Let's get a grip on the labor market

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Speaker 3 In which the theme of the program is uncertainty.

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 from American public media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 3 In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Wednesday, today, the 9th day of July.
Good is always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 3 We are going to begin today with a couple of indicators that we haven't really talked about in a while.

Speaker 3 Applications to start new businesses and the number of those applications projected to actually become businesses within a year.

Speaker 3 The June numbers are going to be upon us tomorrow from the Census Bureau, but in the continuing belief that context is everything,

Speaker 3 It must be pointed out that those would-be entrepreneurs are entrepreneuring when the name of the game in this economy is uncertainty, not historically a great backdrop for starting up a new business.

Speaker 3 And yet, Americans have been creating new businesses like crazy since the early days of the pandemic, itself a rather uncertain time, if you recall. Marketplace's Henriette gets us going.

Speaker 5 There are two ways this very uncertain economy might influence people who are thinking about starting a business right now. Sarah Kunst is managing director at Clio Capital.

Speaker 6 One might be that you feel a little bit more nervous about leaving a full-time job, doing something new on your own as a full-time thing.

Speaker 5 If enough people feel that way, we might see fewer of them making the jump to start up that coffee shop they've always dreamed of.

Speaker 5 The other way uncertainty might influence people, Kunst says, is to make them want to have a bit more cash coming in right now.

Speaker 6 So maybe those... cakes that I make for all of my nieces and nephews for their birthdays, maybe that becomes an Instagram account and you're selling the cakes and it becomes a side hustle.

Speaker 5 That version of entrepreneurship is a pretty well-worn path, but there's another one that we don't hear about as often.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's called necessity entrepreneurship.

Speaker 5 Sunday Kim is an assistant professor of management and organization at Johns Hopkins. Many entrepreneurs, he says, start small businesses out of necessity.

Speaker 7 Not because they see a lot of opportunities there, but because it's difficult for them to secure stable jobs.

Speaker 5 That kind of business formation could persist, he says, even though investors are hesitant and borrowing costs are relatively high.

Speaker 5 Plenty of businesses managed to plow through tough times when they were brand new.

Speaker 5 Chris Kessler, owner of Black Flannel Brewing and Distilling Company in Essex, Vermont, had contractors building out his operation in late 2019.

Speaker 8 Their plan was to finish by the end of March 2020 and then start brewing in April and open in May of 2020. And then you know what happened then, right?

Speaker 5 He had to throw more of his own money into the business, but still managed to open a few months late.

Speaker 8 You know, it took a while to find our feet, find our audience, but once we did, then the profitability came. And we just had to be patient and persevere.

Speaker 5 Kessler's advice for would-be business owners: be ready to adapt quickly if forces outside your control alter your plans. I'm Henry App for Marketplace.

Speaker 3 Wall Street on this Wednesday. Shares in established and publicly traded businesses in this economy are doing fine, it seems.
We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 3 that thing I said yesterday at the end of the program, how we were going to have a tariff-free show today?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 about that. First of all, I meant it at the time, I really did.
But second of all, the President of the United States had other ideas.

Speaker 3 More tariff letters went out from the White House today, eight as of right now, and counting.

Speaker 3 In the meanwhile, copper has given back some of the spike it had yesterday, still though up about 9% the past 24 hours after the President's 50% tariff announcement yesterday.

Speaker 3 To be clear here, that is U.S. copper prices, not overseas quotes.
Marketplace's Sabri Benishwar explains what's going on with that.

Speaker 9 This

Speaker 9 is the sound of copper. These are copper plates.

Speaker 9 I use them in art projects for fun, and I ordered a bunch of them when I heard about the tariffs, only to realize that I had already ordered a bunch of them the last time copper tariffs were in the news.

Speaker 9 So pretty soon I'm going to have a lot more copper than I need, which is exactly what the U.S. has right now.

Speaker 11 The U.S. had been fucking up huge amounts of copper that it didn't really need from around the world.

Speaker 9 Albert McKenzie is a copper analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. President Trump made it clear months ago that copper tariffs were coming, and so U.S.
buyers have been stockpiling a lot.

Speaker 11 One year worth of copper has now been imported within the six-month timeframe.

