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Last week was a doozy in this economy, wasn't it?

Can't wait to see what this week brings from American Public Media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Connor Rizdahl.

It is Monday today.

This one is the 4th of August.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

We are going to begin this week where we ended last week, the July Jobs Report.

It was underwhelming, I think, is a fair word.

And then that huge revision to the May and June numbers tipped it right over into disappointing.

So, surely that has led economists to reconsider how they are feeling about things, right?

A downside surprise like that?

Right?

Daniel Ackerman got back on the phone today with some people he talked to before the report came out to see whether things changed their thinking.

When I spoke with economist Tuan Nguyen of RSM on Thursday, he didn't seem too concerned about the labor market.

But then came Friday's bombshell jobs report, and that changed everything, right?

Not really.

Nguyen says, yeah, the report showed the labor market was weaker than he'd thought, but the data actually reaffirms ours and most people's views that immigration policies, doge, and tariffs would become a drap on the economy and the labor market.

After the report, RSM modestly raised its probability of a recession in the next year from 40 to 45 percent.

The next economist I called back was Ron Hetrick of Lightcast.

He too was unsurprised about the Crummy Jobs report.

He says, Before, there seemed to be too many new jobs.

When we were seeing the numbers we were seeing, that didn't make any sense to me.

That's because President Trump's immigration policy was pushing so many people out of the workforce.

We're seeing the labor force declining very rapidly due to the drop in foreign-born workers.

And Hedrick says it makes sense that the drop took time to show up in the official statistics, which are based on surveys.

Employers with stable payrolls generally respond quickly.

Hey, it's pretty much the same payroll we had last month.

They go in there.

And then what's happening is the people who are experiencing a lot of changes are getting their information in at a delay, as you would expect.

Now Hedrick says the data matches the vibes.

We're getting a much clearer picture of what I think we all kind of feel is happening, and that is complete stagnation.

It wasn't terribly surprising.

Count Pavlina Chernova among the not surprised.

She's an economist at Bard College.

We've been watching for some time that the labor market had been losing steam.

She says the report showed that loss was more widespread than before.

Half of sectors lost jobs.

Unsurprisingly, Chernova says the the course of the labor market will depend a lot on the engine of this economy, which is the consumer.

60 to 70 percent of growth is consumption.

She says if tariffs and higher prices cause a big consumer pullback, that could send a cooling labor market into much worse territory.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Well, let's see now.

That jobs report on Friday?

Forget about it.

Firing the BLS, Commissioner?

Pfft.

Tariffs.

What tariffs?

Stock traders looked past it all today.

Bond traders, though, they're getting a little worried.

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

I can't give you an exact number, but I have pointed out on this program that immigration is a labor market story roughly a zillion times.

And as we sit here today with immigration down sharply for reasons we are all aware of, and the labor market in some degree of trouble, see also the Friday jobs report, there's a whole bunch to talk about.

So we've gotten Wendy Edelberg back on the phone.

She's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Wendy, it's good to have you back.

Hi, Kai.

Let me throw you the softball, first of all.

Did the jobs report on Friday change your mind about how this economy is looking?

I was expecting the employment numbers to drop abruptly.

So that part was not surprising.

You know, I wasn't sure exactly when it was going to happen.

But the fact that

employment rose an average of 35,000 over the last three months, that in itself is not so surprising to me given immigration.

That's where we're going next.

So when we had you on the program last year-ish at some point, we have you on a lot, so it gets a little blurry.

I said, what are you worried about in the new Trump administration?

And you said, Federal Reserve Independence, which we've talked about, tariffs, which obviously we've talked about.

And then a year ago, you said immigration.

Why?

So with some co-authors, I just put out a report showing that we predict that net migration this year is going to be negative.

And that's for the first time in many decades.

And what that's going to mean is that the labor force is not going to grow very much over this year.

And in fact, the labor force will likely start shrinking.

And so we're going to have to get used to numbers like the ones we just saw as representing a healthy labor market.

And that's going to be really hard for people to wrap their heads around.

We're going to have to get used to numbers like 20,000 $20,000 a month, $10,000 a month, maybe even negative.

What does that look like in the economy, though?

It means that our economy is going to change moderately.

It means that some sectors are going to shrink.

It means that sectors that are particularly dependent on immigrant labor are going to have to do more automation.

It's going to mean we just have less demand in communities that are disproportionately filled with immigrants.

But I don't want to overstate these economic effects.

I mean, they're of first-order importance

for these labor numbers that we're talking about.

But for the broader economy, our economy is going to continue to look recognizable.

