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Hey, so how are you feeling about things? Wait, don't answer that. From American public media, this is Marketplace.
In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Friday today, the 11th of April.
Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. I could summarize the week here, couldn't I? A quick what happened and why.
But I'm going to guess all y'all have a pretty good handle on it. No.
So we are just going to dig right in. We on this Friday is Heather Long.
She's at The Washington Post. Jordan Holman is at The New York Times.
Hey, you two. Hi, Kai.
Hey, Kai. Jordan, I get to start with you because we're going to start with consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan out today.
Terrible by almost every measure. And look, we know that sentiment doesn't necessarily affect consumer spending and behavior, but this is another one of these entries in the man, this is not very good file, right? Yes, the vibes are absolutely off.
So you know how we usually say that business executives don't like uncertainty? Yes, we do. Well, shoppers also do not.
I've talked to so many people this week just about their concern with buying things right now. But then also on the other side, they're like, should I panic buy? And it's just leaving people in a lot of suspense.
You're hearing a lot of people take to TikTok saying like, OK, maybe I should buy the iphone with apple care but maybe i shouldn't buy a house or like a big purchase item um and it's just as they look around the corner they're not sure what's going to happen and so that kind of leaves everyone in suspense right and right now we're looking at a at a 90-day corner on these tariffs. Heather Long, let me ask you this.

The CPI came out the other day,

and it was pretty good, right?

Consumer inflation, lower than expected.

We had Rafael Bostic, the president of the Atlanta Fed,

on the show that day,

and so the first question I tossed him was about CPI,

and it was really interesting to me because he gave a nod to that answer

but then turned it right to tariffs

and what that's going to mean,

and that's not something that Fed presidents and board of governors people usually want to do. I know.
It's almost depressing that if we lived in a parallel universe where we had seen that really pretty cheery data on inflation for March, we would have all been writing stories about congratulations, Fed Chair Powell and your buddies, you've achieved the soft landing, the miracle. And instead, it's just what Mr.
Bostic was talking to you about. The only thing any of us are focused on is these tariffs.
And I can tell you at the Washington Post, one of our most read stories this week is what you should panic buy right now before the tariffs go into effect. I'm pulling have to go look that one up.
Sorry, I'm pulling it up here in the studio right now. And here's the one that really, Kai, I didn't know we should be buying South Korean sunscreen.
For real? These are the things. And so that, you know, it just reiterates what Jordan and President Bostick were saying.
Everyone's focus is on these tariffs. Jordan, let's talk about retailers, the people who, you know, out who source stuff from overseas, who bring it into this country, who now I have to imagine are scrambling to find someplace other than China to source their materials.
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
A lot of executives are spending a lot of time in meetings discussing tariffs and what they're going to do with them. It's a mixture of things.
They're talking to vendors saying, like, I mean, let's eat the cost 50 50 on this. Let's stockpile this.
Let's just wait, sell through our inventory and see what happens next. But I think what's so eye popping about this is just how much time CEOs are having to give to thinking through this, especially as the news changes every hour, it feels like? Yeah, more than every hour, honestly, is what it feels like.
Heather, let me ask you this, and I'm going to get a little technical here, so brace yourself. One of the things that happened this week was that as we saw stock markets go down, we also saw U.S.
Treasury debt bond markets sell off. That is to say the prices went down, which meant the yields go up.
That is extremely unusual. I need you to explain why it's unusual and then what it means.
Yeah, sure. What a week.
Normally, the U.S. government bonds are seen as that safe haven when stocks are selling off, when there's panic in the world.
Think back to 2020 and the pandemic. People would rush to U.S.
government bonds and really to the U.S. dollar, too.
And that broke down this week. And, you know, people, there's all these complicated explanations with hedge funds and basis trades.
But at the heart of it, it's really very simple. And that is the right now, the United States, global investors do not want to invest in the United States.
You know, that's why they're dumping dollars. That's why they're dumping our bonds.
That's why a lot of people don't even want to travel here right now from overseas. And so, you know, that's what's changed this week is that, no, it doesn't mean the end of the dollar dominance or anything like this, but it has chipped away at this long time perception of the United States as the global safe haven.
And it has to be pointed out here, Jordan Holman, that that's a lot of what has given us the financial advantage, right? Not just the consumer economy, which is writ large. That's kind of why we've been able to do what we've been able to do for the last 80 years.
Absolutely. And to that point, also for American brands, they're facing like kind of brand crisis right now.
If they're a multinational selling overseas, there is a active backlash against a lot of brands if they are American. So they're not only dealing with the financial rigor of all of this, but they're also trying to figure out how to project themselves.
And that's complicating it. You know, they have the U.S.
consumers who are feeling uncertain, but there's also Europeans, Chinese consumers over there

who are not feeling so great about a lot of American brands right now, too. Heather Long, the last one goes to you.
You've got 30 seconds to answer this, and it's a doozy. And my question is this, how do you suppose this ends? Well, don't we all think we knew.
30 seconds, ready, go. I mean, it's just crazy.

