Consumers are still stressed about the job market

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Hey, you know what will fix that tariff problem?

That's right.

More tariffs from American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

It is Tuesday, today, July 29.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

We are going to start with one trade story.

We're going to move swiftly on to another trade story, and then we're going to put trade and tariffs behind us for most of the rest of the program.

Deal?

All right, good.

Deal.

Trade story number one is actually a story of nothing happening.

U.S.

and Chinese negotiators wrapped up two days of talks in Stockholm today.

Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said afterward, the two sides are going to keep on talking, that he is headed home to break President Trump, and, but also, uh-huh, more tariffs might be needed.

So there's that.

Trade story number two is about the frameworks that have been agreed to with Japan and the European Union.

Details, as you know, are largely absent, but at least part of what the White House is hoping to get done here is to reduce the trade deficit the United States has with both of those countries.

We're going to set aside for just one second the fact that trade deficits in and of themselves are not inherently bad.

The White House says the frameworks are going to lead to massive commitments from Japan and Europe to invest more in the United States, more than a trillion dollars combined.

But here's the thing: reducing trade deficits and increasing investment, you can't do those two things at the same time because math.

Marketplace of Sabri Benishor gets us going.

The NASDAQ does not take yen.

A contractor building a factory in Alabama does not take Euros.

So if the EU and Japan are going to invest a whole lot more here, what are they going to do?

They do have to get dollars.

Maury Obsfeld is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Now, where do you suppose Japan and Europe are going to get those dollars from?

Exporting more goods to us than we import.

Us.

The dollars come from us.

Every time someone here buys an imported Japanese car or a bottle of French wine or a French bond for that matter, they are sending dollars out into the world.

That is where France and Japan get the dollars they need.

The trade deficit is literally where foreign investors get dollars to invest in us.

It's a matter of accounting.

It's not a matter of economic theory.

Gene Grossman is professor of international economics at Princeton.

Let's say Trump succeeds in getting Japan to spend an extra 550 billion.

Did he say that has to show up somewhere?

It's going to show up.

That extra investment is going to show up in a bigger U.S.

trade deficit.

But let's say accounting accounting.

Meth is for the birds.

Let's say the trade deficit shrinks because of tariffs, but Japan and Europe, they still want to invest here.

What are they going to do then?

Again, Maury Opsfeld.

They are going to bid up the price of the dollar.

The dollar will become more expensive.

And what do you imagine happens when the dollar becomes more expensive?

That's going to make foreign goods cheaper for Americans and American goods more expensive for foreigners.

So we import

more and export less.

So the likely effect of all that is going to be a bigger U.S.

trade deficit.

In fact, this is exactly what happened despite higher tariffs in the first Trump administration.

Liliana Rojas Suarez is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

What happened after the 2018-19 tariff is that the trade trade deficits in the U.S.

continue increasing.

Why?

Because she says other countries invested more in us using the dollars we sent them.

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

We learned this morning, by the way, speaking of trade gaps, that it fell in June, fewer imports in the face of White House tariffs, which kind of stands to reason.

All right, all together now, consumer spending amounts to how much of this economy?

If you're a regular listener and you don't know the answer to that one, please see me after class.

Two-thirds is the answer, a bit more actually, which is why we pay so much mind to how consumers are feeling.

The conference board released its monthly gauge of consumer confidence this morning, and the news was, I suppose, good.

We're a hair more confident this month than we were last.

That is just the second time this year the move has been up, not down.

Daniel Ackerman is on the What's Going On with Consumers Anyway, beat for us today.

Consumers are feeling better than earlier this year, but they're not feeling great, says the conference board's Stephanie Guichar.

For the sixth straight month, consumer expectations came in at a level that typically signals recession ahead.

We are still there, so there is still pointing to recession risks.

Guichar says consumers are still being cautious with discretionary spending.

We see some decline, especially in categories like dining out, traveling.

But consumers may be coming to terms with our new tariff normal, says Kayla Bruhn of Morning Consult.

There was a lot of kind of, I mean, I don't know about panic, maybe that's overstating it, but something like panic about tariffs in April.

And even though tariffs are causing some retailers to raise prices.

So much of those initially announced tariffs were either pared back or at least put on hold, at least for a few more days.

So that's avoiding that sort of worst case scenario that consumers were kind of alarmed about.

But Bruin says one factor seems to be more and more of a drag drag on confidence.

There has been this cooling in the labor market.

It just keeps incrementally getting a little bit worse.

There haven't been many mass layoffs, says Bill Adams of Comerica Bank, but consumers are seeing the least opportunities to find better jobs or new jobs since the post-pandemic economy unfolded.

The number of new hires and job openings declined last month, according to the labor department.

