AI and 'surveillance' pricing

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In this week's game of economic jenga, we've got interest rates, tariffs, and trade deals.

You get to go first.

From American Public Media, this is Market Play.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzo.

It is Friday today, July the 25th.

Good as always to to have you along, everybody.

No shortage of things to talk about that have happened in the past five days in this economy.

A mere seven minutes to do it.

David Gura is at Bloomberg.

Rachel Siegel is at The Washington Post.

Hey, you two.

Hey, Kai.

Kai, Kai.

Mr.

Gura, we start with you,

and I'm going to preface it by saying this.

So for a number of months now, I've been asking the various and sundry folks who agree to come on this program on Fridays to characterize this economy.

And they've all said, well, you know, it's kind of teetering.

We're sort of, we're just waiting for for the other shoe to drop.

And it has yet to actually drop, right?

There are tariffs out there, but consumers still are spending and buying.

And that's interesting and good.

But piece in the Wall Street Journal today that pointed out that companies are absorbing a lot of the tariff costs so far.

See also General Motors, $1.1 billion, they said.

And I wonder if that changes your characterization of this economy right now.

Yeah, the open question is how long companies are continuing to do this.

And so you bring up GM.

We saw it from Stellantis, another car maker, VW today, as well, all of them citing tariffs as a factor that's weighing on their bottom line.

So we are seeing it manifest itself.

We're coming up on a week that's going to be extremely busy for economic data, yes, but also for corporate earnings.

This is going to be, I think, the busiest week of earnings season when companies tell us how they've been doing and how they expect to do.

I have a colleague, Sean Donnon, who covers trade, and he had a great analogy.

He said, think of the economy as having a cold.

There's going to be this kind of sustained difficulty the economy is going to face as this tariff war continues, as this trade war continues.

So I think we're beginning to see it.

You're right.

It didn't have the kind of immediate effect some folks forecasted it would, but it is beginning to crop up in the data.

We are seeing more and more companies talk about it.

And of course, as we have from the very beginning, we've seen consumers who are very worried about the effect that this is going to have on their bottom line.

And so it's affecting sentiment.

And the other thing we're starting to see, or at least that appears to be

making itself clear, Rachel Siegel, is that

give or take-ish, the baseline tariff rate in this economy now is going to be 15%, which on the face of it, and in response to what the president has said of 25 and 50 and 145%, you know, 15% sounds pretty good, but it's like 10 times what it was on the 20th of January.

And I guess with an eye toward August the 1st,

that's going to be the new normal, right?

It's going to be the new normal if it sticks.

You know, we have to stay in the middle of the day.

Well, right, right, right, right.

One never does know.

One never knows.

And, you know, if we're talking talking about companies that are trying to figure out how much they can absorb, what they have to pass on, it's really difficult for them to make those decisions, not necessarily knowing what sort of timeline the basic numbers that they're working with are still going to stick.

And, you know, even if there's sort of this August 1st date, I feel like we've seen a lot of those dates be a little fungible.

You know, there's Liberation Day, and then there's still a reason to come back to the table, and then there's August 1st.

And in the meantime, what is constant is that we know that consumers are tired.

They're tired of inflation.

They're tired of uncertainty.

They might not have so much willingness or room in their budget to expand, even if they could.

And you've got companies trying to make decisions all in real time.

So almost like different timelines that a lot of different people have to make decisions off of.

Speaking of people, David Gur, you had on your podcast, The Big Take at Bloomberg, a conversation with two guys who sort of helped drive and run economic policy in the past 20-something years, Robert Zellek and Michael Froman.

And I thought their takes were really interesting about what's going on.

Characterize for me how they

see now what they were trying to do back then.

Well, picking up on what Rachel just said, I think that they're likewise confused about the timetable here.

Something else we also talked a lot about are just the motivations for this trade war.

And so something Bob Zellick told me is you look at what those motivations are.

One is revenue.

