sudeep, I don't know if you saw this across the wires a little while ago,

I'm sorry. somewhat because they heard about this sort of vaporware of a deal and the news cycle moves on.

You know, Sudeep, I don't know if you saw this across the wires a little while ago. 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. 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. 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 fair trade, to prevent IP theft and intellectual property theft.

All of that really does matter to American businesses. What they were not expecting was to have a death blow to the global trading system as it sits right now and have no real clarity about 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 there's some system

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.

And that has got to be very worrying

if you're actually trying to plan weeks or months in advance

Thank you. You said we're on the brink.
It's not looking very good. 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.
Congress doesn't seem keen on helping us, right? Right. Congress wants to increase deficits quite a bit more through tax cuts and some budgetary games that the Senate in particular is playing right now, which I'm sure listeners will hear a lot more about in a couple of months.
But the Fed, I think, wants to help. 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.
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.
Catherine Pell from The Washington Post and Sadiq Reddy at Politico on day 95. Gang, thanks for your time.
Have a nice weekend. Thanks, gang.
See ya.

Wall Street to end the week.

It was calm-ish.

We'll have the details

when we do the numbers. 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.
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. But there is one investment that's been solid.
The asset that people have been taking to the banks since before there were banks. 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? Our special correspondent Stacey Vanek-Smith has the story. 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.
On the desk right now, I have a sort of type of jewelry, an earring that went missing, a lot of different cool rings. This ring here had a gold coin inside.
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. There's a beautiful charm bracelet here with a lot of cool charms, shoes, horseshoes.
Oh, typewriter. Typewriter.
Reuven's business has doubled in the last eight weeks. People are flocking to his shop, hoping to cash in on this moment.
Maybe 20 minutes ago, a gentleman brought in a watch that was 18 carat, that was dismantled. And this is the moment to cash in.
Gold prices have risen almost 30 percent this year, which means each of the little plastic containers brimming with jewelry sitting on Reuven's desk is worth a lot. This is like thousands of dollars that we're looking at.
Yes, yes. I'll even wait for you.
But you have here, let's see what I have. You have about 191 grams of gold.
So a little over $11,000. That's $11,000 like in this.
It's like one of those like very small Tupperwares. Tupperware bin.
Yeah, exactly. Like a little tiny one.
That's like a 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. Institutional investors and even central banks are stockpiling gold right now.
Juan Carlos Artigas heads research at the World Gold Council. Trade policies from the U.S.
administration, they have generated uncertainty. And that uncertainty has investors looking for a safe haven.
The Trump administration's tariff policies will likely raise prices,

push inflation up. 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. And volatile markets mean buying stocks right now is more of a gamble than usual.

So where's an investor to turn? Gold has been a safe haven for centuries, right? We estimate that there's more than $250 billion traded in gold every day. That is a really large number, right? Right now, investors are going back to the future, 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.
Gold is something that right away over the counter you could get paid for it. Meanwhile, at Global Gold and Silver, all of Oshri Ruvan's containers full of jewelry have got me thinking about some of the orphaned earrings I have collecting dust in my jewelry box.
What about like the little gold hoops? Like, are those actually worth much? You know, asking for the sake of journalism. So this is about one gram of 14 karatat gold.
That's about $60. Still, $60.

You could at least get lunch in New York for $60. Yeah, definitely.
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 Vanek-Smith for Marketplace. 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. 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.
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. So pretty much all my life I've been ranching.
You know, we finally bought our first ranch in about 2003. You know, of course, it's taken 20-something years, really,

to get to this point.

And, you know, it's not been 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 three-strand fence.

Cattle constantly out.

My brothers and I, we just seemed like the hope we ever did was chase cows. It's a good time to be in the ranching business, honestly.
Terrence 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 $2,100 for 500-pound calves. I remember when we would just get, you know, sevens, maybe $800 on those 500-pound calves.
Now it's $2,100. But these cattle prices will come down at some point.
When, I don't know. And how far, I can tell you.
But I do know we'll have lesser lesser prices and we're going to be dealing with higher inputs.

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. 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. When you think about the Black Rancher in today's time, there's not really many of us out here.
And I remember back during the worst snowstorm or freeze that we ever experienced in the state of Oklahoma, which was around 2020, I believe. My kids, we had heifers calving out and in the snow and in the freezing, and they stood, you know, stood their ground.
They made it happen during a pandemic. And I just think about, you know, my daughter and my wife in the house, keeping everything warm.
And when you look at the experience and the knowledge

that a black family that I have that done that,

there's not a lot out there with that kind of experience.