Nobody even knew what the sheriff on China was for 24 hours this week. I know, right? And you're asking me to predict the next 90 days.
All right. Never mind.
No, I think it's just sad. You know, the real sadness here is if we actually wanted to be helping a lot of people across this country, manufacturing blue collar workers, there are so many better ways to do it.

And that's what's hard to watch.

Heather Long on a Friday.

Jordan Holman at The New York Times.

Thanks, you two.

Thanks, Kai.

Thanks, Kai.

On Wall Street today.

I mean, sure.

It was up.

We'll go with that.

Details, numbers.

You know the U.S. dollar.
And it's been falling hard and it's been falling fast. A 10-year low against the Swiss franc, a three-year low against the euro.
Marketplace's Mitchell Harmon explains what's going down. Usually what happens when U.S.
stocks tank and global investors freak is they look around for a less risky place, a safe haven to park their money. That's historically been long-term U.S.
Treasury bonds and the U.S. dollar, but they've tanked as well.
It's a strange time. Disconcerting, a crisis of confidence.
We have a real problem here. That's Capital Economics' Jonas Goulterman,

Jay Hatfield at Infrastructure Capital Advisors, and Joe Brusuelas at RSM, who explains that with

all the unpredictable tariff announcements, there's been a loss of credibility and confidence

in the safe haven status of U.S. dollar-denominated assets.
There's a global economic shift underway,

says Jay Hatfield. The prospects for growth in Europe have improved dramatically.
There is significant loss in confidence in the growth prospects in the U.S. And along with that, says Jonas Goulterman.
Dollar dominance in the global system is no longer something we should take for granted. If you're looking for some other place to store your money, the euro, Swiss franc, and yen have been going up the most against the dollar.
Now, a lower dollar could eventually help boost U.S. manufacturing, something President Donald Trump wants his tariffs to do.
Weaker currency means your exports become cheaper. But, Gulterman says, at the price of undermining U.S.
economic supremacy, it's a silver lining to a pretty bad cloud and the storm might still be gathering. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
You know how we report inflation figures two ways, month to month and then year over year? Here's why. From February to March, car insurance fell eight tenths of one percent.
That was in the CPI that came out the other day. And you right now are probably looking at the last insurance bill you got and saying, yeah, no, not my insurance.
Well, it's going to make more sense when I tell you that year over year, March 24 to March 25, car insurance rose seven and a half percent. Market Police's Kaylee Wells explains what's going on there.
Jeff Reeder knows firsthand why car insurance has increased. He leads benchmarking at Aon's Insurance Consulting.
He just replaced his bumper on his 2021 Ford Expedition for $5,000. Cars are much more complex now.
So even simple damages often will have sometimes two or three times the cost that they would have had previously. Because a bumper in 2025 might include fancy sensors and cameras.
On top of that, the insurance market itself has been struggling, says Chase Gardner with the online insurance agent Insurify. Car insurance has been in a state of near crisis since the COVID-19 pandemic.
There were the supply chain issues, the inflation that followed, and a post-pandemic spike in traffic fatalities. And since insurance companies have to get state approval for rates, it takes a while to react to market changes.
So yes, the drop last month is good news. This dip is almost a response to trends that happened in 2023 and 2024, and we're kind of just now seeing those results.
But it might be short-lived, says David Marlett, a professor of insurance at Appalachian State University. The tariffs are the big variable.
So you could have the same car accident, and what might have cost $1,000 six months ago,

now is going to be $1,000 plus whatever the impact of the tariff is.

Because if the auto parts get more expensive, so will the car accidents.

I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. coming up something that is stable no matter what the economy is like what makes a dream job a dream job anyway.
First though, let's do the numbers.

