In health care sector, dread over worker deportations

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Today, we'll take stock of the economy through the eyes of consumers, business owners, and of course, our Friday regulars.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab and for TyrizDahl.

Tyrus It's Friday, August 8th.

Good to have you here.

Like I said, we've got our regulars here with us to wrap up this weekend business news, which was full of announcements about tariffs and the Fed.

Sadib Reddy is MSNBC's Washington Bureau Chief.

Jordan Holman is a reporter at the New York Times.

Hey, you two.

Hey, Kristen.

Hey.

So I want to start with the business news du jour.

President Trump announced he's nominating Stephen Myron, who's currently the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, to fill a temporary opening on the board of the Federal Reserve.

It'll give him power to vote on interest rates and banking regulations, and he's been pretty critical of the Fed.

Sadip,

what do you make of this pick?

What does it say about Trump's future vision for the Fed?

Well, so far we know that the president likes picking his own people, and that's what he's done in this case.

This is somebody who was already on his staff who he got to interact with.

And so there's a sense of loyalty there.

It is loyalty, in fact,

the kind that Stephen Myron has criticized a little bit.

He has actually written about the revolving door between the executive branch and the Fed and criticized it in a certain direction.

And so it's kind of a curious case.

But this is also somebody who has been supportive of the president's tariff policy.

And that has huge implications for the conversation around the table at the Federal Reserve, because the idea that tariffs are going to create sustained inflation is the big question and the big controversy right now in determining economic and monetary policy.

If tariffs are just going to have like a one-time pop in prices, but not create

a wave of inflation, then it's probably easier for the Fed to cut rates.

And so that's just another voice in the president's favor around the table in the coming months.

Well, perfect transition to talk about tariffs.

Yesterday, tariffs on imports from something like 90 countries went into effect.

Jordan, I'm wondering, as things maybe start to become more permanent, possibly here, how are business owners strategizing?

A lot of businesses are saying that they're going to raise prices.

Either not, you know, vocally saying it, they are just raising prices.

Like, here's a list.

So, here are some of the things that we can expect to see more prices.

Clothing, food, shoes,

cars.

And so, companies have decided that they don't want to take the hit to their profit by having to eat the cost of these tariffs.

And so now they're saying, okay, we will bake in these prices.

What the question is that consumers will actually accept them, and then they might have to go to plan B if people do not.

Hmm.

Well, I think maybe importers would disagree.

But to me, yesterday's news felt a little anticlimactic.

I think markets seem to react the same way.

Sadib, do they know something that the rest of us don't know?

Or what do you think the reaction is here?

I think so many investors were shocked back in the spring with the April announcements and the fact that they were scaled back.

And it feels like the entire tariff regime is a moving target.

The president,

obviously, he's a tariff man.

He's been very proud of that, but he also wants to keep making deals along the way.

And as long as the president keeps saying that he's in a deal-making posture, there's going to be an expectation from investors that the worst of the problems will kind of just be

danced around at the last minute.

So you kind of, I think everybody's going to wait and see what is the real impact going to be on corporate profits, which obviously determines the stock market in many ways.

And until you see the tangible evidence, which can take many months, until you see that take effect, then a lot of investors will just kind of stand by and wait and see.

Well, one of Trump's wins this week were major announcements from Volkswagen and Apple about plans to potentially move some manufacturing to the U.S.

Jordan, I'm wondering if we're going to start to see more of these kinds of announcements, especially from the sectors you cover when you're talking about clothes, toys, electronics.

What do you think is going to happen there?

Yeah, we probably will see more of those announcements.

And those announcements have always been used as a political tool in some way to say, hey, we're making this in America or

we're going to try to make X percentage of things in America.

It signals something to Washington.

It always has.

Announcements like these happened during the Biden administration, the previous Trump administration.

But what it really comes down to, I think when people are talking about the reshoring and the made in America, a lot of...

consumers, I would say, are thinking about the jobs that come with it, not just, you know, this glass is going to be made here in Kentucky and whatnot.

But when I talk to business people, they say the reality of actually bringing back full-scale jobs and the level that it was in the 80s and the 90s is just not a possibility anymore.

Partly because those skills have left.

It's just going to be so expensive going back to the point about company profits.

It was just eaten to the profits.

And companies will say, we also have a responsibility to our investors to be making the best fiduciary responsibility decisions and that bringing back those jobs just isn't that.