And at least at the very beginning here, the president is getting some revenue from these tariffs, but it's an open question how long that'll last if it starts to have a real kind of down effect on the economy.

The other is kind of bringing jobs back to the United States.

This is something that the president really made a point of during the campaign.

This is the objective, and we're seeing him talk about that less and less.

And then the third thing is leverage, and that's the thing that seems to be talked about the most by the president, used the most.

And it's leverage not necessarily on economic matters here.

It has to do with other things entirely.

So that could be politics.

It could be grievances.

And that's kind of led to this kind of ballooning of what the trade war is.

The point that they made that really stood with me is like, when's push going to come to shove and politics going to come to play here?

Because as we've talked about, this used to be the provenance of Congress and lawmakers really took that constitutional duty seriously, that they had a lot of control over what trade policy is going to be.

They've ceded that.

Republicans have ceded that entirely to the president here when it comes to these tariffs.

And so I think they're wondering, as I'm wondering, is there going to be a point at which they get fed up with how this is going?

Is that going to be, again, him using this for leverage that isn't economically driven?

Is it going to be, maybe if it has a really big dampening effect on the economy, when's that going to be?

So that's what they and I are going to be watching for here going forward.

Yeah, and I agree.

It's totally up to Republicans in Congress as to how long they let this go on.

But David, look, you got to point out here that

the three rationales that the White House gives for these tariffs, they're all virtually mutually exclusive, right?

You can't have all three of those things at the same time, man.

No, it's exactly right.

And so I think you have just widespread confusion, confusion among companies and people in this country, of course, people overseas as well, whether they're leaders there or people running businesses there.

And maybe,

far be it from me to sort of divine what the president's thinking, but maybe that's the goal there to have that kind of overarching confusion.

But we have a world now that doesn't know what the deadlines are going to be, if they're going to stick, what the goal is, what the objective is.

And that's kind of compounding the damage that this trade war is doing right now and will be doing going forward.

Yeah.

All right, Rachel, new topic.

And we are absolutely not going to talk about the Federal Reserve building, President Trump's tour yesterday, or Jay Powell correcting the president live on television when the president

sort sort of made stuff up.

What we are going to talk about is who's in that job next?

And here's what I want to ask you.

And I talked to Greg Ipp about this at the Wall Street Journal this week.

There are candidates literally auditioning for that job, and they're doing so on Fox News.

They're doing so in conservative media.

What I want to know is what's it going to be like when the Fed share, the next Fed share, is on Fox News

maybe three times a week, right?

And what does that mean

for the stability of this economy?

Yeah.

I mean, in some ways, it's hard to answer that question because we don't have a recent example of that.

I can't say to you, you know, well, 10 years ago when that was happening, here's what that looks like because it's just such a buck to any sort of precedent that there is a really strong divide for the protection of the economy between the Fed and other policymakers.

What we know, though, from sort of conventional econ wisdom is that you don't mix the two and that there is a reason that the Fed operates in what can sometimes be an overly closed off or overly orchestrated way, but it's because the Fed shares words have such tremendous power.

They can move markets.

They're not meant to be quick TV live hits whenever a specific commentator is inviting them on.

And so I think we don't know and there's a reason we don't know because the protection and safety of the economy is not one that lends itself to quick TV hits from someone that powerful.

It's just not.

That is a good turn of phrase, protection and safety of this economy.

That was Rachel Siegel at the Washington Post.

David Gura at Bloomberg as well.

Thanks, you two.

Thanks, Kyle.

Enjoy your weekend.

Wall Street today.

All the stuff that the three of us were just talking about, the interest rates and the uncertainty and the tariffs and the ajata.

Traders just don't care.

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

GoPro, the wearable camera company, Krispy Kreme, the donut company, Kohl's, the department store chain, not ordinarily corporate birds of a feather, but then came the meme stock reprise echoes of GameStop back in 2021.

Somehow this week, those three and some others became the new generation.

