Looking for economic clues in corporate America

marketplace podcast is supported by YubiCo, makers of the YubiKey.

Protecting the personal and business applications and accounts that people and companies rely on every day, the YubiKey stops AI-powered cyber attacks, online identity scams, fraud, and account takeovers.

It provides powerful protection, and it's easy to use.

Simply tap your YubiKey to log in securely to everything, from email to finance to productivity applications across all of your devices.

UbiKey, still undefeated, the original passkey.

More at ubiquo.com.

This episode is brought to you by Huggies Little Movers.

It's fun having a baby that loves to move, but it can be challenging to find a diaper that can keep up with them.

Huggies Little Movers is designed to move with your baby with either the double grip strips or the new HugFit 360 degree waistband.

You can be confident relying on Huggies Little Movers for your active little ones.

Huggies Little Movers, made with double grip strips or the the new HugFit 360-degree waistband, so your little double can keep moving like you.

Huggies, we got you, baby.

One looks for clues about this economy where one can find them.

Today, it's in the books of corporate America from American Public Media.

This is Market Plans

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl.

It is Monday, today 21 July.

Good as it always is to have you along, everybody.

This is going to be a fairly light data week coming up.

We'll get home sales, both new and used, durable goods orders, a couple of speeches by Fed officials.

That's about it.

Never fear, though, because in the absence of A-list economic indicators, we are going to get a whole lot of information about how corporate America is doing.

Quarterly earnings reports from the likes of Coca-Cola and GM, Lockheed Martin, Alaska and American Airlines, Alphabet, Tesla as well.

We heard from Verizon today they did pretty well.

Also, Stellantis, which didn't.

The Carmaker, which reports in Europe, it's a conglomerate of Peugeot, Fiat, and Chrysler, lost $2.7 billion in the first half of the year.

Some of that, it said, thanks to tariffs, and it warned of more pain to come.

Marketplace Mitchell Hartman gets us going with what we might learn from the rest of this week's reports.

About 15% of SP 500 companies have reported quarterly earnings so far.

And says Mike Dixon at Horizon Investments, Overall, the early read from a corporate fundamentals perspective is quite strong.

Starting with the big banks that reported last week, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America.

They came in fairly strong, most beat expectations.

Says Chris Haverland at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

He expects a lot more beating of Wall Street expectations as the earnings roll in.

But he points out, the bar has been set pretty low coming into this earnings season.

Many companies actually cut their earnings predictions in the past few months as uncertainty mounted about how much the Trump tariffs would hurt their bottom lines.

Rob Hayworth at U.S.

Bank Asset Management says now analysts want to know.

Are companies starting to see impacts from tariffs?

Are those costs being borne by themselves?

And so it's reducing their profits and profit margins.

Are they passing them on to consumers?

Or are they getting their suppliers to eat those costs?

Hayworth expects to see the biggest impacts on industrial and healthcare companies.

Steel and automotive tariffs very directly impacting the consumer discretionary sector.

There's talk of significant tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

Expectations are high for big tech, but not necessarily all of big tech, says Mike Dixon at Horizon Investments.

We've got Apple, Tesla, and Google, which are still down on the year.

And then, of course, you've got NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, you know, up 15, 20%.

Now, remember our oft-repeated adage, the stock market is not the economy, but it does reflect what people and businesses are doing in the economy, spending or saving, investing, or hunkering down, says Rob Hayworth at U.S.

Bank.

We do think of this right now as glass half full.

There's consternation in consumer and small business sentiment, but the activity remains strong.

Weekly retail sales, a solid labor market, solid wage growth.

Meaning, companies can count on fairly strong demand to boost their bottom lines.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

Traders today were

fine with what they're seeing from corporate America.

Not very enthusiastic either way, up or down.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

There's a saying in colder parts of the country, or so I'm told, I mean, I live in Los Angeles, but there's a saying in more northerly climes that when it comes to driving, there are two seasons, winter and construction, which means that as we sit here in mid to late July, it's road construction season, which also means it's road closure season.

And when that happens, when towns and cities replace sewers or sidewalks or repave roads or what have you, residents and local businesses do get the benefits when all that construction is done.