Speaker 9 Ola Hansen is head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank in Denmark. The U.S.
imports a lot of copper even in normal times.

Speaker 11 The U.S. imports more than half the copper that they need on an annual basis.

Speaker 9 But while the US is a copper metal importer, it is actually an exporter of copper raw materials, copper concentrate scrap, says Benchmarks McKenzie.

Speaker 11 In theory, if it could process all of those raw materials, it wouldn't need to import. So it is a processing deficit rather than a raw material deficit.

Speaker 9 So what the U.S. would need would be more copper smelting and refining plants.
That's where ore and raw materials are turned into high purity copper. The U.S.

Speaker 9 only has two smelters up and and running right now.

Speaker 11 We'd have to restart a smelter that is on care and maintenance or expand existing operations or potentially increase the amount of recycling that is done.

Speaker 9 Mike Moetz is a professor of metallurgical engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. One issue.

Speaker 11 None of those are an easy thing to do and will be done in time frame of months.

Speaker 9 Restarting a mothballed smelter could take a couple years. Building one from scratch could take a decade.
The White House has proposed building them on military bases to cut down on permitting time.

Speaker 9 But for whoever would build a smelter, there's still the same question as around most of the president's tariffs.

Speaker 11 How long is this tariff going to last?

Speaker 9 Maybe not long enough to justify a multi-billion dollar investment. And while we're waiting two to ten years for more copper smelters, we'll be paying a lot more for copper.

Speaker 9 In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace.

Speaker 3 I personally would listen to a whole podcast about Sabri's use of industrial metals. But failing that, you can listen to our podcast, marketplace.org, or the platform of your choice.

Speaker 3 Just follow us there.

Speaker 3 If and or when you find yourself in the liquor aisle the next time you're in your local piggly wiggly, you may may well see some names on some labels that you know from television or the movies.

Speaker 3 George Clooney, Kendall Jenner, The Rock, to name just a couple. For all of their talents, though, not a trained tequila distiller among them.

Speaker 3 The new new thing for celebrities? Wireless mobile service. Think Ryan Reynolds at Mint Mobile, Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, and the other guy from Smartless.

Speaker 3 Kelsey Griffiths at Bloomberg has been writing about how telecom is the new tequila. Kelsey, welcome to the program.

Speaker 14 Thanks so much for having me, Kai.

Speaker 3 So how do these people like Ryan Reynolds and the Smartlist Gang,

Speaker 3 how do they just become like wireless experts instead of just the celebrities that they are?

Speaker 14 So this is kind of an arrangement similar to how a celebrity might start a tequila brand. The celebrity doesn't have to become

Speaker 14 an expert and start a distillery or grow their own agave. These celebrities can actually work with middlemen, and those are the companies that have the expertise in the wireless industry.

Speaker 14 They have the relationships with the big networks,

Speaker 14 and they're able to kind of work as a wireless reseller.

Speaker 3 So, so they're reselling from like T-Mobile and all that, Jazz, right? Is that the deal?

Speaker 14 That's exactly right.

Speaker 3 How does it work? I mean, are they just like getting spectrum that T-Mobile, just because that's the one that comes to mind, is not using?

Speaker 14 Yeah, exactly. These companies are known as MVNOs or mobile virtual network operators.
And so, the MVNO buys excess network capacity from the carriers like T-Mobile.

Speaker 14 And then the customers of the MVNO are able to use that network on a slightly more limited basis than you might get if you were outright a T-Mobile customer.

Speaker 14 You might find that your wireless bill is lower if you go with something like Mint Mobile, that is an MVNO, but you also might find that your traffic is a little bit slower, or you might not have the same priority as you you would as a regular T-Mobile customer.

Speaker 3 It was interesting to me also in this piece that

Speaker 3 there are

Speaker 3 MVNOs, if I could use the lingo, catering to really specific groups. Like there's a Christian MVNO, there's like a catering to seniors MVNO, there's a bunch of them.

Speaker 14 That's right. These companies take on the marketing aspects that the national carriers typically don't do.

Speaker 14 So the national carrier's business plan is really to just kind of have these one-size-fits-all plans. If it's too expensive or if it's not to your liking, that's okay.