Social media buzz about them sent stock prices soaring and then falling.

Marketplaces.

Savannah Peters explains what's going on this time.

It's not a great time to be an American department store, and Kohl is an especially troubled player in that sector.

Its CEO was fired due to a scandal a couple months ago.

It's just been a steady stream of terrible news for Kohl's.

David Swartz with Morningstar was sort of puzzled to see some recent buzz about Kohl's on Reddit.

He watched its stock price rise gradually at first.

I didn't expect that it would suddenly blow up like it did on this Tuesday.

Day traders flooded into the stock, sending institutional investors who were betting against it scrambling to buy back shares they had dumped, which sent prices soaring even higher.

Up almost 40%.

Rinse and repeat with the other oddball stocks the internet latched onto this week.

Eric Gordon is a professor at the University of Michigan.

This memester thing only works in sort of a market gone crazy.

Where everyday investors feel emboldened to take big risks.

Like in 2021, when near-zero interest rates and COVID stimulus checks helped juice GameStops rally.

This time, Gordon says day traders are exuberant because President Trump's tariffs aren't tanking the economy the way we feared, at least so far.

It's actually one of the many signs that we are in a probably pretty risky stock market.

Where stock prices could be overinflated and due for a slide.

But Steve Sosnik with Interactive Brokers expects retail traders to keep making those risky bets until they stop panning out.

If you're continually throwing darts at a dartboard and they all come up bullseye, of course you're going to keep throwing darts at that dartboard.

In the past, some companies have been able to leverage their meme status into into more capital, like the movie theater chain, AMC.

So, did this week's frenzy provide any lifelines?

No, not really.

Morningstar's David Swartz says the spotlight was too short-lived to meaningfully turn things around for Kohl's or any of the other stocks to journey.

I'm Savannah Peters for Marketplace.

The Fed meets next week.

Rate decision comes on Wednesday.

And while what the Fed does eventually trickle out into the rest of the economy, one of the most direct ways to see that influence is by looking at mortgage rates.

The average 30-year fixed right now sits at 6.74%.

That's according to Fannie Mae.

And it's been kind of stuck there in those high sixes since basically October of last year.

We've talked about what that means for buyers and for sellers, but it's a business challenge for mortgage issuers, too.

Vivian Geller is the chief financial officer at the mortgage firm Pacific Trust Group.

Vivian, great to have you back on the program.

Thank you, Kai.

Always nice to be back.

So I looked it up.

It's been a while.

October of 2022, which was either almost three years ago or forever ago.

Take your pick.

Mortgage rates then were like 7-ish, going to 8-ish.

Home prices were high.

Do a little compare-contrast, would you, here as we sit July of

2025?

Yeah, I think at the time the rates were quite high.

I think we were projecting for them to come down considerably.

I think the next year, we haven't seen a massive dip.

So, you know, we're still kind of in a position where they're perceived as slightly high.

but

probably

little chance of them coming down too much over the next several months.

Right now, they remain level, probably between six, six and a half percent on a traditional loan.

When you go to mortgage and real estate conferences

all over the country, right?

And granted, there's no one national real estate and mortgage market, what's your sense of just the bigger picture?

Well, I'd say there's a fair amount of uncertainty right now, just because of

our politics.

And certainly that doesn't help i i think people that are you know on the sidelines that certainly people that are self-employed or that are worried about their jobs they're probably not going to buy a house anytime soon so that uncertainty is is a little concerning we'll see how it plays out over the next few months so a bit of uncertainty

But where people went during COVID,

certain cities probably in certain states, Florida, Texas,

I think we're seeing a lot more inventory, and that's probably keeping those prices down a touch.

So that's where we kind of sit right now.

When you,

so just to get back on that uncertainty thing, right?

You are the chief financial officer.

It is your job to help plan and figure out what this company is going to be doing and what its finances are going to look like in the next year, 18 months.

How are you doing that?

