Let's take a hard look at that GDP growth

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Okay, start the clock for me, would you?

Jay Powell's press conference.

Ready?

Go.

From American Public Media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

Wednesday, today, the 30th of July.

Good is always to have you along, everybody.

All right, here we go.

Fed Chair Jay Powell, his press conference today, 45 minutes in,

I'm going to say I can do it in 90 seconds, seven pieces of tape.

Here we go.

Number one.

As you know, today we decided to leave our policy rate where it's been, which where I would characterize as modestly restrictive.

Policy rate means the short-term interest rate the central bank controls.

Modestly restrictive means putting the brakes on the economy just

a bit.

Number two.

Inflation is running a bit above 2%,

as I mentioned, even excluding tariff effects.

2.7% specifically is where inflation sits.

According to the Fed's favorite measure, PCE, it's called.

The June number comes out tomorrow.

Remember, their target is 2% even.

And that's before real tariff effects have hit the economy.

All right, number three.

The labor market's solid, historically low unemployment.

That is true.

Unemployment rate is 4.1%.

We get an update on that on Friday.

Moving on, number four.

Financial conditions are accommodative and the economy is not.

The economy is not performing as though restrictive policy were holding it back inappropriately.

Financial conditions is kind of a stew of the value of the dollar and bond yields and stocks, which, as Powell said, so far so good.

All right.

Number five, and in a nutshell.

So it seems to

to me and to almost the whole committee that the economy is not performing as though restrictive policy is holding it back inappropriately and modest modestly restrictive policy seems appropriate.

Can't leave this out though, Powell's to be sure paragraph.

Number six.

All that said, there's also downside risk to the labor market.

In coming months, we'll receive a good amount of data that will help inform our assessment of the balance of risks and the appropriate setting of the federal funds rate.

Just because I haven't used all seven pieces of tape yet, even though I am just a little bit over time, here is one more, what the chair had to say about tariffs.

As I said, a reasonable base case is that these are

one-time price effects.

Of course, in the end, there will not be.

This will not turn out to be inflation because we'll make sure that it's not.

We will, through our tools, make sure that this does not move from being a one-time price increase to serious inflation.

Translation: If tariffs do run prices up broadly and consistently, the Fed is going to take care of it.

Wall Street on this Fed day,

honestly, traders didn't much care for what Chair Powell had to say.

Didn't hate it, but they didn't love it.

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

The Fed meeting, important as it was, wasn't the only A-list economic happening today.

We got our first look at second quarter gross domestic product this morning.

The economy grew at an annualized rate of 3% April through June.

And, but

hang on a second, because there is definitely more, or in a way, I guess, less to that number than meets the eye.

Marketplace's Sabri Benishore reviews the latest report card on this economy.

3% GDP growth is pretty great, pretty solid.

It's just that...

That figure is very misleading.

Thomas Ryan is a North America economist with capital economics.

It's sort of driven by a quirk.

The quirk is trade chaos.

In the first quarter of the year, companies across the economy binged on imports, stockpiling, before tariffs hit.

Then, when tariffs hit, a lot of them stopped importing so much.

And as a result of imports slumping, that's boosted GDP quite strongly.

That's how the math works when calculating GDP.

Imports are a negative, so less imports is a positive, and GDP grew.

So what then does the economy look like if we take out the trade chaos?

Under the hood, it does look like there's some cooling in the relatively solid growth we've experienced in 2023 and 2024.

Jonathan Pingle is chief U.S.

economist at UBS.

If you want to look at the core of the economy, the beating heart of it all, you look at how much we consumers and businesses are all buying and and investing.

At the end of last year, that was growing at a solid 3.4%.

Then it slipped to 2.9%,

then down to 1.9%,

now just 1.2%.

Justin Widener is an economist with Deutsche Bank.

A lot of the slowing is on the residential investment and structures side.

The housing market is not thrilled by high interest rates.

And as far as investment, low oil prices have kept a lid on the oil and gas sector, which is a big one.

So a little bit of a slowdown relative to earlier in the year, but still

a decent number.

The big question is, of course, what happens next?

Again, UBS is Jonathan Pingle.

Well, is this just, you know, sort of two soft quarters and then we perk back up again?

Or is this the new rate?

Or, you know, which is the worser scenario, is, yeah, we slow further.

So for now, overall, economic growth is not as good as it seems, but not as bad as it could be.

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

Friday this week is not only going to be Friday, which is nice, but being the first Friday of the month, It's also going to be Jobs Day, the July Employment Situation Summary is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls it.

Today, though, we got a sneak peek of sorts.

ADP, the private payrolls processing company, said about 100,000 new jobs were created in July.

Most of them, about 70% or so, were in the services sector.

Marketplace Elizabeth Troval breaks it all down for us.