Adams says that's a concern for college grads just entering the job market.

So it's a hard economy to find a new job if you don't have a job.

Overall, consumer views of job availability weakened for the seventh straight month.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Wall Street today kind of meh.

Honestly, the trade news was inconclusive.

People are just waiting for the Fed meeting to wrap up.

Just meh.

Details, numbers, when we get there.

Spotify, the Swedish streaming giant, reported a $100 million loss in the quarter gone by this morning, all while monthly active users were up 11%,

nearing 700 million people.

I wasn't actually on the earnings call, so I can't tell you what kind of hold music they used before things got going, but my gut tells me it wasn't anything by the velvet sundown.

That's the band with a million monthly listeners that became kind of a viral sensation on the surface when some dogged internet detective found signs that the band wasn't actually, you know, human and that its songs were most likely made with artificial intelligence.

As of right now, Spotify isn't labeling AI-generated music as AI-generated music, but should they, do you think?

Marketplace of Matt Levin has that one.

Nika Danilova is an indie synth pop recording artist, goes by the name Zola Jesus.

She agreed to listen to Velvet Sundown and give me a real-time review.

One of those lyrics

found.

Danilova admitted the singer was surprisingly soulful, but overall she was not a fan.

She says if she has to share a streaming platform with robots, listeners should know when they're listening to AI.

You know, to put me alongside Velvet Sun Sundown or whatever, it's like it feels a little

condescending in a way.

It kind of degrades the context of what I've devoted my entire life for.

Spotify has not said publicly how much of its library it thinks is AI generated.

The company declined an interview request.

When the French music streamer Deezer launched its own program to identify AI songs earlier this year, Chief Innovation Officer Aurelian Euro was surprised at just how prolific the robots were.

It's almost 20%

of what we receive every day.

Not every year, it's every day.

While identifying AI music isn't a perfect science, AI music expert Ed Newton Rex at the non-profit Fairleigh Train says it's technologically easier than identifying AI-generated text.

But he says the burden of saying something is made with AI should extend to AI music startups and their users.

I think it needs to be made clear to everyone that when you generate a song and you distribute it on streaming platforms, you have to be open and honest about the fact that you've used AI to generate it.

Of course, all this presumes that listeners will in fact prefer human-created music to AI creations.

Nika Danilova says she's changed her musical style in response to AI.

More stripped-down vocals and piano, less synth and computers.

She says her fans have loved it.

I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

There's a very long list of print publications that have gone out of business in the past decade or so.

Most recently, In Touch and Life and Style magazines last month.

But there is at least one niche in the world of print that is seeing something of a revival, children's magazines.

Elizabeth Seagren is a senior staff writer at Fast Company.

Elizabeth, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me.

How did you come to this story?

Well, you know, I'm a magazine writer.

And as you can probably imagine, I grew up on magazines.

I actually grew up overseas.

And so I would beg my mother to buy Sassy and 17 and Tiger Beat magazines that were so expensive because they had to be exported.

But when my own children were born a decade ago, all of these magazines had sort of disappeared.

And so I was really interested in why that had happened and why we're beginning to see a few of these magazines come back.

All right.

I will see you your sassy and your tiger beat, and I will raise you Boys Life and Scholastic, which is

the magazines that I've remembered.

That's awesome.

Describe the current offerings for me, would you?

Okay, so over the last nine years, there have been a few new entrants into this world.

Kazoo is the magazine that arguably launched this new movement, and it's focused on kids five to 12.

And in particular, it really wants to help girls grow up feeling strong and confident.

So it has lots of the usual stuff, advice about how to manage your friend drama and puzzles and things like that, but also interviews with Sonia Sotomayor and Misty Copeland and Shonda Rhimes.

There's another magazine called Honest History, which is all about trying to make history really engaging.

And then there's Anyway, a magazine for tween girls in the vein of the magazines I was reading as a child.

And it's really all about issues that tween girls are dealing with, but also really inspiring stories about tween girls.

Like the newest issue is about female skateboarders who are tweens.

Okay, so amen to empowering tween girls.

And as I've said before in this program, history is really cool.

But have the founders and publishers of these new magazines not heard that print is dead?

Yes, they have.

And in fact, many of these founders actually came from the print world and saw how the magazine industry was basically destroyed over the past 10 years.

And I know this firsthand, I work at a magazine.

But something really interesting happened over the last five years.

A lot of data began to emerge showing that actually it's not great for our kids to be spending so much time on screens.

And so parents are today desperate for other alternatives for their kids.

And so the magazine industry is sort of looking at this and saying, hmm, we have an opportunity here.