I just don't want to overstate this.

The way people, I think, are really feeling how very different the immigration environment is is not going to be through the economy.

It's going to be through

all the other things.

Well, list some of them out for us.

Well, just the visceral reactions

that we're all going to have watching

images on the news and

knowing that our neighbors are frightened and just seeing

differences in the way our communities are going about their daily lives.

I think that will actually be

feel a lot more important than the fact that the meat at your grocery store is 7% more expensive than it was last month.

Right.

What does it mean if, you know, let's say we have 20,000 jobs a month, maybe 50 or 70,000 70,000 jobs a month.

What does that mean for economic growth, right?

Because if the labor force isn't growing and we're not adding jobs, the economy is going to have a tough time growing.

Yeah, so the numbers for GDP are a little smaller than you might expect, partly because just for the way the economy works, this has outsized effects on employment growth, but also these are lower wage workers.

And so we expect this to knock GDP growth down this year by about four-tenths of a percentage point.

So, you know, absolutely there, notable,

but not

huge, not the thing that tips us into recession if that's what's going to happen.

Aaron Powell, right.

The labor force, obviously, is people.

There is a large and growing number of people who are what are called long-term unemployed, right?

They're not first-time claimants for unemployment benefits, but continuing claims is how they're looked at.

That must go up, right, if we're only making 20, 30, 50,000 jobs a month?

Yeah, so not necessarily.

I think the way to think about it is that our economy is just growing more slowly.

And,

you know, think about Japan.

Japan has very, very tight immigration policies and an aging population.

And the result is that they're, you know, the amount of employment that they have month in and month out is falling over time.

They're a going economy, they're a rich economy, but they're just seeing less employment month after month.

And that's the kind of world we are creating for ourselves.

So this is not necessarily a high employment.

This is, we can keep the unemployment rate at 4.2.

It's at a really low rate.

We're just going to

have to wrap our heads around the fact that we now have a slowly growing labor force.

Wendy Edelberg at Brookings.

Thanks, Wendy.

Thanks.

One of the things we've talked to Wendy Edelberg about before, as I mentioned at the top of that interview, is the independence of the Federal Reserve and how important it is that what the central bank does on monetary policy, interest rates, be about its dual mandate, stable prices and maximum employment, and not about politics as much as is possible.

But there is a slice of politics in the Fed that I'm pretty sure we haven't really covered before, but that is, as of this past Friday, incredibly timely.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, specifically who's on it.

It certainly is something that isn't, you know, sort of around the kitchen table of everybody about like what this, you know, how this works is an important component to our economic well-being.

That's what we thought too.

Sarah Bloom Raskin is a professor of law at Duke University.

She's a former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and most relevant for us today, she was a member of the Board of Governors at the Fed from 2010 to 2014.

We're talking about this today because last Friday, Dr.

Adriana Kukler, one of seven members of the Fed's Board of Governors, said she is stepping down as of August 8th.

That is this Friday, which means President Trump is going to nominate her replacement.

The Federal Open Market Committee votes on interest rate decisions eight times a year.

Five of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents get a vote too.

You've heard us talk to some of them: the Atlanta Fed, the San Francisco Fed, Chicago.

The regional presidents rotate in and out of voting, except for the New York Fed, but that's a whole different story.

That seat always votes.

The thing to know right now, though, is that all seven governors vote on the FOMC every single time.

And each governor serves a 14-year term.

14 years is, technically speaking, an eternity.

If you want to do the math, that's three and a half presidential elections.

And that is intentional because the idea here is that you want a group of people who can try to actually see around the corners and have a long-term perspective.

And so 14-year terms, it's just part of the kind of recipe or the secret sauce here for kind of constructing an agency that has some degree of insulation, or let's say more insulation, we think, than the other hundreds or so of independent agencies.

That second voice is another Sarah Sarah Binder, professor of political science at George Washington University.

I should point out here that while as chair, he is first among equals, Jay Powell is just one of the seven Fed governors.

He also leads the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee, which is why he gets all the press and the other six get less.

The governorships governorships typically are pretty low profile.

There's a lot of committee work.

There's oversight of the reserve banks.

There's obviously the Fed's other work on supervision of the banking system.

But by and large, it's a very low-profile position.

So think for a second about doing that job for 14

years.

Well, 14 years is a long time.

Sarah Bloomer asking again, former Fed governor who resigned before her term expired.

Probably three years in, when I was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, I stepped away from my position on the Board of Governors.

That's pretty typical, actually.

Very few Fed governors serve all 14 years.