Speaker 14 You can go to one of these resellers that might cater more to your niche interests or your niche budget.

Speaker 3 Let's say then that I'm a customer of Mint Mobile or Trump Mobile, right? Because this is what the president and his family are doing.

Speaker 3 And service goes down. Do I call the White House, as it were, or do I call T-Mobile?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so you wouldn't ever interact with the back-end carrier,

Speaker 14 your company, the big carrier, exactly. So you wouldn't interact with them.

Speaker 14 You would interact with the company that you pay your bill through, and they would be the ones to kind of deal with any sort of service outage with their commercial arrangement.

Speaker 3 So understanding that you're a telecommunications reporter, not a brand expert reporter, it does seem that like the smartless guys and even the president, they're just slapping their names on stuff, right?

Speaker 14 Yeah, you know, I think that these folks might describe it a little bit more elegantly, but ultimately this is a licensing arrangement. And it is, like you said, a marketing deal.

Speaker 14 So these folks are able to reach a niche population that, again, the major wireless carriers might not.

Speaker 14 And it also gives the smartless guys or even the president's family a way to feel like they're connecting with fans or with people who maybe want to have them in their lives on a daily basis.

Speaker 3 Or voters, even.

Speaker 14 Or voters.

Speaker 3 So what do you think? If the barriers to entry entry are as low as they seem to be,

Speaker 3 this is just, I mean, being your own mobile thing is like the new new thing, right?

Speaker 14 Definitely. I would say this is a hot business trend, and I think we'll only see more celebrities and

Speaker 14 really well-known names trying to get into the wireless business. One reason for that is that it is a recurring payment.

Speaker 14 And in some cases, these companies collect a lot of data, and so that can be useful to companies down the road.

Speaker 3 I am so going to start a marketplace wireless thing. I'm just saying.

Speaker 14 Marketplace Wireless. It has a ring to it.

Speaker 3 It totally does. Kelsey Griffiths at Bloomberg.
Kelsey, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time.

Speaker 14 Thank you.

Speaker 3 We have perhaps all become more familiar than we would care to be with the mysteries of the global supply chain, thanks to A, the pandemic, and B, companies big and small trying to make their way through President Trump's tariffs.

Speaker 3 It's with that as background that I tell you wholesale inventories in May, stuff that wholesalers have on hand to sell to businesses that then get sold to us in one form or another.

Speaker 3 Those wholesale inventories overall were down three-tenths of 1% in May, right about what people had been guessing. So we have called Kalina Bruce.

Speaker 3 She runs Nor Lux Candle Bar up in Seattle to get a little context. She has both retail and wholesale customers.

Speaker 12 It is our slower season in general. So

Speaker 12 we are seeing a steady but slower group of folks that are coming in and doing candle pouring.

Speaker 12 We recently had the opportunity to open a long-term pop-up.

Speaker 12 I would say our biggest kind of source of revenue right now are our wholesale accounts and our corporate and bulk gifting options where people are ordering candles for special events.

Speaker 12 I would say our biggest challenge is consistently cash flow.

Speaker 12 I think one thing that can be really challenging for us is because we do a lot of wholesale and bulk orders, we may have a really big order and we have to, you know, take care of all of the supplies, materials, and expenses up front and then we don't actually see revenue from that for two months

Speaker 12 I'm putting in a lot of hours myself I am driving all the time

Speaker 12 I first of all am a mom so my day starts with me getting my kiddos to where they need to go and then I may be at one location for half of the day and then at another location sometimes I'm doing deliveries like if we have a local order and they'd rather have their items delivered rather than shipped, I'm doing that.

Speaker 12 So I am spending a lot of time

Speaker 12 commuting.

Speaker 12 I talk about self-care a lot and practicing self-care, but I think that I need to do a better job of that.

Speaker 12 For me, I really do enjoy pouring candles and I tend to find days where the shop is really quiet and I'll go in and pour.

Speaker 12 And I have my little guilty pleasures of watching my reality shows and things like that. Currently I'm on this love island tip.

Speaker 12 I think we are we're also probably gonna have some watch parties at the shop as we're nearing the finale.