And so the parents are willing to pay the subscription fees, whatever they are,

in order to keep their kids off the screens, basically.

Is that the deal?

And they're high.

These magazines are charging significantly more than the magazines of the past.

So, you know, a magazine can cost anywhere from $5 to $15

an issue, which is just many, many times what we were paying when we were kids.

And that's because these magazines are not relying on advertising at all.

They're relying entirely on subscriptions because they saw what happened when all of the advertising exited the magazine industry and consumers just sort of left.

And so what these magazines are trying to do is to make these magazines seem a lot more like books.

They're spending a lot of money on the design of these magazines and also the content in them are designed to be sort of evergreen so that you can keep coming back to them to basically justify these higher prices.

And they hope that they'll be able to succeed in a way that lots of other magazines have failed.

Hope, of course, is not a business model.

Are these places profitable and do you think they're going to be able to stick it out?

Well, they are profitable, but that's because they have very, very few staff members working on them.

Often, you know, it's the founders who are spending all of their time working on these magazines.

And for now, they have relatively small circulations.

They're in the thousands, which is kind of a far cry from what things were like in the 80s when, you know, there were 9 million magazine subscriptions for kids.

So we're not.

there yet, but it's still early days.

And a lot of these magazines are growing very quickly.

And so there's a chance that we might get back to a world where these magazines are part of our kids' childhoods again.

Elizabeth Seagran at Fast Company.

Elizabeth, thanks a lot.

Appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me.

Coming up, all the way along the food supply chain, you're going to see slashing of jobs.

Government food assistance and the velocity of money.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is off 204 points today, about 15%, 44,632 on the blue chips.

The NASDAQ down 80 points, 4 tenths percent, 21,098.

The S ⁇ P 500 down 18 points, 3 tenths percent, 63, and 70.

PayPal says the company is seeing a slight deceleration in consumer spending, especially for Chinese-made products.

Shares down 8 and 7 tenths percent today.

United Healthcare reported earnings in the news was not great.

Shares down 7.5% there.

Ponds up yield on the 10-year T-note, 4.32%.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Kai Rizdahl.

This is a big, big week for economic data.

Jobs, inflation, consumer spending, GDP, as well, all of it coming down the pike in the next couple of days.

In a couple of weeks, we're going to get another data point that affects pretty much everything I just mentioned.

Labor productivity.

How much stuff that we make and do versus how much time we spend making and doing it.

Strong productivity growth means businesses can make more money and invest in more equipment or hire more workers workers or pay them more and that in the long run leads to economic growth right now though businesses across the country are dealing with a problem that is chipping away at all of that one guess as to what that problem is here's marketplace's justin ho wolftooth components is a manufacturer in minnesota that makes bike parts mostly out of aluminum Co-owner Brendan Moore says over the last several years, the company has been trying to boost output.

It bought more aluminum milling machines.

It's invested in more automation.

It even moved workstations closer together.

You know, if there's 30 or 40 steps from when a thing is a piece of aluminum to when we ship it, every one of those we're scrutinizing to see where we can take a second out or two seconds out or combine steps.

Moore says the goal, make and sell more bike parts, rake in more profit, and use that money to develop new products, expand.

But then came the Trump administration's tariffs.

Moore says his aluminum costs spiked, along with the cost of the other imports he relies on.

Certain components that aren't made in the U.S.

anymore, say, for example, a bearing, a small ball bearing.

As a result, Moore says that extra revenue he's banked from all of those productivity improvements is being soaked up by the cost of tariffs.

Moore says he's holding off on some new hires he wanted to make.

The company also shelved plans to buy another building and expand operations.

We're investing in the things we need here and now today and maybe in the next coming months, but we're not buying a piece of equipment that we think we're going to need or we're pretty sure we're going to need in six months right right now.

One upside of the productivity improvements his company's made is that he can afford not to raise prices and absorb the cost of tariffs.

Nicole Servey is an economist with Wells Fargo.

She says productivity growth can play a big role in keeping inflation in check.

This has been very important,

actually, since the pandemic in helping the rate of inflation return back towards 2% or towards the level that the Fed would feel comfortable.

But on the other hand, the added cost of tariffs eats away at the other benefits of a more productive economy, says George Perks, macro strategist with Bespoke Investment Group.

Instead of hiring more workers or paying your existing workers higher wages or investing for the future, you're basically taking that productivity improvement that you've made and paying it on to the new government tax.

Perks says that's a big missed opportunity.

Productivity is the key to unlocking higher wages, higher spending, higher income, higher production, higher standards of living.

It's the fundamental building block of all of this stuff.

And if businesses keep holding off on using productivity gains to make big investments, Nicole's survey at Wells Fargo says that could have a scarring effect.