And when they do leave early, the president nominates somebody new, the Senate has to approve, and then that person can serve the rest of that 14-year term, which gets us back to Adriana Kugler stepping down and President Trump getting the first Fed nominee of his second term.

So this is a crack.

This is an opening.

This is an opportunity for Trump to push the Fed and mold the Fed in the direction that he wants.

Can you hear the butt?

Come in here because I can.

But then in May, Jerome Powell's term as chair ends.

And in principle, that same person then would be eligible to become the chair.

Andrew Levin is a professor of economics at Dartmouth who worked at the Federal Reserve for 20 years.

President Trump has made it, shall we say, exceedingly clear that he wants Chair Powell to resign.

The thing is, though, Powell's term as Fed chair expires in May next year.

His term as governor doesn't expire until January 2028.

He could stay those 18 months, okay, or he could leave.

Which means that Powell's decision to stay on the board or go is the difference between President Trump getting another nomination in the short term or not.

And there is one more wrinkle here.

The president is not the Fed's boss.

Congress is the Fed's boss.

Congress created the Federal Reserve System, and the Senate has to approve nominees to the Board of Governors.

So, as much as we talk about the independence of the Federal Reserve, at the end of the day, it's the politicians in the White House and in the Senate who are going to decide who sits on the Board of Governors and who helps run this economy for the next 14 years.

Coming up.

There's some days when the wind is at your back and you're really knocking it out of the park.

That's not this day.

The ebbs and flows of municipal bonds, but first, let's do the numbers.

Yeah, go figure this.

I don't know.

Dow Industrial is up 585 points today, 1.3%, 44,173.

The NASDAQ up 403 points, 1.9%,

21,053.

The SP 500 added 91 points, 1.4% there, 63, and 29.

Boeing climbed two-tenths of 1% today.

About 3,200 of its machinists in the St.

Louis area went on strike.

Today, the workers who make fighter jets rejected an offer of 20% wage increases.

Here's news from the world of podcasting.

Saw this on Bloomberg.

Amazon is cutting more than 100 jobs from its Wondery podcast division.

That includes the executive running Wondery, which is known for such titles as Dr.

Death.

Amazon, by the way, is also reorganizing its entire podcast operation.

Amazon down 1.4%

on the day.

Bond prices went up when that happens.

Yields go down.

The yield on the tenure T-Note fell to 4.19er%.

Why, you ask?

Because they're worried about a slowing economy.

You're listening to Marketplace.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

How many times have you heard me say when I'm setting up a story on the Chinese economy, and I quote official data coming from Beijing, GDP, unemployment, whatever?

How many times have you heard me say, we got to take said economic data with a grain of salt because, you know, it's China.

Two years ago, just for instance, they literally erased the youth unemployment rate from their official releases because the number was too high.

So, this is where I point out that President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week because he didn't like the July Jobs Report.

Marketplace Matt Levin does a little compare and perhaps contrast.

When Zhongyu and Zoe Liu at the Council on Foreign Relations heard the news about the BLS commissioner getting canned, it felt, well, familiar.

The first impression was, oh, this comes to me as a convergence between the United States and China.

That was literally the first thought that I had.

See, maybe America and China aren't so different after all.

Lio says nobody really believes China's National Bureau of Statistics when it says Chinese GDP grew over 5% last quarter.

So China watchers like her look for data from third parties that are proxies for economic activity, like freight volumes.

If economic activities are of a high level, then you would anticipate trucks are moving around.

Investors and economists also look to data on electricity use or nighttime light or heat emissions from satellite imagery.

Scott Kennedy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies says retailers who are deciding whether to open a new storefront in China don't really consult government stats.

There are marketing firms, domestic Chinese firms, some foreign firms in China that do market research.

They do their own surveys of consumers.

That system is by no means perfect.

Sure, the Chinese economy has grown dramatically the past few decades, but Derek Scissors at the American Enterprise Institute says the lack of good government data has nevertheless hurt Chinese businesses.

Firms can't tell what's going on.

They look at official data and say, should we get into this industry?

I can't tell.

And then they make bad decisions.

It's also important to remember here, nobody has ever really trusted the Chinese Communist Party's statistics, and Chinese markets have learned to adapt.

Sizer says U.S.

businesses have come to depend on good government data, and he worries whether politics might infect more than just the jobs report.

If we're moving into an era where official statistics are unreliable, that's a huge shock the Chinese economy never had.

Because they never had reliable stats to begin with.

I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

When we talk about the bond market on this program, it's usually, not always, but usually about the federal bond market, the 10-year and all the rest that the Treasury Department sells to finance what Congress has authorized it to spend above and beyond what the IRS takes in in taxes.