ADP's report showed more growth in hospitality and leisure than any other industry.

46,000 new jobs.

That comes with the caveat, says Ali Bustamante with the University of New Orleans.

It doesn't necessarily tell us that these jobs are going to stick around.

It doesn't also tell us that these jobs are particularly good or high-paid jobs.

And Greg Wright with UC Merced says while July's job growth was concentrated in low-wage services.

That was even actually somewhat offset by losses in education and health services, which tend to be somewhat better types of jobs.

Education and health lost some 38,000 jobs.

While it's unclear whether that's just a blip, Wright says.

There's been reductions in government funding at various levels in health and in education, mostly at the kind of university level.

On the other hand, the financial services sector saw some growth.

Mike Steinitz is with talent firm Robert Haff.

Hiring continues, but it's done more at a slower pace.

He says companies are focused on specific skill sets, employees that can improve efficiency by modernizing tech platforms and analyzing investments.

There's a lot of needs for people to come in and analyze that data and figure out what buckets they should go into.

Well, it's easy to look at the overall hiring numbers as good news.

Daniel Hornung with the Urban Institute says it's still part of a slowing we've seen coming out of last year's strong labor market.

The question is whether that slowing is going to accelerate and stop, basically.

He's especially concerned about how tariff policy might hurt the labor market.

I'm Elizabeth Troval from Marketplace.

We're a long way from knowing exactly what President Trump's tariffs are going to mean for this economy.

What they're going to mean for consumers, but also what they're going to mean for businesses, small businesses in particular, which just don't have the economic wherewithal to handle the extra cost.

Small businesses like Knoxville Fine Violins, Wesley Rule, proprietor.

Summers are generally slow for violin shops.

This one's been particularly slow, but it seems that things are starting to pick back up.

School is starting back.

We're adding an orchestra program to one of the public high schools here in Knoxville this year.

So that's positive.

It seems like prices have stabilized for us from our distributors.

You know, things were kind of bouncing back and forth for a while, and we were getting lots of warnings from our distributors that prices were going to spike and go up, which they did.

So for instance, most of our strings for our instruments come from Europe, whereas a lot of our student instruments, for instance, come from Asia.

And so we were getting a lot of different information from different distributors depending on which tariffs were being put in place at what time.

And so I think generally prices for us have increased an average of 30%.

We've actually worked really hard to keep our budget instruments the same price, even though our margins are even thinner than they were to begin with.

Just because, you know, low-income families and people that are looking for budget instruments, often their budgets are stretched elsewhere, you know, whether it's through groceries or some other things.

And so we were able to keep those prices where we have always had them.

And we're also trying to start a program that offers a decreased price rental for low-income families.

It looks like there might be a tariff on India, which will affect the price of fittings.

So, like ebony and rosewood, and a lot of those, like pegs and tailpieces, those kinds of things that are found on violins, a lot of that comes from India.

So, we may stock up on that before any sort of tariffs go in place there.

And we're also looking at a lot of bow material is potentially going to be at risk to be more difficult to get.

So, we're going to probably stock up up on that as well.

During the summer, because it's slow, we often work on a lot of restorations throughout the summer.

So, we've restored a lot of 18th-century violins, and we have a lot of interesting new stock that people haven't seen.

And so, we'll have teachers and students come back in to get ready for the school year, get ready for the symphony that's going to start back.

And we get to show off kind of all of our new stock.

I also just really enjoy the new new students.

You know, the students that come in, they've never played a violin before, or they've never played a cello before, and you kind of hand them an instrument for the first time, and their eyes light up, and they're so excited to start their school year.

That's that's great.

Wesley Ruhl and his wife Lauren own Knoxville Fine Violins, Knoxville, Tennessee.

If you need a loot here.

Coming up.

When was the last time you walked into a coffee shop or the grocery store and you paid with the stable coin?

Uh

never.

First, though, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is down 171 today, four tenths percent, 44,461.

The NASDAQ up 31 points, about a 10th percentile, 21,129.

The SP 500 chopped off about seven points, a 10th percentile 63, 62.

Consumer spending grew 1.4 percent in Q2.

So let's check some places where a lot of us spend some money.

Starbucks down about a quarter of 1% today, missed quarterly earnings estimates and reported a sales decline.

Dallas-based Wingstop added a good soaking of Buffalo, saw shares surge 27% after beating expectations.

Bonds down, yield on the tenure, T-Note up 4.37%.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

We are, as of this airing, two days out from President Trump's August the 1st tariff deadline.

What's going to happen between now and Friday is, as we have learned, anybody's guess.

But the past six months have been a real-time experiment in what happens when you dismantle the global trading system and what that does for the United States' position in it.

That gets me to an article I saw in Foreign Affairs the other day.

