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On the program today, all the economic data you could possibly want,

and then some

from American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl.

It is Thursday, today, the very last day of July 2025.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

I said earlier this week, Monday, I think, that this was going to be a very economic data-intensive week.

And look at this.

I was right.

The biggie is, of course, yet to come.

The July Jobs Report is tomorrow.

But today brought us the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index.

Everybody say it with me now, the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation.

Prices up 3 tenths percent in June, that's month to month, 2.6% from a year ago.

Those are the headline numbers.

Core data, which takes out food and energy, was actually a little bit higher.

Point being, incremental though the increases were, prices are going up.

Marketplace of Sabri Benishore explains what is happening.

It's getting a little more expensive to buy a flight and have a vacation.

In particular, it's costing Americans more to travel abroad.

Omer Sharif is president of Inflation Insights.

It's getting a little more expensive to live in a home.

Shelter continues to add.

And then we had a pretty big bump up in healthcare costs as well in June.

And it is getting more expensive to just buy stuff.

Things like apparel, appliances, furniture and bedding, TVs.

On a month-over-month basis, they increase by 0.53 percent we haven't had a number that strong since january of 2023 back in december the yearly inflation rate for goods excluding autos was two tenths of a percent in june it was one and one tenth percent and that is tariffs starting to show up in the economy shrief says but something else also showed up wages despite the inflation number wages continue to grow faster.

Scott Helfstein is head of investment strategy for Global X.

While there are some areas of concern, the economy continues to power ahead.

So people are getting raises that are higher than inflation, but they didn't spend a whole lot more in June when you take that inflation into account, just a tenth of a percent more.

It could be consumer stress, but more likely, it's just we need a little break, says Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group.

Consumers bought a lot earlier in the year because they were concerned about the tariffs on prices and they wanted wanted to buy ahead of that.

So it would make sense that spending growth is a little bit softer now.

Looking at all of this, the inflation, the wages, is the Federal Reserve.

It's got to decide what to do with interest rates.

Being on the high side as they are holds back the economy some, but it is a way to keep inflation from spreading beyond tariffs deeper into the economy, Fauché says.

But the Fed's concern is that if we start to see higher inflation, well, then maybe workers start to get larger wage increases, which in turn would lead to higher inflation over the longer run.

That is why he says the Fed yesterday said it was not ready just yet to cut rates.

In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace.

On Wall Street today, there was that PCE number.

The president's August 1st trade deadline looms.

Maybe traders were just having a day.

Whatever the cause, all three major indices moved a bit lower.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

You know how Jay Powell says all the time that he and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve just need more data before they decide what to do?

He said it again again yesterday, and he also said, After being asked, that U.S.

government economic data is the gold standard, and he hopes he and the gang can keep getting what they need, which I mention because earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced more cuts to the data it collects, specifically data used to calculate the consumer price index.

So, to figure out what is happening here and why it matters, we've gotten Martha Gimbel on the phone.

She runs the Yale Budget Lab.

Martha, good to talk to you again.

Thank you for having me.

So, first of all, what do you make of this

pullback in collecting economic data?

Are you worried about it?

I mean, I'm extremely worried about it.

I think it's really important for people to keep in mind that this is not a new thing.

We do, in fact, have the gold standard of government economic data around the world.

Everyone is jealous of our data, but we've also not been investing in it.

And so, you know, last year you saw BLS announcing they were going to have to make cuts, and they're doing that again this year, particularly on inflation data.

Let's say in five years

after this cut back in collecting some of this data,

we man up the Bureau of Labor Statistics

absolutely to the hilt and they get all the resources they need.

What has been lost if we don't have a big chunk of data?

Well, so first of all,

we will have however many years where we won't have had as good an understanding of the economy as we needed.

And obviously right now, we're at kind of a pivotal time, and it would be good to make sure that we are really certain in our understanding of the economy.

I should say there's a broader issue here.

So if you've heard people talk about people being less likely to respond to polls or things like that, that also holds for government data.

And so now is a time where we really need to be experimenting and trying to figure this out so that we can have that gold standard data moving forward.

It's not the case that in five years we can just start doing what we were doing last year and the data will still be as good.

The data is deteriorating because there's this change in how people will respond to surveys.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Right, which is a broader societal thing, as you point out.

But look, let me ask you the very technical, and I'm hoping you can make it simple for us, aspect of this.