Just like the feds, states and cities and towns need to borrow money too for projects they want or need to get done, new roads and bridges, maybe a sewer system that are going to cost more than they can raise in tax revenue.

So they go to the municipal bond market, munis they're called, where they hope to find investors who appreciate the tax advantages and their relatively low risk and also a predictable stream of interest income.

Marketplaces Henri Epp tanged along for a recent muni bond sale.

Michael Gawn is sitting in a conference room at the Vermont Bond Bank, watching as the names of financial institutions flash across a large screen.

Each one is an order for municipal bonds offered by Gawn's Bank, where he's the executive director.

It seems to be a little bit more interest in the longer bonds, at least in the first half an hour here of our order period.

Longer bonds, meaning those that mature in 25 or 30 years.

But there's another hour and a half to go.

The Bond Bank is an entity backed by the state of Vermont that hits up the bond market on behalf of small local governments.

Basically, the bank pools together bonds for lots of capital projects, sells them to investors, and then loans the proceeds back to those small communities.

There are library renovations, there are recycling centers, there are school improvements that are all going to be financed with the proceeds of this bond sale.

The bonds mature anywhere from 1 to 30 years from now, with rates gone hopes investors will find attractive.

Though he acknowledges there's some tension here.

Between what we want as the issuer, obviously we want lower rates.

We want a really good deal for our borrowers at the bond bank and what the investors want, which is higher rates, better yield.

The number of orders that come in today will help determine exactly where those yields land, and therefore how much interest the bond bank charges municipalities to finance their renovations and school improvements and new recycling center.

A few miles from the Bond Bank office, cans and bottles drop onto a conveyor belt at the Chittenden Solid Waste District's 32-year-old recycling facility, and workers sort it all by hand.

Sarah Reeves, the Waste District's executive director, says in newer recycling centers, most of this work is done by machines.

That can read the type of plastic, that can read the material that's flowing under the conveyor belt, and can individually sort for that specific bit of material.

Reeves wants that for her recycling facility, too.

So a few years ago, local voters approved a $22 million bond to replace this aging facility with a brand new recycling center with automated equipment.

The Waste District received the first $10 million through a bond bank sale in 2023 to buy all those machines.

They got a 3.9% interest rate.

Through the latest bond bank sale, they're set to get the other $12 million for construction.

What's at stake for us is getting the best interest rate that we can.

But she's bracing for her borrowing costs to go up.

And Abby Ertz at FHN Financial says that's a realistic concern.

In general, we have seen an uptick in yields over the past couple of years.

Municipal bond yields and therefore borrowing costs have risen, she says, because a lot of local governments are going to the bond market.

Many municipalities put off big projects a few years ago as inflation and interest rates set by the Fed rose.

But now Ertz says they can't wait any longer, so there's more supply of muni bonds.

That can be difficult for those investors to absorb.

So when there's more supply, then you may have demand, that tends to kind of increase yields in that market.

Michael Gawne at the Vermont Bond Bank is watching those dynamics play out as the bank's two-hour sale nears its end.

Certain maturities between 10 and 25 years haven't sold as well as he'd like.

Listen, there's some days when the wind is at your back and you're really knocking it out of the park.

That's not this day.

This day is relatively calm.

So they decide to extend the sale period by another half hour or so.

And to Gawn's relief, orders start to pick up.

As this order period sort of gets closer and closer to ending, we look better and better.

And so it'll be nice to communicate to our borrowers where they landed on rates.

For the new recycling facility, that rate landed at 4.76%,

nearly a full percentage point higher than what they got two years ago.

In Vermont, I'm Henry App for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today, in which I will note that we do operate in an attention economy now.

Distractions are everywhere.

But also, that I would be willing to devote more of my attention to this job were my employer to offer me, and I am not pulling this number out of thin air, $23.7 billion.

Pity, then, isn't it, that I don't work for Tesla?

The company's board has offered occasionally wayward CEO Elon Musk that amount in company shares if he sticks around for two years and, you know, does his job.

Said members of the board, we are, this is a quote, we are confident that this award will incentivize Elon to remain at Tesla.

Here's the kicker to this whole thing, thing, though.

He's not going to get the $23.7 billion if a case in Delaware Chancery Court goes his way.

If that case works out, he's going to get $50 billion.

$50 billion.

Amir Bibawi, Caitlin Esch, John Gordon, Noya Carr, Amanda Petra, and Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff.

Kelly Silvera is the news director, and I'm Kyle Rizdo.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

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