So I think you'll start seeing, yeah, probably more companies announcing things around this, but you really need to look in the details about how this will affect American jobs.

And I think that will be minimal.

Well, on that note, you know, we got that sort of sour jobs report last week and some other middling data that we've seen recently.

I'm wondering how much, Sadip, you're reading into that and what you're looking at in the weeks ahead.

Well, obviously, the jobs data have been surprising.

There's plenty of discussion about the BLS and its role in revision.

So, some of this other data, like we saw, the ISM figures, we see survey data, sentiment data, that shows softening as well.

And that has to be

concerning because

there are lots of different data sets that tend to turn

at

similar times when the economy is softening.

And we're seeing signs of that right now.

And you don't know, is it because consumers are constrained because somewhat higher prices in certain areas?

You don't know if the economy was going to slow otherwise.

You don't know if it's high interest rates.

There's so many factors that are playing a part here.

And we are, obviously, there are other things that are changing in the immigration landscape that could create cross-currents in the economy.

And so trying to make sense of that requires looking at a lot of data.

And there are some worrying signs out there but it hasn't certainly hasn't become catastrophic yet and we we will hope that it does not get in that direction.

Jordan, same question to you.

You've got like 30 seconds.

What are you looking at next week or what's or ahead?

Yeah, no, the company earnings, especially from company, consumer companies, service companies, restaurants, whatnot, those will start rolling out throughout the rest of August.

And so I'll be looking at the profits of that and any commentary that companies say around hiring, around pricing, all of those things, that would be very key to help fill in some governmental data gaps.

Jordan Holman is a reporter at the New York Times.

Sadiq Reddy is MSNBC's Washington Bureau Chief.

Thanks, you two, and happy Friday.

Thanks, Christy.

Thank you.

Wall Street today, traders were feeling good despite tariffs.

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

Of course, when we talk about tariffs on the show, we usually focus on what it means for our economy.

But it takes two to trade, and some other economies, especially emerging ones, are looking at a tough rest of 2025 because tariffs and their effect on trade will likely make lending riskier in those countries.

Risky enough for Fitch ratings to downgrade its outlooks for banking sectors in Korea, Mexico, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval explains.

Even if tariffs cause just a slight dip in U.S.

consumption, John Diamond at Rice University says for emerging economies that export to the U.S.

That's a sizable impact because we're such a big percentage of the market.

Think of Vietnam, for example.

Fitch ratings just downgraded its banking sector from improving to neutral.

The U.S.

is pulling back.

That's going to impact their growth rate and the amount of export-driven growth that they can drum up.

Well, that's also going to impact how able they are, you know, to make payments on their debt.

and if their debt to income ratio goes up you're going to be able to borrow less money and so that's going to you know affect how much they can invest and so there's just this cycle that they face some of these emerging economies had invested a lot in recent years expecting to sell to u.s consumers especially in manufacturing because they were subject to much lower tariffs than china says colin hendricks with the peterson institute for international Economics.

So these tariffs are going to make it much more difficult for developing and emerging economies to pitch themselves as destinations for foreign direct investment because they no longer have as much of a cost advantage when it comes to assembling and bringing goods to market.

Hendricks says all of this augurs poorly for these developing and middle-income countries.

I'm Elizabeth Trobal for Marketplace.

We've been covering ways the immigration crackdown is going to affect the economy, with fewer consumers to consume stuff and fewer workers to fill jobs.

One industry that could see an outsized impact is health care.

Something like 350,000 Haitians could soon lose legal status.

And in Massachusetts, many recent arrivals from Haiti work in low-wage, long-term care jobs.

Reporter Simone Rios has the story from Boston.

A three-year-old boy shows off an electric tricycle in his living room.

His father, Jacques, smiles, but he has big worries.

His family is in the U.S.

under a program called Temporary Protected Status, and the Trump administration is ending it for Haitians.

Jacques' boss recently told him he'd be let go from his hospital job if he can't fix his legal status.

I can't continue to work.

So now I don't know what I'm going to do because I have an apartment to pay, I have a car loan, I have my family in Haiti to help.

Jacques has to decide by February whether to leave the U.S.

voluntarily or be undocumented and work under the table.

We agreed to call Jacques by his nickname because he fears being targeted by ICE.

He's one of roughly 50,000 nurse aides in Massachusetts, and a lot of them have legal status that could soon expire.

