Producers feel the pinch

We thought about calling it the ultimate do-everything wonder tool for making CIOs look like mad geniuses, but that sounded kind of long.

So we just call it the Enterprise Browser.

It drives productivity up, IT costs down, and helps you stay more secure than ever.

It's like the ultimate do-everything wonder tool for making CIOs look like mad geniuses.

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The Enterprise Browser from Island.

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You do have to eat your vegetables, kids, but it's going to cost you.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdall.

It is Thursday, today, the 14th day of August.

Good as always, to have you along, everybody.

We are going to begin today with apologies to Charles Dickens with a tale of two two indicators.

We learned earlier this week, Tuesday I think it was, that consumer prices in the form of the Consumer Price Index mostly held steady in July despite President Trump's tariffs.

One might, again apologies, call it the best of economic times, or at least the best we might expect at this point.

Today, though, was, if not the actual worst of economic times, certainly an unwelcome surprise.

From the good people at the Labor Department came the July Producer Price Index, prices at the wholesale level, up nine-tenths of 1% June to July, the biggest month-to-month gain in three years.

Marketplace Novosaffo drew the short straw in our news meeting this morning, and he spent his day figuring out the disconnect and what it's going to mean.

The consumer price index measures what we pay.

The producer price index measures what the people who sell us stuff pay.

And in certain categories of the PPI, those people are paying a lot more.

Ben Ayers is a senior economist at nationwide.

But there were also spikes in hotel accommodations, freight transportation.

We are seeing businesses being creative about how to

make up for some of the costs from tariffs.

In certain tariff-sensitive categories prices in the producer price index have been rising for months but big increases have not been showing up yet in the consumer price index which ticked up only two-tenths of a percent in july one reason is that many businesses are reluctant to pass on higher import taxes to consumers that tells me that a lot of these markets are more competitive than i thought laura weldkamp is a professor of economics and finance at columbia business school if you raise your prices you've got a competitor next door selling something similar, and people won't buy your more expensive good.

They'll buy the less expensive one.

So for many businesses, the thinking has been, why raise prices now if you can wait it out in case the tariffs are negotiated away?

Meanwhile, retailers have been burning through built-up inventory, and that's created a lot of uncertainty, says Matthew Martin of Oxford Economics.

When is the cost increases really going to start and what is going to be the magnitude?

So this producer price index may be an inflection point.

It shows that cost pressures on importers are going up.

And we know now that tariffs are here to stay, not just a negotiating tool.

As we enter fall, we are going to see higher prices for consumers.

Maybe not as large of a rise as we had initially expected, but we think the duration of the increase is going to be longer.

How long?

Martin expects consumer prices to rise faster through the fall and to the beginning of next year.

I'm Nova Safo for Marketplace.

Nine-tenths of 1% was, as I said, the month-to-month increase in wholesale prices.

The year-over-year figure was 3.3%, and about a quarter of that increase was driven by a spike in one particular category, fresh and dry vegetables.

The price your grocer is paying to source your veggies was up a whopping 38.9%.

Daniel Ackerman has that slice of the story.

Wholesale vegetable prices are just volatile, says William Masters, a food economist at Tufts University.

So this is a number that just bounces up and down like a cardiac chart at the doctor's office.

And the current bounce up is not outlandish.

Still, I asked Brown University political economist Mark Blythe if he could explain the bounce.

No, I can't, and no one can, because this could come from a whole host of things, right?

He says it's too soon to pinpoint the exact cause, but he has some ideas.

Could this simply be a result of climate change?

Could this be the fact that things are hotter and drier?

Yes.

Or he says it could be that some farms in the U.S.

are short on labor due to President Trump's immigration crackdown.

This could literally be the fact that many of the workers that were picking these things in the fields are actually afraid to go to work.

Another possible explanation?

Tariffs.

Over a third of our vegetables are imported.

David Ortega is a food economist at Michigan State University.

He says on average, those veggies are incurring higher tariffs than a year ago.

Things like tomatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, cucumbers.

Mexican tomatoes, which are most of the fresh tomatoes sold in the U.S., are taxed at 17%.

The PPI report only includes domestically produced vegetables, not imports, but by limiting overall supply, Ortega says tariffs can cause homegrown veggie prices to rise too.

Now there's less supply available to meet the demand, and so that's going to raise the price up.

And because the grocery stores sourcing all that food run on such thin margins, Ortega says it would be hard for them to eat any sustained increase in wholesale prices.

We could see some of those cost increases get passed on to the consumer in the coming months.

If those wholesale prices don't settle down soon, I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Traders were a bit disquieted by the inflation news, not dejected, just disturbed.