Or are you just kind of like throwing something at a dartboard and saying, well, we think it's going to be like this?

I mean,

I think, you know, we just go off of a lot of intuition.

And

I think we're going to,

yeah,

I think that we know that we can't really count on a whole lot of certainty over next year.

So we're probably going to err on the side of caution.

You know, there won't be a lot of expansion, but, you know, things are pretty steady right now.

We're going to try and just kind of keep things level.

I don't think it would be a time for us to

look to make any major moves.

That seems to be telling, Vivian, right?

Don't you think?

Yeah.

I mean, look, nobody likes to make any big decisions in any, whatever industry you're in, right?

When there's uncertainty, we're all just going to sit tight and kind of wait for things to play out.

So it's not just real estate.

That's going to be across the board.

and in a lot of industries.

Yeah.

So if I call you in another two and a half, three years,

what's your guess?

What do you think it's going to be like?

Yeah, I think rates will go down.

I think they'll go down next year.

I don't think the Federal Reserve is going to do a whole lot this year.

I think home prices will rise minimally and steadily

on an average.

You know, we still have tons of people with these great interest rates that everyone refinanced into or bought into back in 2020.

So there's not a lot of incentive, you know, to leave your home right now and go to a 6.5% interest rate if you had a 3% interest rate.

And if you don't really know what's going to happen to the market.

So I think

things are going to be steady over the next year.

And then maybe things will pick up as we see rates drop, hopefully in about a year or so.

Vivian Geller.

She's the CFO at Pacific Trust Group here in LA.

Vivian, thanks a lot.

It's always good to check in.

You too, Kai.

Thanks so much.

Take care.

Coming up.

It's helped us pay things off.

It's helped be able to purchase new equipment.

Sunflowers, it turns out, are good for business.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is up 208 today, about 15%, 44,901.

The NASDAQ up 50 points, about 15%, 21,108.

S p 500 gained 25 points, 4 tenths percent, 63.88 fifth record close this week, should you be curious.

For the five days gone by, the Dow up about one and a quarter percent, NASDAQ up 1%, SP 500 banked one and a half percent.

Those meme stocks Savannah was telling us about, Kohl's down 6%, GoPro banked 2.7%.

Krispy Kreme ticker symbol DNU T.

But honestly, they're not really that good as donuts.

Gotta tell you, up 2.5% you're listening to Marketplace.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

Try though we might, it is well-nigh impossible to move through this digital economy of ours without leaving telltale signs of what you've been buying or looking at or almost even thinking about buying along the way.

And capitalism being what it is, those breadcrumbs are digital gold for retailers, companies that have been using what they know about us to advertise to us for years now, obviously, but increasingly they're using it to set the prices they show us.

Marketplace Kimberly Adams explains.

Companies these days have access to a ton of data about us.

And says Pat Garofilo with the American Economic Liberties Project.

Surveillance pricing is the practice of targeting an individual for an individual price based on sensitive data that you know about them.

But what some call surveillance pricing to many retailers is just pricing, and it's everywhere.

It's basically an automated way of doing things that retailers have been doing for decades, if not longer.

Stephanie Martz is general counsel for the National Retail Federation.

Which is gathering information about what customers are willing to pay, what their competitors are charging, and figuring out the best price.

to set for various items.

From coupons and discounts attached to loyalty programs to surge pricing for ride share, according to Trevor Wagoner of the Computer and Communications Industry Association.

The use of prices that are not constant, some form of dynamic pricing, is known to be relatively common.

But in most instances, it's not controversial.

But what's different now is just how much data is floating around out there about us and how good and fast the AI tools are getting at connecting it.

Which is is why several states are working on legislation to limit the practice or make retailers disclose when they do it.

Ida Escamani runs legislative affairs at the State Innovation Exchange.

Because of corporate concentration and more and more of this data sharing, these companies are able to target us in new ways because this data is so intimate.