Jacques says most of his fellow nurse aides are Haitian, and about half are about to become undocumented.

He works on a ventilator ward at a hospital, cleaning bedpans and taking vital signs.

This job, American

doesn't want to do.

Mostly Mostly people did this job are immigrant, many for Haiti.

Temporary protected status is for people who can't return to their countries because of political or environmental catastrophes.

15 nations are on the list, and slightly over a million people now have TPS.

The White House has eliminated the program for countries including Haiti and Venezuela.

That could make hundreds of thousands of people deportable and unable to work.

The healthcare industry could face a much larger threat with President Trump's promise to carry out mass deportations, says Dr.

Steffi Woolhandler.

You cannot subtract a huge share of the nursing aides from a nursing home and still have the quality care we need to keep our elder and disabled people comfortable and safe.

Woolhandler is a physician and a health policy researcher at Hunter College in New York.

She recently wrote for the Journal of the American Medical Association that more than a million non-citizens work in health care now, and over a a third of them are already undocumented.

She says the immigration crackdown couldn't come at a worse time for the industry.

We have huge shortages of personnel willing to work in nursing homes.

Half of nursing homes in the country report that they've had to stop admitting people because they just didn't have the personnel to take care of them.

People travel from around the world to receive health care in Boston, and geriatricians here are well aware of the need for foreign workers.

Dr.

Asif Merchant is a medical director at five nursing homes in the Boston area.

He says hospices and home health care also rely on immigrants, sometimes for the majority of the workforce.

And suddenly, a large portion of that will just evaporate.

Several court cases around the country aim to stop the White House from ending TPS and similar programs, but Merchant says his facilities are already seeing people leave voluntarily, and some are bracing to lose up to 20% of their staff.

There are many nursing homes that are already on a very thin margin, and it may lead to some additional closures of nursing homes.

Aside from the workers themselves, Merchants say it could be the patients who pay the ultimate price.

In Boston, I'm Simone Rios for Marketplace.

Coming up.

I am good.

My family is doing good.

I'm still making art.

What it's like to work a job and run a business.

But first, let's do the numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 206 points, half a percent, to finish at 44,175.

The NASDAQ added 207 points, 1%, to close at 21,450.

And the S ⁇ P 500 gained 49 points, 8 tenths percent, to end at 6,389.

For the week, the Dow pocketed 1.3%, the NASDAQ increased 3.9 tenths percent, and the S ⁇ P added 2.4 tenths percent.

The gold market kind of melted down earlier today after the Financial Times reported that it would be subject to the president's import tax.

Then, a White House official reportedly said there would be no tariff on gold.

Futures finished the day up a tenth of a percent.

Gold mining stocks followed the same up and down pattern.

Bonds fell, yield on the ten-year T-note rose to 4.28%.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kristen Schwab.

For the last handful of months, I've been keeping in touch with a group of people to get a sense of how they feel about the economy, how they live in it, and how they navigate it as it changes.

The series is called Lived Economies.

Yesterday, we heard from Julie Yang, a mother of six in Minnesota.

Today, we're checking in with David and Gail Rames, a couple in their 60s living in Hookset, New Hampshire.

The last time I talked to them was when I I visited their home this past April.

They're here with us to catch up now.

Gail and David, so good to connect again.

It's good speaking with you again, Kristen.

Nice speaking to you, Kristen.

Tell me what you've been up to since we last spoke in April.

How are things?

Well,

we're just finishing up booking a trip out west to go skiing in February.

Ooh, nice.

Where are you going?

We're going to go to Salt Lake City.

We're going to do some skiing, and then we're going to jump in a car and head off to the Zion National Park.

Yep, Zion.

Zion.

And what have you two, what have you been up to this summer?

Just camping, doing some camping, and weekends with girlfriends, our annual weekend down in Citruit for, well, Dave had to stay home.

I ditched them.

It was a girls' weekend.

Okay, so plenty of trips in the bag and booked.

Do you have it?

Have your expenses changed at all this summer since we've talked?

No, I don't think they've changed very much.

No, just the food prices don't seem to be going down, but we manage.

David, you are retired, Gail.

You are thinking about retirement.

The last time we talked, you had it.

It looked like it was on the horizon.

Is that still in the cards for you?

Or what are your plans there?

It's in the cards.

I'm going to retire.

I'm going to give my employee probably a three-month notice, the beginning of the year and then retire Easter weekend.