The BLS and one assumes other government agencies that rely on the collection of survey data, they are imputing

what the next cell's worth of of data, what the next point on the spreadsheet ought to be based on what they have, right?

Does that affect the accuracy?

So we don't really know is part of the problem.

So

yes, maybe, probably,

ideally, we would be having better surveys here, but we don't have a sense of how this is going to perform.

Then again, one of the things that's hard here is when you look at data accuracy, one of the things that you benchmark other sources of data against is the government data.

And so to some extent, you're asking the question of how do we tell how the benchmark is performing when we don't have something to benchmark it against?

There are other data sources out there.

We did a whole thing a number of years ago on high frequency data and other things that the government can use.

And also the Fed itself has said, you know, we use some of that data during the pandemic because we were having challenges getting our own data.

There are alternate means, shall we say.

Yes, but there's two things I want to flag there.

You know, one, I used to work with high frequency company data, and we looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to try to make sense of our data and again to try to benchmark it.

So the high frequency data is often reliant on the services of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of that high frequency data comes from companies.

And so it's not always available to the general public.

And so you may have a situation where some people really understand what's going on with inflation and others don't.

Yeah.

I feel the need to be really clear here because I get this question a lot when I go out and I get into my DMs and the social and all of that.

There is no indication as of right now that government economic data is being manipulated.

There's no indication of that.

And I promise the listeners, we would know.

You know, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there's only one political appointee there.

She is, in fact, a Biden appointee.

It's just not.

If you saw the Bureau of Labor Statistics data being tampered with, one, it'd be incredibly hard to do.

And two, you would see career employees walking out the door.

Right, right.

Martha Gimbal at the Yale Budget Lab.

Thank you so much, Martha.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

Whether there's a button in your car that you push to start the thing up, or whether you have to deal with an actual key, most of us don't really give all of that too much thought.

The key fob in particular, the actual thing.

But for car makers, especially the fancy ones, that little piece of industrial engineering is a very big deal.

Hannah Elliott at Bloomberg wrote the other day about why car companies take those key fobs so seriously and also what happens when they don't.

Hannah, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

I confess I only recently bought my first car that has a good functioning kind of grown-up fob.

But this article caught my eye because, I mean, they're a thing and companies spend millions of dollars on them.

Yeah, you know, key fobs are really interesting.

They are definitely an afterthought in the whole scheme of things, but actually the key fob is like a calling card that represents what you can expect to get from the car you're about to get into, or it should represent.

Some of them do a better job of that than others.

And we will get there.

You're right, though, in this piece.

The fob is a driver's first handshake with the car.

When did they become this branding thing?

This is a really good question.

And it's been like 20 years or so.

Of course, in the 90s, we started seeing keys that were like switchblades where you could, you know, push that button and the metal key would flip out.

That was kind of like an early precursor to the FOBS that we see today.

But if we go back even further, of course, car brands have long made keys that had the stamp of the brand's logo or something, you know, to represent the brand.

But especially in the last 10 years, we've seen the FOBS really become a calling card.

My favorite is the one that was a flop, the BMW thing from 2015 that was so multifunctional, it had a touchscreen on it.

And you're like, come on, man.

Yeah, you know, I think the display key was very well-intentioned.

This was, of course, 10 years ago, we kind of thought everything was going to the screens, and this was very cool and advanced and futuristic, but it kind of became a cautionary tale because it was too much.

You know, ultimately, BMW realized consumers don't want to hold a tiny computer in their hand to open their car.

It was a little just on the other side of too much.

Yeah, far on the other side, if you're asking me.

I forget whether it was Cadillac.

It must have been Bentley, actually.

They spent like a million and three quarters, maybe $2 million on the design of the fob.

That just seems like a lot.

That's exactly right.

And Bentley told me they spent more than two years

refining their fob, which again, it seems a little bit unexpected, but Bentley sees the fob itself as the thing that somebody might put on a bar if they're out or leave on a table in public somewhere.

And again, this all feeds back into the status of having a Bentley.

You know, it's a bit of a casual, you know, a low-key humble brag, if you will, to just leave your Bentley key on the bar, you know, while you drink your martini.

Okay, first of all, shut up about, you know, I drive a Bentley, and so here's my thing,

my key fob.

But look, that gets to another thing.

And honestly, this kind of irks me.