The headline was, The Right Way to Wield America's Economic Power.

Dalip Singh wrote it.

He's now chief global economist at PGIM.

That's the investment arm of Prudential Financial.

But before that, and more relevant to this conversation, he served in senior economic policy jobs in the Biden White House.

Dalip, welcome to the program.

Good to have you on.

My pleasure, Kai.

Thanks for having me.

We are,

as we see in the headlines every day,

in an era of economic warfare.

And certainly it has been stepped up in the Trump administration, but it predates the Trump administration.

It goes back decades and decades.

And I guess the question is...

Kai, it goes back centuries and centuries.

Centuries and centuries.

Well, there you go.

And you're the expert in the conversation.

So

here's the gist of the first question.

And

it's pretty basic, but is it different now somehow?

Yes.

It's being used more often and with more force than ever before.

First, because we're in the most intense period of geopolitical rivalry since at least the Cold War.

And because today's great powers are mostly nuclear powers, the logic of mutually assured destruction is to push direct conflict away from the military battlefield and into the economic arena.

So let's talk about how we do that.

And I want to get to the idea of economic tradecraft, which is sort of the thrust of your piece.

There is, as everybody knows, diplomatic tradecraft, political tradecraft, military tradecraft, which the United States has demonstrably been pretty good at at for the last 80-ish years.

I would submit, and I guess my question to you is, do you think the United States has been as good at economic tradecraft the past generations?

We've always been better at using economic tools to create and to innovate and to inspire and attract.

That's been our superpower.

And, you know, it's still investments in research and development, infrastructure, workforce development, that's what's made America different over the past 80 years.

And having grown up professionally in the private sector, I think those tools, the positive ones, are our most potent ones because plenty of countries can punish, but no other country can inspire and create like the U.S.

That's who we are at our best.

Trevor Burrus: You know, there are going to be people listening to this who say,

this guy just needs to read the newspaper, man, because what's happening every single day in this and the global economy now

is a disruption of what has been built over 80 years.

And I guess the question that comes from this is: your entire argument assumes regular order, if I could speak in congressional terms, right?

It assumes thoughtful consideration.

It assumes the investigations that go along with tariffs and all of the rest of the things.

It assumes

normal diplomatic, economic, tradecraft channels, which, as we all know, simply is not happening now.

And

I mean,

did the United States break the global economy?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Look, I mean, I don't,

I'm trying not to sound naive.

We can act in a way that's unpredictable.

We can act in a way that maximizes our use of leverage.

But if you ask me, trust is the currency of diplomacy.

Diplomacy is ultimately how you settle conflicts.

Unbridled chaos ultimately creates a vacuum and makes us weaker.

So my ambition is modest.

to start a conversation and to encourage people who are smarter and wiser than I am to improve on the ideas I put out there.

So let's talk about that.

Let's talk about that thing you want to do, which is the crux of your piece, which is building government capacity for economic tradecraft.

Because just to allude to an earlier question, we have government capacity for military tradecraft and diplomatic tradecraft and all of those things.

How do we build this economic tradecraft capacity that you seek?

So I'm calling for a doctrine of economic statecraft that would be announced at the highest levels of government.

It would lay down guiding principles for why and when we use economic weapons.

And it would set limits, you know, like not targeting food or medicine.

I don't think we have an institutional setup that's fit for purpose.

So I'm also calling for a cabinet-level Department of Economic Security.

We need a 21st century institution built for geoeconomic competition.

It's going to take decades, right?

Yeah, it will, because right now our economic tools, they're scattered across treasury, commerce, state, USTR.

We need a single agency that gives us coherence.

We need to simulate conflict scenarios and stress test our tools just like the Fed does.

And the biggest, I think the biggest efficiency is we need to recruit multidisciplinary talent, a SWAT team, you know, across economics and finance, because the right tools are not enough.

We also need the right team.

I'll echo your earlier caveat here that you're not naive because there are challenges now, shall we say, with recruiting people to the federal government and building that kind of bureaucracy back up.

But the last thing I want to touch on on this, and this is, you know, I'm asking you as a guy who spent his professional life in this.

We, the United States, is now, and again, not being idealistic here, we are in a place where

we are the unreliable actor.

What and how

do we convince the Allies and our trading opponents too, right?

Because it's a global economy that

we have steadfastness of purpose?

Aaron Powell, well, look,

that's the right question.

First, we have to convince ourselves that doctrine isn't code for handcuffs.

No president would agree to handcuffs.

But what I would say to our allies and really to the powers that be in Washington is that we know economic statecraft is here to stay.

But doctrine is about improving its discipline and its legitimacy, and ultimately its effectiveness.

And the benefit is also will minimize the blowback, because if you exercise power without discipline, history teaches us eventually that that backfires.