Speaker 12 I don't know if that's just you know me being a creative or me being a business owner or really just like me really needing some more self-care outlets but I am really thinking about the business all the time.

Speaker 12 You know, we have our products and we have our services and are there other things that we can add to really take our business to the next level.

Speaker 3 Kalina Bruce, Noir Lux. It's a candle bar up in Seattle.

Speaker 3 Coming up.

Speaker 15 Slowing their pace of hiring, reduced their team sizes, have their teams working fewer hours.

Speaker 3 Measuring what companies try to manage, but first, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 3 Dow Industrial is up 217 today. That's points.
Percentage-wise, about a half percent, 44,458. The NASDAQ gained 192 points.
That is 9 tenths percent, 20,611.

Speaker 3 The SP 500 added 37 points, 6 tenths percent, 62, and 63. NVIDIA's dominance in artificial intelligence was front and center today.

Speaker 3 The chip design company became the first publicly traded company to hit $4 trillion in market value.

Speaker 3 The most valuable company on the planet, beating some of the biggest players in tech to that $4 trillion mark. Apple shares there grew about 1.
Microsoft picked up 1.4%.

Speaker 3 Kelsey Griffiths and I were talking about celebrities and wireless. T-Mobile, which acquired Mint Mobile last year for for like $1.3 billion.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Ryan Reynolds. Slid about 1.5%.
Comcast, lost about 1%. Bonds up yield on the tenure.
T-Note. Down 4.34%.

Speaker 3 You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 3 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
While the housing news of late has been discouraging if you're a buyer, mortgage rates, sticky high prices, you all know the refrain. If you're a renter,

Speaker 3 not so bad. After the double-digit rent increases of a couple of years ago, rents have gotten pretty stable, actually.

Speaker 3 Redfin's got some new analysis that shows the median asking rent, and this is nationally now, has actually gone down a bit the past four months. The big reason why?

Speaker 3 Construction of new apartments is near a 50-year high, although as Marketplace's Smith Fields reports, it is starting to slow down.

Speaker 18 This is your classic Econ 101 supply and demand story. There's not enough rental housing to meet demand, so prices rise.
Then developers start building a bunch of new apartments.

Speaker 18 And once all those new apartments go on the market, rents start to come down a little.

Speaker 19 It's encouraging when the data matches up to theory, so very exciting to see that when you build a lot of new apartments, apartments become cheaper over time.

Speaker 18 Still, Jenny Schutz at Arnold Ventures says rents aren't getting cheaper everywhere or for everyone.

Speaker 19 Where we really don't see much softening is at the very bottom of the market. And much of this is just because the lowest cost apartments are charging about what they need to in order to break even.

Speaker 18 There's also a lot of competition for those cheaper apartments because there just aren't that many of them.

Speaker 18 Alexander Herman at Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies says where you live also makes a big difference.

Speaker 10 Boston's the poster child for rents declining right now, right? And there are other markets, especially in the South, but also in the West, where you see rent declines.

Speaker 10 But But every single market in the Northeast and Midwest continue to see their rents rise.

Speaker 18 That's because in those markets there hasn't been nearly as much new construction. Almost half of all apartments finished last year were in the south.
But now nationwide.

Speaker 10 Because of high interest rates, because of this modest rent growth, and because of competition from new units, there's been a significant slowdown in apartment construction really over the past year.

Speaker 18 That's happening as more people than ever are renting, largely because it's so expensive to buy.

Speaker 14 The two markets are very, very linked.

Speaker 14 Lori Goodman at the Urban Institute says given how high home prices and mortgage rates are, it is now substantially less expensive to rent than it is to buy a new home for most people in most parts of the country.

Speaker 18 But she says as multifamily construction slows down, rents will start to go up again, and that balance is likely to shift. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

Speaker 3 Let's talk here for a minute about data, because with all the trade policy-induced chaos and uncertainty out there, it is nice to have something concrete to lean on.

Speaker 3 Our data set of the day today is the labor market.

Speaker 3 And while the June jobs report that we got last Thursday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was good, better than most of us had expected, TBH, there were some gray areas, shall we say.