Flat were the major indices.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Not far behind inflation on the list of things keeping Jay Powell up at night and quite possibly tied for the number one spot, to be completely honest with you, is the job market.

Job growth has slowed, as we know.

It has slowed a lot.

Kimberly Adams told us yesterday that the number of people who are what economists call long-term unemployed, that is six months or more out of a job, that number is growing.

And adding insult to that labor market injury, the indignities of the modern hiring process are multiplying.

Never fun, even in the best of times.

Looking for a job now means navigating a gauntlet of automated applications processes set up to whittle down the hundreds, sometimes thousands of people applying, often without even a hint of a human touch.

Marketplace's Megan McCarty-Carino has more now from the front lines of algorithmic application hell.

You kind of can't imagine how chaotic it is to have nine small dogs in the same house until you experience it.

Hi.

Oh, oh, oh my gosh.

They're insane.

I love them, and they're insane, huh?

I caught up with Jackie on a particularly busy dog sitting assignment in Oakland.

We're not using her full name because she's worried it could hurt her chances with potential employers.

I just want everyone to know that I don't have a breathing problem.

That is a pug sitting next to me.

Dog sitting is actually her side hustle.

She's been looking for a recruiting job in tech for about a year.

She shows me a spreadsheet where she tracks her applications.

So I have a total of 529.

529 applications and only 39 led to any human contact.

The vast majority of the entries went nowhere.

That's the dehumanizing part where you don't even get an email saying thanks but no thanks.

Despite an application process that's longer and weirder than ever, hiring platforms don't just use keyword filters for resumes.

They often use automated systems that analyze extended questionnaires, grade work assignments, assess personality, or Jackie's favorite, conduct interviews with bots.

Do you think they heard me roll my eyes?

I will never do one.

Technology has increased the number of jobs applicants can reasonably apply to.

It started with digital job boards, then remote work.

Now, AI helps applicants tweak their resumes and cover letters in a matter of seconds.

But widening the application funnel comes with trade-offs, says Peter Capelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Because the bigger the pool you've got, the more variation you've got in it.

And that falls then to your selection processes to sort that out.

All those added layers of algorithmic filtration.

He says the odds of getting an interview are only about 3%,

though applicants are jumping through more and more hoops.

At some point, they just learn that this is not going anywhere and why keep banging my head on the wall.

At this point, digital application portals seem like a lost cause to Oliver Golden Egan.

I have not gotten traction on any applications that I have not had some sort of personal connection to.

He graduated from Pomona College on scholarship last year.

After interning at Harper's Magazine, he's been looking for full-time work in publishing.

He usually tries to cold contact an employee of his target company so he can send his resume via email.

He's even thought about delivering application materials on paper in person.

I don't come from a background that's like necessarily replete with those kinds of connections.

My mother's a housekeeper.

AI application systems are often sold as fixes to the traditional biases in hiring.

But Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanen says they introduce new unfairness.

The experience that we put these job seekers through, right?

Being interviewed by a robot essentially, I think it's kind of a violation of basic dignity.

He says there's little evidence AI can accurately predict who will excel at a job in most cases.

If these are no better than random number generators, I think we should be explicitly using random number generators.

Basically, choosing candidates by lottery after they fulfill some minimum requirements.

You're not pretending to go through this opaque process that somehow magically picks out the best candidates, and so it's understood by everyone that it was just the luck of the draw.

If Dog Sitting could pay the bills, Jackie says she'd gladly leave the job boards behind and stick with her pet friends.

I don't feel ignored.

I don't feel like I, you know, I'm just kind of disappearing into the void.

Yes, they need a lot of attention and affection, but they give it right back.

The perfect antidote to a dehumanizing hiring process.

I'm Megan McCarty-Carino for Marketplace.

The United States of America is the biggest producer of oil and gas on the planet, perhaps the most global of all global industries.

The United States of America is also a global leader in refining, and that's expected to remain true even as the growth in petroleum demand wanes.

Not all refiners are going to stay on top, though, because as it turns out, global though the industry is, refining is a peculiarly regional business.

And what's to come next for American refiners depends to a great degree on where they are.

Marketplace Elizabeth Troval has more on that one.

To make it in the refinery business, you need three things.

A healthy supply of crude oil, friendly regulation, and local demand for your product.

Robert Howers is with RBN Energy.

So if you're on the East Coast or the West Coast, there's no crude oil pipelines connecting those refineries to the supply in the middle of the continent.

In California, the refining biz is especially tough because the state is producing less crude oil.

So refiners have to get it from somewhere else.

California refineries are shutting down.