But during, those businesses can pay a pretty significant short-term cost.

From his hometown, Burlington, Vermont, Marketplace's Henri Epp takes it from there.

It's been like this for well over a year now, and construction is supposed to go on for at least another year.

Ray Taylor Burns lives in an apartment on Main Street.

It feels like a wasteland instead of a lively downtown block.

For businesses, that's hit the bottom line.

Kara Tobin owns Honey Road, an upscale Mediterranean restaurant on Main Street.

I mean, we went from being the best location in Burlington to the worst location in Burlington overnight.

Tobin estimates her revenue has declined during construction by 20 to 30 percent.

The restaurant industry already operates on really small margins.

Everyone knows that.

So to lose 20 to 30 percent of our revenue was huge.

Tobin says she no longer counts on walk-in customers.

She's closed her patio seating, taken out loans, and cut her own pay.

Down the block, the music venue Nectars, famous for being the place where the band Fish got its start, has closed for the summer.

And a breakfast place called the Cafe Hot has cut back too.

So it got to a a point where we had to lay off staff, got to a point where we've reduced from a seven-day schedule to a five-day schedule.

Travis Walker Hodkin is the cafe's co-owner.

And it seems like there's a huge sacrifice being asked of this city for the future of this city.

And the small businesses are receiving the bill.

There's some evidence that large projects like this can have lasting effects on small businesses.

Ingling Fan is a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Minnesota.

She conducted a study that found even after a project ends, restaurants especially see lower revenue.

Some of the previous customers

may identify new businesses to visit and are no longer going to return as customers to some of those smaller businesses.

Unfortunately, there's always some pain in all of these projects, no matter what you do, especially if they're much bigger.

Dominic Longobarty is president of the American Public Works Association.

The best way to minimize that pain, he says, is to communicate the overall goal of a project.

Make sure that the people know, well, it's a short-term inconvenience, I'll say, the benefits you hope are planned out to be long-term.

In Burlington, the city's public works director, Chapin Spencer, has been trying to make that case, that doing the work now will pay dividends down the line.

During my lifetime, we will not need to touch touch these sewer or water mains again.

And that will allow the future vitality of this city for many, many years.

Spencer says the city has been trying to help businesses by offering some interest-free loans, free parking downtown, and a marketing campaign.

And soon, parts of Main Street will open to car traffic on nights and weekends.

Some business owners here feel like the city's communication efforts throughout the project have fallen short, making it hard for them to plan.

But Kara Tobin, owner of the restaurant Honey Road, says she's starting to see signs that the disruption will eventually end.

The question, she says, is whether her restaurant and the neighboring businesses can survive until then.

In Burlington, Vermont, I'm Henrietta for Marketplace.

While premiums for 2026 haven't been finalized as of yet, if you buy your health insurance through healthcare.gov or through your state marketplace, your premium is probably going up next year.

According to some new analysis from the health policy nonprofit KFF, it looks like insurers that sell Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, if you like, plans, are going to be raising rates by about 15%, the biggest premium increase in seven years if it happens.

And the enhanced subsidies that the federal government's been offering since 2021 are probably going away.

Marketplace Samantha Fields has more on that one.

When health insurance companies want to raise premiums, they have to submit paperwork to state regulators justifying why.

Usually these filings are just filled with a lot of math and numbers.

Cynthia Cox at KFF says sometimes insurers also include a little narrative explanation about why they want to raise rates.

This year, some of that narrative is the same as usual.

The cost of health care has been going up, and companies want to pass more of it on to consumers.

But what's different for 2026 is that we're also seeing insurers talk a lot about federal policy.

Tariffs, for one, and how they might push the cost of prescription drugs and medical devices even higher.

But the main reason insurers plan to raise rates is that they expect Congress to let the enhanced subsidies that have made it a lot more affordable for people to buy ACA insurance expire.

Matthew Fiedler at the Brookings Institution says if that happens, many enrollees are going to pay a lot more for their coverage.

Some of those people are going to decide to drop their coverage as a result.

And insurers are assuming that the people who are most likely to drop their coverage are people who are relatively healthy, and that people who are sicker are more likely to keep theirs.