Speaker 3 Government hiring, for example, was disproportionately high. And while the unemployment rate did indeed fall, that happened in no small part because people were dropping out of the workforce.
So.

Speaker 3 We set Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman to the task of finding other ways to measure the health of the American labor market right now.

Speaker 13 BLS jobs data is still the gold standard for economists, business planners, and Fed policymakers, but it has its drawbacks.

Speaker 13 First, says economist Sean Snaith at the University of Central Florida, the data is lagging. It's collected and analyzed several weeks before it's released.

Speaker 20 You're looking backwards and you're sort of looking through a glass darkly. This is preliminary data.
It's going to be revised. It's going to change.

Speaker 13 Plus, it's survey-based, using a statistical sample sample of 120,000 employers, 60,000 households that's extrapolated to the whole economy.

Speaker 13 By contrast, payroll processing platforms can crunch data on millions of workers in near real time.

Speaker 13 The company HomeBase manages schedules, time tracking, pay, and hiring for more than 2 million small business employees, says CEO John Waldman, and can sometimes anticipate big pivots in the economy.

Speaker 15 Small businesses provide a really early signal well before larger businesses, frankly well before the BLS.

Speaker 15 In times of economic volatility, small businesses operate cautiously, and we have seen that throughout 2025.

Speaker 15 Slowing their pace of hiring, reduced their team sizes, had their teams working fewer hours.

Speaker 13 Payroll processor UKG similarly handles pay and HR for more than 6 million hourly shift workers nationwide.

Speaker 13 Here's what economist Edward Hearn sees in all the time cards and employee counts he he tracks.

Speaker 11 Employers being cautious in hiring, employees hesitant to look for work or quit or separate from work at all.

Speaker 13 Online job sites like Glassdoor have a lot of real-time data about job openings, pay, and hiring trends.

Speaker 13 Glassdoor economist Daniel Zhao closely tracks the Labor Department's nationwide jobless claims data.

Speaker 13 The weekly report counts all workers who file a new claim or continue on unemployment week after week without finding a job.

Speaker 21 Continuing claims are starting to rise. That's signaling hiring is slowing down.

Speaker 21 It's getting harder for people on unemployment insurance to come off of it because they're finding it harder to get a new job.

Speaker 13 At Glassdoor, Zhao also has access to anecdotal evidence, opinions shared by employees and job seekers.

Speaker 21 One thing that we hear from many employees is that they feel burned out, they feel overworked.

Speaker 13 Predicting where the economy and the job market are going is hard. At any given time, different data sets can be a key to predicting the future or a misleading distraction.

Speaker 13 Sean Snaith directs the Institute for Economic Forecasting at his university, but he's humble about what he can accomplish.

Speaker 20 You use models, you use math and statistics, but those are imperfect. It's science, but it's also art.

Speaker 20 One of Snaith's go-to data sets is the BLS's Jolts Report, and in particular, I look at the quits rate, refer to it myself as the Johnny Paycheck Index, who famously sang the country's song, Take This Job and Shove It.

Speaker 20 It shows the willingness of people to voluntarily leave a job.

Speaker 13 Right now, quits are low, indicating people don't feel confident about finding a new job. Layoffs are also low, though Snaith points out, that's a lagging indicator.

Speaker 13 Companies don't usually start laying off workers until the economy is already contracting.

Speaker 20 We're currently forecasting for the unemployment rate to drift higher in the year ahead, payroll employment growth to continue to slow.

Speaker 13 Still, he says, by historical standards, the labor market remains strong. Most people who want a job have one, their pay is rising, and they're continuing to spend.

Speaker 13 I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

Speaker 3 This final note on the way out today, in which we're not keeping track, but we are kind of keeping track. The minutes of the most recent Fed meeting, the one in mid-June, came out today.

Speaker 3 Mentions of the word tariff?

Speaker 3 31 of them. We are going to take that as progress because it popped up 32 times in the main minutes.
You take your wins where you can get them, people.

Speaker 3 Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Justin Bueller, Drew Jostin, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Torado, and Becca Weinman.

Speaker 3 Jeff Peters is the manager of media production, and I'm Kai Risdall. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 3 This is APM.

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