Of course, you know, they have been.

And governmental red tape in that state isn't helping because it's more expensive to operate, says Neil Walters with consulting firm Carney.

It's a very challenging environment from a legislative and regulatory standpoint.

And it's also an area where the uptake of electric cars and the like is strong.

Meanwhile, Midwest refiners close to ample Canadian crude oil are better positioned, says Debenole Chowdhury with S ⁇ P Global Commodity Insights.

They're kind of first in line when you think of the pipeline movements from Canada.

The economy in the Midwest is also dependent on farming equipment.

And we're not seeing a drastic quick electrification of any of that fleet.

But there's one region, the Gulf Coast, that cuts above the rest.

It's got favorable regulations and is well connected to the Permian, where crude oil is produced.

And it's got a large export market in its backyard.

We We see Latin America not growing their refined product production, but seeing their demand continue to grow.

So that means they rely on the United States Gulf Coast refiner to fill their supply gap.

And he says, when you look at the demographics in that region, especially Texas, with its large, fast-growing cities, there's still a healthy demand for transportation fuels.

I'm Elizabeth Troval from Marketplace.

Coming up.

Our events are pretty packed to the point where sometimes we have no seating and people are sitting on the floor, sitting on top of each other.

And And it's a library.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is down 11 points today, basically on change percentage-wise, 44,911.

The NASDAQ down two points.

We'll call that flat, 21,710.

SP 500, yeah, flat 64, 68.

Shares in the cryptocurrency exchange bullish are on fire today after an initial public offering early in the week exceeded expectations.

Bullish stock jumped 9.4% today.

What do you think the ticker symbol is for that stock?

If you thought B-U-L-L, you'd have been wrong.

B-L-S-H.

B-U-L-L is a trading platform or something.

I don't know.

John Deere hit fallow ground today as the farming equipment manufacturer announced third quarter profits lower than last year.

Income down 26% year over year, largely because

tariffs.

Deere and company shares down six and three-quarters percent today.

Bonds down.

Yield on the 10-year T-note up 4.28%.

You're listening to Marketplace.

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We thought about calling it the wonderful workflow wizard for big businesses battling ballooning budgets.

But that felt like it was trying a little hard.

So we just call it the Enterprise Browser.

It drives productivity up, IT costs down, and helps you stay more secure than ever.

It's like a wonderful workflow wizard for big businesses battling ballooning budgets.

Yeah, you get the idea.

The Enterprise Browser from Island.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

According to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, that's part of the city government, the overall apartment vacancy rate there is 1.41%.

So landlords have what you might well call the upper hand.

And it used to be that if you wanted to rent a place in the biggest city in this economy, you would more likely than not have to pay a hefty broker's fee, even if you somehow found the apartment yourself online.

New York was just one of two cities in these United States, Boston's the other, where landlords would hire a broker to market their rental and then make would-be tenants pay the fee.

As recently as last year, nearly half of all New York City rentals had a broker's fee.

That has been banned by the city council.

Whoever hires the broker has to pay them now.

Massachusetts just did something kind of similar.

Marketplaces Aman at the Fields has more on how it's playing out so far.

Earlier this summer, Catherine Crawford's landlord told her he wouldn't be renewing her lease.

He was planning to sell her Brooklyn apartment.

It had bay windows and great light, and she had only moved in a year before.

So she started looking for a new place just before the law on broker fees was going into effect.

I knew that the change was coming in June and so I was hoping that I wouldn't have to pay it.

Especially because she had just paid a broker fee last year, more than $6,000 for her current place in addition to first month's rent and a security deposit.

Crawford was a little worried that rents might shoot up.

I talked to a broker, I think it was the day before the law changed, and he said, you know, you should come see it tonight and pay the broker's fee if you're interested, because the apartment's going to go from $3,000 to $4,000 overnight.

At another place she looked at right after the law changed, a broker told her she could either still pay the fee and they'd just call it something else, or she could pay an extra $600 a month in rent.

Right around then, Crawford also started noticing rents jump online.

I got email updates on apartments I'd saved that were, you know, some were going up $100, $300, $400, $600.

I think I saw one at 1,000.

So, like, that was shocking.

But it didn't last.

After a few days, she noticed many of those asking rents drop back down again.

Kenny Lee, senior economist at the real estate website Street Easy, says that's pretty much what his numbers show too.

The early data is sending me a clear message.

Following the implementation of the FAIR Act on June 11th, the New York City rental market has been stable.

There were some big spikes in asking rents that first week, and there were notably fewer listings too.

But it now looks like that was a blip, Lee says.

Landlords and brokers adjusting to the new law.