So, insurers are raising premiums to account for the fact that the typical enrollee in 2026 will now be someone who needs more care than the typical enrollee in 2025.

Congress first approved the enhanced subsidies during the height of the pandemic in 2021.

Since then, ACA enrollment has doubled from $12 million to $24 million.

Cynthia Cox at KFF says: with the rate increases insurers are planning and without the more generous subsidies, the average person will pay about 75% more to buy insurance for 2026.

Let's say that we have a family of three making $110,000 a year.

So right now they get a subsidy to help them with their monthly premium costs.

They're still paying almost $800 a month.

Next year, without the subsidy, she says that same plan would cost them about $1,600 a month if they can afford to keep it.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

Coming up.

But I don't think they're going anywhere.

I say build them a stadium and move here.

Same team, different city.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is off 19 points today.

That's less than a tenth of a percent, 44,323.

NASDAQ picked up 78 points, about 4 tenths percent, closed to 20,974.

The S ⁇ P 500 up eight points, about a tenth percent, 6,305.

First ever close above 6,300, should you be curious.

So Lantas, we talked about in the Mitchell Hartman lead, shares, even after that $2.7 billion loss, up 1.5%

because capitalism.

Other car makers, General Motors flat, Tesla down about a third of 1%.

Ford banked 1.3%.

The Day Verizon, we talked about that as well.

Up 4% on the day after beating expectations.

Bonds up, yield on the tenure.

Tinot down 4.37%.

You're listening to Marketplace.

This episode is brought to you by Huggies Little Movers.

It's fun having a baby that loves to move, but it can be challenging to find a diaper that can keep up with them.

Huggies Little Movers is designed to move with your baby with either the double grip strips or the new HugFit 360-degree waistband.

You can be confident relying on Huggies Little Movers for your active little ones.

Huggies Little Movers, made with double grip strips or the new HugFit 360-degree waistband.

So your little double can keep moving like you.

Huggies, we got you, baby.

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.

This marketplace podcast is supported by HIMS.

With HIMS, you can access personalized prescription treatment options for ED.

HIMS offers access to ED treatment options that cost 95% less than brand names if prescribed.

You shouldn't have to go out of your way to feel like yourself.

HIMS brings expert care straight to you, with complete online access to personalized treatments that put your goals first.

This isn't one size-fits-all care that forgets you in the waiting room.

It's your health and goals put first, with real medical providers making sure you get what you need to get results.

To get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ED, visit HIMS.com slash marketplace.

That's HIMS.com slash marketplace for your free online visit.

HIMS.com slash Marketplace.

Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan.

Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality.

Prescription required.

See website for details, restrictions, and important safety information.

This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

So, London was great and all.

It's always nice to get out of the studio and do some reporting.

But I did miss one of my favorite days on the economic calendar while I was gone.

The Federal Reserve's Beige book came out last week.

We get it eight times a year.

It's a broad, anecdotal-ish look at how economic activity out there is changing.

And there were items on the usual suspects, retail and consumer activity, corporate investment.

Also, the agriculture economy.

Strained is a word that was used.

Falling repayment rates on farm loans, that popped up.

Weak conditions is a quote.

As Daniel Ackerman reports, it is tough out there for farmers right now.

Clayton Johnson farms in the southwest corner of Minnesota.

I farm with my dad.

We farm corn, soybeans, a little bit of oats, and a little alfalfa.

Plus a few cows and pigs.

So we got a little bit of it all.

Johnson says he's happy with the growing season so far.

In my little area, we've been just getting by with timely rains.

But even though the weather has been cooperating for Johnson, the market forces impacting his operation, not so much.

He says the cost for fertilizer and pesticide applications has been rising.

Honestly, it's scary.

Input costs keep going up.

Our commodity prices prices keep going down.

Low prices for commodity crops are a problem for farmers all over the country right now.

Corn, soybean, and wheat prices are all fetching lower prices than they were three years ago.

Brandon Gerrish is an extension specialist at Texas A ⁇ M University.

He says some wheat growers chose not to harvest their crop at all this year and let the livestock have at it instead.