Okay.

That seems earlier, I think, than you had initially talked about.

It was, but I'm just, it's time to change.

Time to retire and just go with the flow, depending on how things are going, but it's time to go.

Well, how are things going?

The last time,

we talked, we talked a little bit about your retirement accounts and you two expressed a little worry.

How have you been keeping an eye on that?

Well, I peeked at it the other day,

and it's above what I

looked at it in March.

So, if we lost anything in April, it came back.

So, yeah, you know, right now I'm

really

pensive about

any expenses until Gail gets retired and I think and gets settled in.

in.

I think

we've talked about this before.

I've caught myself several times going back and

looking at the financial plan and

looking at the numbers.

And every time I look at the numbers and look at the plan, everything is fine.

But

looking at

all of the situations, the economic situations and political turmoil, the social turmoil,

all of the things that are going on.

It just makes you nervous about doing anything.

And it's frustrating because

this is our time.

We're retiring.

We've worked hard all year long or all years.

We've worked long and we're retiring in a real tumultuous time.

And it's frustrating because of that.

Where do you two see yourself in a year?

Where do you see the economy?

Where do you see your economy?

Hopefully, the same or kind of like staying above water and floating along, and we'll be spending more time with the family and the grandkids during the summer months next year.

You know,

I think,

once again, going back to me, looking at the other financial plan, we'll be well above water.

We now have an idea on what Gail's Social Security is going to be.

Between my Social Security and her Social Social Security, it covers our expenses.

We're not having to pull a lot out of our out of our

investments.

But, you know, it's still, I'm still, you know, just nervous about it.

It's a whole new thing.

Because you remember we discussed before that, you know, I'm kind of the spender and Gail is the saver.

And those roles are changing.

I'm getting to be very cautious about spending.

You know, I'm going to the supermarket and buying generic brands instead of named brands.

And

I'm, you know, shopping more careful.

It's a whole new thing for me.

Yeah, big period of transition for you, too.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

David and Gail Rams are in Hookset, New Hampshire, and we are keeping in touch with them for our series, Lived Economies.

Gail and David, it was so good to catch up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's early August, which means summer break will soon come to a close for students across the country.

Teachers, too, unless they never really took the summer off.

Julia McGuigan is the owner of Julia M.

Illustrates, an illustration business in Omaha, Nebraska.

We heard from her a year ago about her decision to take a new job in teaching while also continuing to manage her shop.

So last August, I went back to teaching and simultaneously had my shop open, which is a physical storefront.

So while that was open and I was teaching, I had had some help with that on the weekends.

So I kind of split it among myself and and two other girls.

It was hard, I will say, but I decided, you know, let's close the shop, reduce that overhead.

It was sad, and a lot of people...

reaction to it, they don't know what to say or they feel like, oh, I'm so sorry it didn't work.

But in my eyes, it was more of like, oh, no, this is actually, this is okay.

Like, I am good.

My family is doing good.

I'm still making art.

It's actually been a great season.

I feel really blessed that the business is doing so well.

Where it's been really successful is going to the farmers markets because that's where all the tourists are.

And the kind of art that I make is representative of Omaha and its landmarks.

So those are the kind of things that I find that tourists are looking for.

Little stickers, cards.

My husband and I, we bought our first house in May of 2025.

The supplemental income from my business has been really nice to help with things like a dishwasher that we needed to buy, buy, fixing a broken glass window in our kitchen.

So all these little things that kind of add up when you move into a new home.

Currently, I am cleaning out my garage, which is very

buggy and it's not really weatherproof, but I'm making that into a garage like she shed almost where I can comfortably work on my work and store my inventory all year round.

That's Julia McGuigan, illustrator and teacher in Omaha, Nebraska.

This final note on the way out today.

We started with tariffs and will end with tariffs.

Sorry.

I don't make the news.

I just report it.

The World Trade Organization is using the word subdued to describe global trade for this year and next.

That's actually a better than expected review because the WTO raised estimates since importers rushed to get goods into the U.S.

in the first half of the year.

Still, the WTO Director General said, quote, uncertainty remains one of the most disruptive forces in the global trading environment.

Our theme music was composed by B.J.

Lederman.

Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargalli.

Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer.

Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager.

And I'm Kristen Schwab.

Have a great weekend.

We'll be back here on Monday.

This is 8 p.m.

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