Well, here you go on the Friday of a man. What are we down? Dusty was up 619 points, one and six tenths percent, 40,212.
The Nasdaq picked up 337 points, two and a tenth percent, 16,724 there. The S&P 500 added 95, 1.8 percent, 53 and 63.
Here's really why we're doing the super happy music. For the five days gone by, the Dow up 4.9 percent.
NASDAQ up 7.3 percent. The S&P 500 elevated 5 and 7 tenths of 1 percent.
However, comma, all y'all know the rest of the story. JPMorgan Chase

posted earnings that beat expectations. Still, though, the back points to, quote, ongoing

turbulence. Yeah.
JPMorgan Chase bumped up four percent. Wells Fargo slipped about one percent.

Bond prices down yield on the 10-year T-note up 4.49 percent%. You're listening to Marketplace.

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Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This is Marketplace.
I'm Kai Rizdahl. With the now standard caveat that what I'm about to say could be changed at literally any moment by a post on Truth Social, as of right now, the import tax on everything coming into this country from China is 145 percent.
And most goods from pretty much everywhere else come with a 10 percent tariff. The Trump administration says it's imposing these tariffs for two reasons, to protect American jobs and industry and to bring in new revenue, what the White House claims would be trillions of dollars over the next decade.
I'm obliged to point out here that tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers. But tariffs can be tough to actually collect, especially when avoiding them can save you millions.
Marketplace's Matt Levin reports. You know, when you return from traveling abroad and just want to get back to your bed, but you still have to wait in that annoying line for that customs officer to ask you those annoying questions.
Well, if you were a bicycle from China or a t-shirt from India, you probably wouldn't have to wait to interact with anyone from customs. So the average inspection rate and year over year it kind of changes has been averaging like three to five percent.
Angela Lewis is a licensed customs broker for a logistics company called Flexport. It's her job to file the paperwork U.S.
Customs and Border Protection requires for stuff to enter the country. More than $3.3 trillion worth of goods entered the U.S.
last year. It's simply impossible for customs to inspect all of that, which means when Lewis fills out the paperwork for, say, a shipping container of 100 bicycles from China to get through the port of Long Beach, the federal government is mostly trusting that what's in the shipping container is actually 100 bicycles and not, say, 500 bicycles, which would require five times more in tariff payments.
I do think that the way the tariffs are being implemented and the speed of which they are is making it easier right now for some fraud and evasion just because of how hectic it is. Goldman Sachs estimated that in 2023, tariff evasion cost the U.S.
$110 to $130 billion. And that was before the Trump administration's tariff hikes.
Economist Derek Kellenberg at the University of Montana says the incentive to cheat is higher now. We find that for every 1% increase in tariffs, there's a 3% increase in misreporting of trade values in industrialized high-income countries.
A.K.A. a 3% increase in tariff evasion.
There's three common ways to do this. Lie to the government about the value of the goods you're bringing in, lie about what goods you're bringing in, or lie about what country you're bringing the goods from.
But there's also just good old-fashioned smuggling, avoiding official ports of entry altogether. Rather than drugs or guns, it may become more profitable to be smuggling avocados, eggs, and iPhones at the current tariff rates.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined an interview request, but acknowledged that new tariffs do give rise to new evasion tactics, which can make enforcement even more of a challenge.
But the penalties for tariff evasion can be severe. Attorney Vavik Qatari at Whistleblower Law Partners says beyond a tripling of the missed tariff payment.
There is also a per violation penalty. And so if you are falsely claiming, you know, hundreds of thousands of goods entering the company at a lower price, you can see how that would add up.
Katari says for Customs or the Department of Justice to start an investigation, they often rely on external tips. And those often come from other companies that suspect their competitor isn't playing by the rules or from good Samaritan employees.
Whistleblowers are probably the best and one of the only ways for reporting when a company evades tariffs.

Whistleblowers can collect a portion of the lost revenue they report, and payouts can be in the millions.

The Trump administration may want to advertise that whistleblower reward a little bit more.

I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. Heather, Jordan, and I talked a little bit up at the top of the program