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.

Nathan Bradford, G-Line Ranch, near Bowley, Oklahoma.

Tell us about your economy, would, let's do the numbers. Down Dust R's up 20 points, essentially flat, closed at 40,113, did the blue chips.
The Nasdaq up 216 points, 1.2%, 17,382. For the week gone by, the Dow up just shy of 2.5%.
Yes, I did skip the S&P. Tacked on 40.7%.
5525. NASDAQ for the week up 6.7%.
The S&P 500 rose 4.6%. Here's a sentence you will read in many companies' quarterly reports these days.
Quote, macroeconomic uncertainty stemming from global trade policies. That one happened to come from Skechers.
The shoemaker withdrew its full year guidance and reported weaker than expected revenue. Skechers down more than 5% today.
Bond prices went up the

yield on the 10-year T-Note thus went down 4.25%, 4.25% on the 10-year. You're listening to Marketplace podcast is supported by Gusto.
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This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.

Alphabet reported quarterly profits yesterday.

Google, of course, is its biggest name subsidiary.

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. That is five times as many as it was doing a year ago.
Autonomous vehicles are increasingly showing up on our roads. And as Marketplace's Kimberly Adams reports, the White House has big plans for more.
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. This is no longer science fiction.
You now have autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 100 million miles autonomously on public roads. 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.
But what's been lacking is a federal policy framework that clarifies the rules of the road. 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.
Now, American-made AVs will get that perk as well. Melissa Otto is with S&P Global.
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.
But even if government and industry are ready to speed up adoption, most people still aren't quite there yet. Only 13 percent of Americans are saying that they would trust a fully self-driving vehicle to ride in one.
Greg Brannon is director of automotive research for AAA. It's not an overall mistrust of the technology.

We have hypothesized that it's primarily around the fear of letting go.

Brannon says almost two-thirds of U.S. drivers are still afraid of AVs.

In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace. 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.

What do you get as a maritime business opportunity without compare?

Irina Jorov reports.

Chris Corsentino 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.

I remember being in the playroom with my brother. 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.
The ship was taken out of service in 1969, and it sat for decades at various ports around the country. 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. But before it's sunk, workers must strip anything non-metal off the ship and clean out contaminants like old fuel.
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. 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.
The Florida coast is full of artificial reefs, from cement pyramids to even some smaller ships. So it'll be kind of that flagship, if you will, for our artificial reef program.
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.
In all, Florida's artificial reefs foster an estimated $3.1 billion recreation and tourism industry. For now, as preparations for the big sink continue, the ship is generating a little tourism boom in Mobile, too.
Now that the ship is here, we've done, in March, we took out 1,502 people to see it. 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.
His little riverboat gets up close to the hulking ship. 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.
Some 50 people climb aboard the Perdido Queen on a Friday afternoon. Jones blasts the horn as he departs.
About 10 minutes later, the ship comes into view. John Robitaille is our guide.
All right, there she is, the SS United States. 990 feet in length, making her 100 feet longer than the Titanic.
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. Chris Corsantino, who sailed on the SS United States as a four-year-old, says this is his second time taking the tour.
It's an old dame. It's beautiful.
It's like an old friend. I feel like I should pull over and give it a kiss.
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.

In Mobile, Alabama, I'm Irina Jorov for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today comes to us from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Once you will remember, we did a bunch of reporting in the dark supply chain days of the pandemic. Ships at anchor by the dozen down there waiting to get in.
Well, come the first week of May, and Sadiq 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. 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 world.
Our theme music was composed by B.J. Liederman, Marketplace's executive producer, Nancy Farghali.
Donna Tam is the executive editor. Neil Scarborough is vice president and general manager.
And I'm Kai Rizdahl. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody.
We will see you back here on Monday. All right.
This is APM. For decades, China's economic rise has been symbolized by the unstoppable force of low-cost manufacturing.
But today, a new and far more disruptive wave of competition is unfolding, one that threatens not just Western manufacturing, but also the West's geopolitical dominance.

I'm journalist James King, and in my new audiobook, Global Tech Wars, from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, I'm unpacking what China's rapid technological ascent across cutting-edge industries like artificial intelligence,

electric vehicles, and surveillance technology means for the future.

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