They are sometimes so big and clunky that they're just a lump in your pocket or they ruin the line of your suit not that i wear suits and they're just they're just like too big lotus agrees with you on that and lotus developed recently for their new electric suv the eletre

a a key fob that is shaped kind of like a guitar pick and it's slightly bigger than a guitar pick but not by much and their real goal with this like you say was to create something that was slim and elegant something still tangible but something that would not ruin the line of your suit, for instance.

Yeah, exactly.

So the minimalism thing gets me to my last question, which is eventually and probably soon, we're just going to get in a car and somehow, whether it's like reading my cornea or

some chip that the car company has put in my brain, it's just going to know it's us and we get to drive away.

Yes, I think that is the future, honestly.

Obviously, right now, we're already in the era of apps, basically controlling everything in your car, you know even starting the car warming the car adjusting windows battery life all of that so we're already in the app era

but also there are a small contingent of folks who actually still like to hold something tangible whether it's maybe if it's even the credit card type key that tesla offers just it's nice to hold on to something

Hannah Elliott at Bloomberg Pursues.

Hannah, thanks a bunch.

I appreciate your time.

Fun piece.

Thank you guys.

Tell you what, hold on to this.

If you somehow miss us on the air on your local public radio station, we've got a podcast if you need us, marketplace.org, or obviously the platform of your choice.

Just follow us there.

Coming up.

They're entering a space that is extremely inefficient right now.

Private equity meet youth sports.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is off 330 points today, three-quarters of 1%, 44,130 on the blue chips.

The NASDAQ basically flat, 21,122.

The SP 500 down 23 points, about about 3 tenths percent, 63, and 39.

Big tech firms were the most actively traded stocks today, among them anyway.

Means there's news or data that's driving people to buy and sell.

So let's see.

Microsoft beat expectations for quarterly results yesterday after the bell.

And so today, shares rose about 4%.

Meta also posted an earnings beat after the bell yesterday.

Today, shares lifted 11.25%.

That's a lot of Facebook.

Comcast lost fewer broadband customers than expected.

And that's one reason shares rose 2.25% today.

Another reason is growth in Xfinity mobile subscribers.

A third reason is capitalism.

Online news car seller Carvana, based in Tempe, Arizona, posted a second straight day of big gains.

Today, shares spiked another 17%.

Bonds went up.

The yield on the 10-year T-note thus fell 4.37% is the yield.

And you,

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

The labor market is arguably the hinge point in this economy right now.

It holds steady, say 4-ish percent unemployment.

The Fed is less likely to move interest rates lower.

It goes up from there too much, then down those rates probably go.

As I said, the July unemployment report comes tomorrow, 8:30 Washington time.

But labor market data comes in many forms, and today we learned from Challenger Gray and Christmas, the outplacement firm, that companies announced a bit more than 60,000 job cuts this month.

That's up 29% from June, and more than double the number of layoffs in July of last year.

Daniel Ackerman takes it from there.

My first question to Ron Hetrick of the employment data firm Lightcast today.

What is it like to be a labor economist right now?

It has never been more frustrating.

Frustrating, he says, because the labor market hasn't changed much recently.

We're just, we flatlined.

Firms have been waiting and seeing about tariffs and interest rates, and there hasn't been much hiring or firing, which is why today's report caught Tuan Nguyen's eye.

He's an economist at RSM.

If you compare it to the hard data on layoffs from the government, which is much more stable, the spike in layoff announcements in July is quite a surprise.

It's a surprise that Nguyen isn't too worried about.

Tech companies announced the most layoffs, firms like Intel and Microsoft, but Nguyen says some tech firms are also hiring.

Companies are switching to hire more AI engineers to better position them ahead in the AI race.

Retailers have announced significant job cuts too, many citing tariffs.

But overall, says Indeed's Allison Srivastov, layoffs aren't coming up as a metric that I'm really overtly concerned about as of now.

Instead, she's keeping an eye on the overall amount of movement in the labor market, or lack thereof.

She says not many people are leaving their current jobs for something better.

It's really important that we have that kind of churn.

We need that kind of movement in the labor market for it to be really healthy.

She says the lack of churn means people looking for work have a harder time finding it, and firms might not have the workers they need.

Ron Hetrick, the frustrated labor economist with Lightcast, says he's looking ahead to a fuller picture of the labor market.

I am so, so dying for the employment report tomorrow.

Hetrick says the industry-by-industry breakdown offered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics should provide clues about how things like immigration policy are affecting the workforce.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

This may not come as a huge surprise to parents of kids who are into sports, but those travel baseball teams or club soccer teams or insert your kids' sport here

can get expensive, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars expensive.