about that consumer sentiment survey out today from the University of Michigan. Not great is the shorthand.
And among the most not great bits, that over the next 12 months, consumers think inflation is going to hit 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1981. And if that year doesn't ring a bell for you inflation-wise, just go ahead and Google Paul Volcker.
There are warning signs coming from consumers on unemployment, personal finances, also incomes, and people are pessimistic across demographic groups. We started a new series this week.
It's called Lived Economies, in which Marketplace's Kristen Schwab is spending time with a couple of sets of people to better understand how they fit into our financial system and how they're feeling about it. Here's Kristen with part three.
Elk Grove, California, is the kind of suburbia you see on TV. Matching houses, manicured lawns, a white EV in every driveway.
There's one parked at the house I'm visiting, too.! How are you? The first thing I notice when I walk into Hanan Tamari and Karima Dasi's house is how good it smells, like honeysuckle or gardenia. In the corner of the living room sits one of those trendy olive trees I'm always seeing on Instagram.
There's a selection of fruit juices on the kitchen counter, decanted into carafts. And then whenever you want, please help yourself to the cheese board.
Thank you. The couple's 20-month-old daughter Talia is here too.
What's your name? She might call you in Arabic, which just means like, like, ah. Any stranger female is .
I would be honored. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Adassi and I have been talking on the phone for months now. now.
I would be honored.

Adassi and I have been talking on the phone for months now.

I'm visiting him in February when we didn't know just how much economic policy would turn things upside down.

At the time, when I asked how he feels about his personal economy, his mood turned sour.

Your notes were negative, honey.

Yeah, no, I don't believe in the American dream.

I just, I don't think it exists anymore. The thing is, even though these two appear to live a pretty nice life, they feel defeated when it comes to finances.
And that echoes how a lot of consumers feel about the economy right now, even high earners. Consumer sentiment has plunged in recent months, and that dip includes people like Adassi and Tamari, whose incomes are higher than most.
They earn about $200,000 a year. Adassi feels like their gains have been zeroed out by climbing home prices and inflation.
He's finding out that what he thought was achievable, given their finances, isn't. I think majority of Americans think the American dream is to buy a house, have a couple of kids, and retire.
But now it's the American dream is, to me, the American dream is... You work till you die.
No, that's not the American dream. That's the American reality.
Tamari and Adassi are both 31 and children of immigrants. Their parents are Jordanian.
And their family showed them that if they put in the work, they'd be rewarded. And I remember even thinking about this when I was deciding if I wanted to go into pharmacy or not.
Adassi says the most important thing he considered when choosing his career was, one, something that is stable no matter what the economy is like. And two, something he could do anywhere.
In pursuit of this, Adassi spent a decade in school and took on more than $250,000 in student debt. Debt, he's still paying off.
And he's starting to feel like maybe it all wasn't worth it. Bitter.
I think that's a good word. Yeah, bitter.
I definitely do feel bitter. I definitely do.
Adassi grew up in Elk Grove and followed his dad's path. Growing up, yeah, I would probably say, if you were making $100,000, you were fine.
Buy a house, you know, do whatever you want. Let's take a second to acknowledge that most households in the U.S.
do not make six figures. In 2023, the median household income was about $80,000.
It is also worth noting that California doesn't come cheap. Adassi and Tamari rent right now, but would like to buy.
The median home price in Elk Grove is about $650,000, according to Redfin. I also want us to be comfortable in the event that if I decide, hey, I want to quit my job, I just want to, you know, raise my family, I want to be a stay-at-home mom.
Tamari works for a housing developer, but she's thinking more about staying home lately because she is pregnant. Their second daughter is due in May.
And there's a whole new list of baby stuff to buy, like a second crib, which takes us to Target. This is Talia's crib.
It is on sale. How much is it now? It's $3.49.
Adassi points at some cribs for half the price. They go back and forth a bit.
And then Tamari admits why she really wants the more expensive one. Yeah, I was thinking we match the two girls' cribs next to if they share rooms.
They'll be next to each other. They put off the crib decision for another day.
And in the meantime, grab some swaddles and bottles. The total is about $108.
As Adassi rolls the shopping cart to the car, he circles back the idea of the American dream. You know, my American dream is I want to go shopping, get what I need, and it being less than $100.
On the way home, Adassi talks about how, at this stage, he never expected he'd be counting every dollar after a Target run. It's like I also kind of like take into fact that my income is like three to four times the average American income.
In other words, if he's making an above-average wage, why does life feel so average?

He's open-minded, though, that things could change.

And in this current moment of economic upheaval, he's decided to take a wait-and-see approach.

In Elk Grove, California, I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, which really is just chef's kiss.
There has been a glitch all day long, it seems, in the computer system that Customs and Border Protection uses to track and collect. Wait for it.
Wait for it. Yes, tariffs.
And because of that glitch, CNBC reports, tariffs are not at the moment being collected by the federal government

of the United States of America. You cannot make this stuff up, people.
Our theme music was composed

by B.J. Lederman, Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fergali.
Donna Tam is the executive

editor. Neil Scarborough is vice president and general manager.
And I'm Kyle 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