She's worried companies might use that data not just for discounts, but to charge consumers more when they're in a bind or when they really need to book that flight.

In Washington I'm Kimberly Adams from Marketplace.

You've heard it on this program from April Hemmes in Iowa and Brian Duncan in Illinois and Patrick Smith up in Washington State that American farming just ain't what it used to be.

And there is data to back that up.

A report from the USDA back in February showed total farm cash receipts this year, that's the gross revenue that farms make from sales, is going to be $2 billion less than it was a year earlier.

So to make ends meet, farmers are getting creative.

That's the setup for today's installment of our series, My Economy.

I'm Candace Monaghan, founder of the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival, and we're located in Botetot County, Virginia.

Beaverdam Farm has been in my family since 1900.

We were a dairy farm for 92 years.

We are currently a beef cattle farm, and we have hay and straw.

I never strayed too far from the farm.

I was born on the farm just like my siblings.

A lot of my friends would go out and work the waitressing jobs or cashier or whatever, and I milked cows.

In 2015, my dad decided that he wanted to plant a field of sunflowers and there was no real reason behind it other than the fact that he had always liked the flower.

And back then we had our dairy farm and I was the bookkeeper for the farm and we were kind of struggling a little bit with paying some bills.

You know, farmers are always like, we'll catch up next year.

Like next year we'll be better.

And that never really happened.

So we were sitting there and we were discussing bills and the sunflowers were supposed to bloom in two weeks.

And I said, maybe we could have a sunflower festival.

And he kind of looked at me and was like, do what?

And I said, well, surely if people pay to walk through dead corn in a corn maze, they would pay to walk through beautiful sunflowers.

I kind of set a goal of 300 people.

We charged $5.

That'd give us a little bit of money to put towards something.

We asked our local FFA group, which is Future Farmers of America, at one of the two high schools in the county, to come out.

I said, if people come, they might be hungry.

They might need food or water.

So they brought hot dogs.

I don't know how many trips they made to Kroger that day, but they sold out of all the hot dogs and bought everything that Kroger had.

From there on, it just kept growing.

We went up to 8,000 people, then we hit 10,000, 15, and then we are in the 20,000 people range now.

It's helped us pay things off.

It's helped be able to purchase new equipment.

Last year alone, our vendors made, they sold product at $518,000.

And that was over 120 vendors last year.

Putting that back into small businesses and the economy, it's great to know that once again, we're helping the community and all these other small businesses like us that are around.

I have two children.

They're 16 and 18 now.

And, you know, I always say, okay, y'all have been involved since day one, like 10 years now.

You're used, you see what I do, like you see what can come from it, you know, because I'm going to need somebody to do this when I can't do it anymore.

You know, so that would be my hope that this is something that they can on one day when they circle back around.

Candice Mona and they're running the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival, Botetot County, Virginia.

It is their 10th anniversary this year, by the by, flowers blooming early September-ish, if you're in the neighborhood.

Whether you are back on the family farm or making your way in the big city, this series is your series.

Let us know what's going on.

Would you marketplace.org/slash my economy.

This final note on the way out today, a phrase you haven't heard on this program in a couple of years, I think, sluice.

It's not a phrase.

I guess it's an acronym.

I don't know.

The Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey.

The Federal Reserve goes out and asks senior loan officers what they're seeing out there, what their lending standards are like, that kind of thing.

Because once again, this economy runs on credit, right anyway here is a tidbit from the most recent sluice it's spotted in the Wall Street Journal more banks have raised their standards for issuing credit cards this year made it tougher to get cards and have lowered them new credit card accounts by the way down 5% April through June the first drop in more than a year canary coal mine

all that think about it our theme music was composed by BJ Lederman Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargali Joanne Griffith is the Chief Content Officer.

Neil Scarbo is the Vice President General Manager.

And I'm Kai Risdahl.

Have yourselves a great weekend to everybody.

We are back on Monday.

This is APM.

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.