Year over year, asking rents are up a bit more than they were in the winter and spring, but he says that often happens in the summer in New York.

Still, Lee Solomon, a longtime broker in Brooklyn, says it has only been about two months since the law changed.

How it's all going to play out in terms of the numbers, I think it's too early to say.

Solomon is also a landlord.

She and her husband own and rent out seven apartments in Brooklyn.

There's a lot of fear now with landlords that, you know,

will you be able to cover your costs?

She says landlords are contending with lots of rising costs, property taxes, insurance, labor, and maintenance.

And if they have to start covering those broker fees too, she thinks many will eventually raise rents to make the math work.

But even so, not having to pay a broker fee will reduce the upfront cost for tenants.

When Catherine Crawford moved into this apartment last summer, the one she's now packing up, she had to pay more than $13,000 in total just to get the keys, even though she found a place on her own on Zillow.

It hit us a lot.

I was thinking when I moved here, oh, well, if I stay even two years, it gets better, three,

but then it ended up being one year, so.

The idea of having to pay a broker fee again so soon felt ridiculous.

That's so cost-prohibitive if you'd have to move, you know, every couple of years.

Luckily for her, she found a new one-bedroom apartment a few days after the law went into effect.

I was so glad that I got the place that I did when I did because I didn't have to pay.

It saved me more than $6,000.

This time she just had to pay first month's rent of about $3,500 and a security deposit to move in, which she did at the end of last month.

If you just put like random stuff down, I'll move it from here.

And because the apartment was on the market for a couple of weeks, Crawford actually got a deal.

She'll be be paying less than the original listing price.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

Wholesale inflation, as we covered up at the top of the program, came in way higher this morning than anybody had been guessing.

The consumer price index earlier this week, the core measure, that's minus food and energy, just a hair higher than expectations.

Inflation, big picture, more hot than not.

I offer that recap to tee up this next segment.

As things get more expensive, who would say no to a free book?

Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy.

My name is Ola Akimo,

and I'm the creator and director for the Free Black Women's Library in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

The Free Black Women's Library is a community care space, co-working space, community resource.

It's also considered a third space.

I would describe it as a space that has a lot going on and it's all good.

Initially, when I first started the library, it was actually a traveling library.

It was 100 books and it was mobile.

So I would take the books from place to place, install the books in the space, and then activate the space with some type of workshop.

So it was a lot.

Books are one of the heaviest materials you could work with.

They're like bricks.

So I challenged myself and I said, if I'm able to raise 100K through crowdfunding, that means that the universe wants this and it's meant to be.

I was able to raise the money and I got a storefront, renovated the storefront, took all the books out of storage, canceled the storage space.

And the library is 100% grassroots funded, meaning that the community that uses the library are the main funders for the library.

These are the people who sustain the space.

Right now I have one part-time staff person and then I have one other person who works about five hours a week who helps me with my email situation, which is a mess.

I sometimes feel like we have outgrown the space where we are now because our events are pretty packed to the point where sometimes we have no seating and people are sitting on the floor sitting on top of each other.

So I would always like to be in bedside, but there are some days where I think, oh, it would be nice to have a space that's just a little bit bigger and with more than one bathroom.

Part of the reason why all the public programs are free here is because I don't think it's fair that if somebody wants to take an art class, art class costs $200, that means they don't get to experience that class.

Like, no, that's not fair.

Whether you are making six figures or whether you're making nothing, it does not matter.

Ola Akinmo, she's the director of the Free Black Women's Library in Bedstead, Brooklyn.

Let us know, would you?

What's going on in your personal economy?

Marketplace.org/slash my economy is where you can do that.

This final note on the way out today, small-ish solace for those in the want to buy a house stage of things.

But the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage last week dropped to 6.58%,

the lowest it's been since October of last year.

But, and however, that's as of close of business yesterday, which was before the inflation data that came out today, which in turn sent bond yields higher, which, because capitalism is going to affect mortgage rates.

Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillong, Maria Hollenhorst, Iru Ekpinobi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio.

I'm Kyle Risdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

Hey everybody, I'm Kai Rizdahl, the host of Marketplace.

I'm going to join Amy Scott on September the 9th.

She's the host of How We Survived, and also science writer Elizabeth Kohlberg for a conversation about the economic consequences of our climate crisis.

We're going to break down how the acceleration of climate change is going to disrupt jobs and entire industries, even our daily lives.

But it's not all doom and gloom.

We're also going to dive into the solutions that are giving us hope right now.

Thanks so much to Odu for sponsoring this free webinar.

And you can sign up today at marketplace.org/slash climate.