Beef prices are at a record high right now.

Years like this, where wheat prices are low and beef cattle prices are high, we see a lot more producers grazing out their wheat rather than bringing it to grain harvest.

Mitchell Hora farms wheat as well as corn, rye, and soybeans in southeast Iowa.

And while he's noticed the rising input costs...

For our operation that's not that huge of a deal.

Because Hora says he's invested in building up the health of his soil.

He rotates his cash crops through different fields each growing season, and he plants cover crops over the winter.

We've been doing these things now for more than a a decade very diligently, and that's led us to be able to reduce our fertilizer usage by about 50%

and reduce our pesticide usage by nearly 75%.

Horace says that's improved his farm's resilience against both weather conditions and economic ones.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

People running arts organizations are most certainly not immune from the cascade of uncertainty that the Trump administration has brought to this economy.

Earlier this year, the White House ordered the National Endowment for the Arts to cancel grants across the country, and in its 2026 budget, the administration has eliminated funding for that agency agency altogether.

That is, of course, a big deal for the organizations that get NEA grants, as our parent company has in the past.

But it affects people downstream of all that, too.

Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy.

My name is Monica Leo, and I'm with Eulenspiegel Puppet Theater.

That's E-U-L-E-N-S-P-I-E-G-E-L Puppet Theater.

Don't ask me why we picked a name that's so hard to spell and pronounce.

And we're in West Liberty, Iowa.

I did not actually ever plan to run a puppet theater.

I had these puppets sitting around and I happened to have a neighbor and she came over one day and she said you know we should do some puppet shows with those puppets.

She really only really wanted to do it as a hobby and when people started wanting to pay us to do shows

she was kind of through.

And I ended up with one

artistic partner that I worked with for 31 years.

We'd always worked out of our homes, but you get kind of tired of stumbling over a puppet stage every time you try to go to the kitchen.

And settling in this little town has been the best thing that could ever have happened to us.

We do a lot of shows a year.

We also do a lot of school residencies.

We'll go into a school, a lot of times it's three days, where we work with kids and create puppet shows with them and also perform for them and have them perform for the school.

In the past, I will say that our touring fees covered 75% of every year's budget, and the rest of it came from local people coming to shows and also from grant support.

Ever since the pandemic, that has changed a little bit.

I'd say still probably at least 50% and usually 60 to 65 percent of our income comes from touring, but more of it comes from grants and donations now than in the past.

Right now, we are really uncertain about some of our funding sources, especially things like the National Endowment for the Arts, which of course funds all the state arts councils.

We'll have to figure out how to make up that difference.

I do, you know, having done this for 50 years now,

It's, I know, I know we're going to do it.

I know the money is going to come from somewhere.

I just don't know where.

Puppetry is a very powerful art form.

People do not really realize it's, in my opinion, now I'm probably going to irritate some legitimate theater people, but in my opinion, it's more powerful than just human theater because it deals in symbolism.

And the other thing I love about puppetry is that

you can be a jack of all trades.

You can write, you can build, you can perform, you can make music,

you can do everything.

That was Monica Leo.

She runs Eulenspiegel Puppet Theater in West Liberty, Iowa.

Let me just say, it is not pronounced the way it looks on the page.

We cannot do this series without you, you know.

So let us know how things are going, would you?

Marketplace.org/slash my economy.

The Major League Baseball team, formerly known as the Oakland Athletics, sits dead last in the American League West.

That, though, is arguably the least of their worries.

After 56 years and four World Series titles, and that book Moneyball about how brilliantly efficient they were, the A's have finally made good on their decades-long threat to leave Oakland if they didn't get a new stadium, which they did not get.

The plan is that come 2028, the A's, just the A's, thank you very much, or athletics, no Oakland included, are going to become the Las Vegas A's in a spiffy new 33,000-seat stadium right on the strip.

Until then, though, the team is currently playing major league baseball in a very minor league part, about 90 miles to the east in Sacramento.

Marketplace of Mount Levin has that one.

On a June Saturday night in Sacramento, about 8,300 people watched the A's take on the Cleveland Guardian, 60% of Sutter Health Park's capacity.