And without putting too fine a point on that,

that's a business opportunity.

And private equity groups have noticed youth sports right now is a $40 billion industry and it's still growing because private camps and elite coaches and the, it has to be said, very faint hope of making your kid a star, all that ain't cheap.

Tom Ferry is the executive director of the Aspen Institute's Sports and Society program.

Tom, welcome to the program.

Good to be here, Kai.

Without casting aspersions on all my private equity friends, of which I have none, private equity has a reputation, right?

They go in, they buy a company, they strip it for parts, they maximize their potential gains, and then they spin out.

Is it unreasonable to think that there's some of that going on here and they want to take youth sports and make a boatload of money?

Look, I mean, private equity firms exist to make money, but I would be careful in assuming the worst.

They're entering a space that is extremely inefficient right now.

It's been run by a lot of these mom-and-pop organizations, and it's an environment where you have coaches who are just not trained in key competencies.

And you have parents who are trying to organize their lives on multiple apps.

And they're spending, by our research, more than three hours a day on their kids' youth sport activities.

So is there room for private equity firms to come in and create efficiencies?

I do think they could do that.

But I think the real question with private equity is, are they going to come in and just try and pull more money out of the families that are already at the center of this very expensive industry?

Or are they going to invest in and have the patience to pull

money from maybe lower amounts of cash from a larger swath of the population?

You know, the business part of this, of course, is that once you get past like literally local little league where it's $100, $200 to get in for the season, whatever it is, youth sports becomes incredibly expensive, and it's an investment for the parents.

And I'm going to trot out a prejudicial phrase here, I think.

It becomes a little bit sort of, it looks like, pay-to-play, no?

Yeah, I mean, pay-to-play is an interesting term.

I mean, it means you're paying something to have your kid play sports.

I mean, that's been going on for a long time.

What we mean by pay-to-play in the current environment is lots of money.

We're talking, you know, $2,000, $3,000, $5,000, $10,000, sometimes $20,000 a year for your kid to have a sustained experience in sports that

lasts into adolescence and puts you on a track to college scholarships or preferential admission to schools, or maybe it's just playing time on your high school team.

Yeah, we should be realistic here, right?

Most parents, that's not true.

Some fraction of parents believe their kids actually are going to make it to D1 college, and they believe they're going to make it actually into the pros.

And the odds are, I mean, we've got to be honest, overwhelmingly against them.

Yeah, they really are.

But this is what Americans do, right?

That just means they say,

let's get them into

a really intense experience early on, get them ahead of all the other kids, slot them onto the type of teams that are going to get looks from scouts.

The long odds haven't discouraged parents from getting on this pathway.

It's just encouraged them to start earlier.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So, does this

interest, shall we say, by private equity and big money into youth sports, does that

help kids or does it help the profits?

To be determined, it could help profits and it could help kids.

It could also hurt kids.

It's going to entirely come down to the question of whether private equity firms see business models to engage more children at a lower price point with a higher quality experience.

If they can figure that out, they're going to do very well and they're going to do very good for our society.

Well, spitball it for me for a minute because you're a guy who does this professionally.

Do you think they're going to be able to do it?

I think there is demand from parents for them to do it.

Parents want better.

They want their kids to be involved in sports.

They want at a lower price point.

They want the coaches to be trained.

They don't want to feel like they are part of an upper-out system where the kid constantly has to pay more, more, more, and then they're out.

So I think that they're entering a marketplace where there's great demand for a better alternative product.

Yeah, better experience, right?

That's what it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Ferry, he's the executive director, also the founder of the Sports and Society program at the Aspen Institute.

Tom, thanks a lot.

I appreciate your time.

Thanks, Kai.

This final note on the way out, the latest, hey, tariffs are actually having an effect.

News comes to us from the Ford Motor Company.

Ford said in its earnings announcement this week that it figures President Trump's import taxes are going to cost it a cool $2 billion this year.

About 800 million of that came straight off second quarter profits.

The rest is cost cutting and everything else the company's having to do because of the tariffs.

I will say that as we go to air, we still don't have anything from the White House about the president's deadline of, sorry, just checking my notes here.

Yes, tomorrow.

on tariffs on most of the world.

It could, of course, be totally different by the time you hear this.

Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillain, Maria Hollenhorst, Iru Ekpinovi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Torrenzio.

I'm Kylie Risdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

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