Dilib Singh

works in private finance now.

He spent lots of time at the highest levels of economic policy, I guess, in the Biden administration.

His piece in foreign affairs is called The Right Way to Wield America's Economic Power.

Mrs.

Singh, thanks for your time, sir.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, Kai.

It's a pleasure.

A couple of weeks ago, as part of that whole crypto week thing you may or may not have clued into, President Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S.

Stable Coins Act, also known as the Genius Act in that too clever by halfway that Congress has of naming legislation.

Stablecoins are a kind of cryptocurrency, but unlike, say, Bitcoin, they are supposed to be obviously stable, a store of value.

One stablecoin equals one U.S.

dollar.

So far in practice, they've mostly been used to buy and sell other kinds of crypto, but with the regulatory blessing that they've just been given, crypto companies and some big retailers like Amazon and Walmart are eyeing a much, much bigger market.

Marketplace's Matt Levin looked into whether stablecoins could compete with credit and debit cards.

Chinton Tarakia recently ordered a $6.50 brown sugar milk tea with something called cheese foam at a boba shop in San Francisco.

Instead of cash or a credit card, Tarakia opened an app from the crypto company Coinbase and paid with stablecoin.

All I do is scan a QR code, right, that is at the register.

I type in 6.50 and hit send, and it's done.

Most people still pay for cheese foam in actual dollars, but Tarakia works for Coinbase.

His job is basically to convince businesses like that Boba Cafe that accepting stablecoins is really not that different from accepting Visa or American Express.

But unlike traditional payment systems, stablecoins move at the speed of the blockchain.

It takes 200 milliseconds now.

And so when I hit send, it's submitted to the blockchain, it's confirmed quickly, and then it lands in the merchant's wallet.

Credit and debit card payments can take days to actually show up in a merchant's bank account.

Speed is one selling point in the gospel of stablecoin, but the bigger lure for crypto-curious retailers in traditional credit card systems today, there's usually between a two to three percent fee.

If stablecoins are used by existing companies, they may add a small fee, right?

But that fee is usually far, far, far less.

Businesses can either pass on that fee to their customers or just eat it, which is why the National Retail Federation Stephanie Marts is pretty excited about stablecoins.

This would be much-needed competition for the traditional credit card market.

Retailers paid $187 billion in swipe fees last year, mostly to Visa and MasterCard, which have long been criticized as having a duopoly on payment systems.

Our strong hope and expectation is that this would finally result in credit card and debit card swipe fees going down.

The e-commerce company Shopify and payments company Stripe offer stablecoin options to merchants.

Walmart and Amazon have reportedly explored offering their own in-house stablecoins.

But it's still very early stages for the tech.

Rubail Berwadkar is global head of growth for Visa.

It's not really very common.

I mean, when was the last time you walked into a coffee shop or the grocery store and you paid with a stablecoin?

Berwadkar says the speed and efficiency of stablecoins could improve payment networks, and Visa has already launched stablecoin-linked cards.

But he cautions that beyond retailers, stablecoins also have to appeal to consumers who are used to getting miles with their purchases or easily disputing a transaction.

Building acceptance is hard.

It has to be safe, it has to be secure, and it has to have the promise of making sure that a consumer can trust where their money is being used.

The Genius Act is intended to convince crypto skeptics that stable coins are indeed safe.

If a company issues $100 million in stable coins, the new law requires that they actually have $100 million in safe assets, like short-term treasury bills.

So, when you want to convert coins to actual real dollars, you can.

UC Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen still fears what amounts to a stablecoin bank run.

If there are worries about the survival of a business or the survival of a coin and people begin to cash it in, the issuer is going to have to sell off the treasury bill.

Stablecoin issuers are already some of the biggest U.S.

debt holders, and they'll likely be gobbling up more treasury bills post-Genius Act.

Eikengreen says stablecoins could pose a threat to the deepest and most liquid bond market in the world.

We could be creating an exceptionally volatile source of demand for treasuries.

Which could make for an exceptionally volatile financial system.

I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today, I got some good trade news and I got some bad trade news.

If you're a consumer or purchaser of Brazil nuts, orange juice, iron ore, and or certain parts for civilian aircraft and some other things, the additional 40% tariff that President Trump put on Brazilian imports to the United States today for a grand total of 50%,

well, that doesn't apply to you.

If, on the other hand, you are a coffee drinker,

well, Sorry.

According to the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, 35% of the unroasted coffee that we use here in this economy comes to us from Brazil.

And effective a week from today, and by order of President Trump, it is going to be half again as expensive.

Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Justin Dueller, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton, Thorpe Warren, Carlos Torado, and Becca Weinman.

Jeff Peters is the manager of media production, and I'm Kyle Risdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

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