Where we just see that there's a retrenchment away from productivity growth or interest in research and development, and that actually slows overall economic output kind of in the medium term.

Back in Minnesota, Brendan Moore with Wolftooth Components says there is a silver lining.

His business is pretty efficient at churning out bike parts.

Right now, he says he's thinking about other ways he can boost output once the economy becomes more certain.

This really forces you to think about it.

And it's beyond just the manufacturing, it's the marketing, the sales, the customer service, all those things, I would say, have an enhanced focus.

Moore says if the tariff situation never calms down, all of those productivity gains he's made will let him get back to growing the company.

I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace.

The phrase Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and its acronym SNAP appear a grand total of eight times in the thousand or so pages of the GOP's tax cut and spending law.

But with those eight mentions, more than 22 million people stand to lose some or all of their food assistance benefits.

The reality, though, of how money moves through this economy, whether through government benefits or elsewhere, means that one person's or one family's income eventually becomes a business's revenue.

And so, as Marketplace's Samantha Fields reports, what's happening with food assistance isn't going to affect only those families, it's going to affect the grocery stores they shop at, too.

When Bill Hagedorn's in-laws first opened Access Natural Foods 55 years ago, there weren't many places you could buy organic local food in central Maine.

They had a farm on about 200 acres, and so they grew a lot of their own produce initially.

They don't grow the food they sell anymore, but they are still running the store in the city of Auburn.

Hagedorn helps them manage it.

The grocery landscape is pretty different now than it was in the 70s.

Lots of stores sell organic and local produce.

So Axis is actively looking for ways to stay competitive.

They recently found a new distributor with a line of organic products geared toward families on a budget and were actually able to lower some of their prices.

We have a very economically diverse customer base.

We do have customers who are on a strict budget and coming in and looking for healthy food at a fair price.

About 17% of people in the surrounding county are low enough income that they qualify for SNAP benefits.

For a single person, that's about $30,000 a year or less.

SNAP is a big part of AXIS's business and Hagedorn is worried about the cuts to the program.

From a business perspective, it's very concerning just because we operate on a pretty tight margin and so any loss of customers for any reason is a significant detriment to our business.

Grocery stores and farmers markets nationwide could lose a big chunk of their revenue because of the impending cuts.

About 27,000 retailers across the country really have that high percentage of SNAP dollars as their income.

That's everything from farm stands to Walmarts.

Lily Roberts at the Center for American Progress says small independent stores are likely to be hit the hardest.

I think most people don't recognize how many of the businesses and especially food establishments in their communities are bolstered by SNAP dollars.

SNAP accounts for about 12% of all grocery sales nationwide.

And Stephanie Johnson at the National Grocers Association says for some stores, it's much more than that.

We have members that are in low-income communities, and they may have over 50, 60, 70% of their sales are from SNAP.

That's particularly common for for stores in rural areas and in some poorer neighborhoods in big cities.

For some, the stable SNAP benefits are what make it possible for them to open in those underserved communities and stay resilient.

Now that SNAP benefits are being cut, that loss of revenue may be enough to cause some stores to close.

Greg Silverman at the Westside Campaign Against Hunger in New York says that will ripple through the economy.

You can look at the supply chain in reverse, right?

From table to farm.

When families lose snap benefits, they'll have less money to spend at grocery stores, which means those stores will also start buying less from wholesalers.

And they're going to start purchasing less.

You take that all the way back to the farm and the agriculture sector, processors, and farmers are going to be selling less product.

So you're talking all the way along the food supply chain.

You're going to see slashing of jobs.

At Access Natural Foods in Maine, Bill Hagen Orn says the snap cuts are also not happening in a vacuum.

There is kind of a conflux of events that are coming together that make it more challenging for small businesses to continue to operate at a decent profit.

In the last five years, there's been a pandemic, supply chain issues, and inflation.

Now there's the uncertainty around tariffs and this loss of revenue from snap cuts.

It's a lot for an independent family-run store in a business where profit margins are usually about one to three percent.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today, courtesy of the consumer products conglomerate Procter Gamble.

If you buy Pampers or Charmin or Bounty or any one of a zillion other things that company sells, this is perhaps of interest.

PNG said on its earnings call today, it's going to be raising prices and that it expects a $1 billion hit to profits because of the president's tariffs.

Now that I think about it, actually, more tariffs in the show than I had remembered.

Sorry.

Jordan Manji, Sonio Maharaj, Janet Wynn, Oga Oxman, Virginia K.

Smith, and Tony Wagner are the digital team.

Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital, and I'm Kyle Risdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is is API.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference.

That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace.

A different future is closer than you think with Capella University.

Learn more at capella.edu.