That's fewer empty seats than an A's game in the Oakland Coliseum the past few years.

But a fuller stadium doesn't necessarily mean a louder one, even when a little kid leads the crowd in the A's signature channel on the jumbo truck.

The A's have banned the drums and voodoo Zuelas that were the rowdy rowdy hallmarks of the Oakland days.

The vibe in Sacramento is more, hey look, there's a baseball game going on.

It's nice.

Yeah, this definitely feels like AAA, right?

It was small,

intimate, but the Coliseum was a lot raucous, you know, a lot more fun.

Down the right-field line, Scott McDonald and his two sons watched the A's warm up.

Raised in an Oakland suburb, McDonald grew up going to the Coliseum.

Like a lot of old school Bay Area fans in attendance, he felt a a tinge of guilt buying a ticket.

I swore him up and I said I wouldn't come once they moved.

Part of the lure though, McDonald's two boys can lean over the wall and basically touch an A's play.

In a cozy minor league ballpark, there really are no bad seats.

You don't have to pay through the nose to avoid the nosebleeds.

Actually, tickets were pretty cheap, like $33, and we're in the front row.

Giovanna Magana is in the concourse behind home plate, waiting for her dad to buy her a beer.

She's also from the bay and used to tailgate outside the Coliseum.

Official ticket prices through the A's box office are among the most expensive in baseball, but the secondary market on sites like StubHub can be very cheap.

Although if you're expecting minor league bargains at the concession stand.

So a house double cocktail is about $28

and a regular house cocktail.

This one shot is $15.

I don't remember the drinks being this expensive or the beer.

Some of those higher prices are for fancier beers.

The beer garden near the Leftfield Pavilion now features some upscale Bay Area craft offerings.

Melissa Pehin and Chris Ryan used to spend an inning or two at the beer garden during minor league River Cat games here.

They like the upgraded selections.

Because we love Piny the Elder and that definitely wasn't here before.

I do wish there was more like local Sacramento beers here though.

Ryan was born and raised in Sacramento and a lifelong lifelong A's fan.

Both he and PN are excited the team is here in their city.

Just wish the A's seemed as excited to be here too.

Before the season, the A's announced their official name would not include the word Sacramento.

Neither would the Jerseys.

Yes.

Yes.

Because how long could this be, this residency, possibly three years?

I think minimum three years, max five years.

So I have no pride in the city that you're in.

Seems like they're just like using us.

Lots of Sacramentans feel this way.

They're also offended by the huge visit Vegas ad on the left field wall, which may be why A's home game attendance and the buzz inside the ballpark are sagging.

Sure, the team's in last place, but Sacramento's NBA team, the Kings, has been bad for decades and still draws raucous sellouts.

4915's in your total.

In the absence of anything that actually says Sacramento on it, the hottest item at the OnJack merchandise store is the $40 t-shirt Stacey and Brian Peck just bought.

A local landmark is emblazoned in green and gold on the front.

Sacramento Bridge.

The Tower Bridge.

The Tower Bridge.

And it's the only thing that shows the A's colors and the A's logos coming to Sacramento.

The A's have said there's no mention of Sacramento on their merch because they don't want to mislead fans into thinking this is anything but temporary.

Stacy Peck, though, she's holding out hope for something more permanent.

But I don't think they're going anywhere.

I say build them a stadium and move here.

The A's lost to Cleveland that night 4-2.

The Sacramento A's this year so far though, technically undefeated.

I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today, the last word, scorekeeping-wise, at least, on the GOP's big tax cut law.

The Congressional Budget Office is out with its latest estimate of how much it's going to cost, that is, how much extra the government is going to have to borrow to pay for it.

$3.4 trillion over 10 years.

That matches earlier estimates.

10 million fewer people with health care as well.

And that is going to bring costs of its own.

Amir Babawi, Caitlin Ech, John Gordon, Noia Carr, Amanda Peacher, and Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff.

Kelly Silvera is the news director, and I'm Kai Rizdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

Is it time to reimagine your future?

The right business skills may make a difference in your career.

At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world.

We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication.

And you can apply these skills right away.

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

Learn more at capella.edu.