WWJPD?

Cash flow crunch?

OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $100,000 right when you need it.

Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat.

With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently.

Apply today at ondeck.com.

Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow.

Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by Ondeck or Celtic Bank.

On Deck does not lend in North Dakota.

All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

This podcast is supported by Odo.

Some say Odo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth.

Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable.

And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite.

So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstock building blocks for business.

Odoo, exactly what businesses need.

Sign up at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

I'm just going to say it.

We are going heavy on the macroeconomics today.

Oh, that and spicy food.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risnall.

It is Thursday today, August 21.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

There is a trifecta leading the macroeconomic conversation in this country right now.

Tariffs, because, well, you all know why.

Inflation pretty much ditto.

It's higher than the Federal Reserve wants it to be.

And the labor market, still okay, but trending toward not entirely okay.

The latest piece of evidence of that came this morning with first-time claims for unemployment benefits, which were up more than expected to the highest level since mid-June.

And the week before that, continuing claims, that's all the laid-off workers who've been getting benefits for two weeks or more.

That came in just shy of 2 million people, the most since November of 2021.

So, marketplace at Mitchell Hartman gets us started.

Unemployment claims give us a snapshot of what's happening in the labor market in near real time.

First-time claims reported today were filed just last week.

And when they're increasing, says Andrew Stettner at the Century Foundation, they're one of the key signs we have a weakening job market.

More people staying on unemployment benefits than a year ago.

Hiring really slowing down in all sectors except for health care.

A lot of employers are still loath to downsize.

They remember the labor shortages of the pandemic.

So new layoffs have not been at a recessionary level, but because people haven't been able to get off unemployment, you've seen the total number steadily increase.

But the glass may still be half full, says Amy Glazer at staffing firm Adeco.

We don't want to confuse weakness with moderation.

We're seeing a bit of a pause, not a halt, in hiring.

And we've seen declines in both employers' demand for workers and in the number of people looking for jobs.

We've got the aging boomers that are retiring every day.

And then you also see the demand side of the house where we've got tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty.

That points to a supply-demand imbalance, explains George Borey at asset management firm Allspring.

The demand for labor is contracting at a faster pace than the supply of labor, and you may see unemployment now start to move higher.

As workers on unemployment plus new entrants to the labor force chase a shrinking number of jobs.

It's a labor market in transition, possibly something Fed Chair Powell will touch on when he speaks at Jackson Hole.

The data does show that the labor market is softening.

And so from that that perspective, there is an argument for the Fed to resume rate cuts.

However, inflation.

More to come on that.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

More to come indeed in just a second.

Wall Street on this Thursday.

Traders had just the slightest bit of dyspepsia today.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming is going to be the center of the macroeconomic galaxy tomorrow.

It's a gathering the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City holds every year.

Everybody who is anybody is going to be there for a symposium, the theme of which this year is Labor Markets in Transition, Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy.

I'll tell you what, they could not have timed it better if they had tried, given that the central bank is wrestling right now with what it ought to do about the U.S.

labor market in transition, while inflation is still higher than Jay Powell and the gang want it to be.

Powell is giving the big speech of the session tomorrow morning, as Mitchell alluded to a minute ago.

Hanging on his every word would be an understatement for what the economic world is doing, us included, full disclosure.

So we made some calls today to try to figure out what Powell might say.

So I'm Bill English, and I'm a professor in the finance department at the Yale School of Management.

Nellie Lang, and I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

My name is Linda Hooks, and I'm a professor of economics and head of the department of economics at Washington and Lee University.

They're talking to us, which means they're not in Jackson Hole.

I'm actually in the middle of moving offices.

We just moved into a brand new building, and so this was like a reason to stop unpacking boxes.

I'm in the worst possible lighting.

This is, it's only audio, right, not video.

You know, it's summer, so I'm working on research, so I'm trying to write a paper with a colleague.

The Fed chair's speech in Jackson Hole is always a big deal.

This year, though, feels kind of different.

This is a moment of high drama.

President Trump and increasingly his loyalists have been going after the central bank, as you know, Powell and others personally.

It is a very safe bet, though, that that's not going to come up tomorrow.

Chairman Powell is generally a middle-of-the-road kind of person in terms of his speeches.

And so I expect him to stay there in the middle lane of the road, talking about current economic conditions and about the Fed's forecast for the near-term future economic conditions.

Chair Powell will take his usual approach, and I expect that he will speak to some progress on the new framework.

Every five years, the Fed reviews the framework it uses to guide monetary policy.

The last one was 2020, five years ago, of course, when the economy was in a very different place.

So the question is, will they make changes to it again?

I think the answer is probably yes.

They've been talking at the last four or five, I guess, FOMC meetings about that.

So there's been some coverage in the minutes.

And those have suggested they're likely to

kind of unwind some of the changes that they made in 2020.

Also, though, People are looking for Powell to say something about this.

I think think he'll also

point to his current views on possible outcomes at the September meeting.

I know many people are hoping he will.

I will bet you $5

it is some version of they're going to want to see more data.

There are a half a dozen Fed meetings before.

Powell's term as chair is done, so it's not like we're never going to hear from him again, but this is the last Jackson Hole for him being the big man on campus.

I think he has a good story to tell about how the Fed handled policy over the last few years.

I hope that he'll take the opportunity to tell that story.

There's lots, you know, big,

big shocks that happened to the U.S.

and to the global economy that he navigated the U.S.

economy through using monetary policy.

And the U.S.

came out of the pandemic extremely strong relative to other countries.

I'm not sure that Powell will reflect on his own legacy.

He is a modest person,

and I think he's going to wait for others to do that.

Here's my preview.

It's going to go 20, maybe 25 minutes.

Powell's speech is very heavy on the monetary policy framework, balancing both sides of the dual mandate.

He's going to talk about that too, jobs and inflation.

He might say it could, emphasis here on the could be appropriate to cut rates later this year.

And again, remember, I've got a five spot on him saying he wants more data.

I'm going to generalize here just a little bit, but the way the big AI engines we've all come to know and love and perhaps fear-that's Google's Gemini and ChatGPT, Anthropics Claude, and all the rest-the way they work are through these things called large language models, LLMs.

They hoover up basically all the text on the internet, they grind through it and spit out the answers to whatever questions you have asked.

Like I said, I generalize and I simplify, but that's the basic gist.

Now, though, there are things called VLMs, vision language models.

Marketplace's Sabri Benishwar makes that make sense.

Sentences have words, kind of like music has notes.

Large language models work basically by predicting the next note.

Now, some AIs do do this with actual music, but fundamentally, large language models do this with words, predicting the next word to form a more complex sentence or paragraph.

Steve Aredi is a professor of computer science and linguistics at McGill University.

Each word stands on its own, and then you can build a model on top of that what word comes next.

All of this music was, by the way, AI generated.

Now, pictures might be worth a certain amount of words, but they aren't made of actual words.

So researchers had to figure out how an AI is supposed to understand them.

An image has so many details in it.

What would you focus on?

So it's much, much harder problem than generating language or anything else.

The answer researchers figured out was, well, smaller images, little tiny patches of an image.

You might say it's a sky and which has a tree, leaves some leaves in it and some clouds in it.

And you break this image into these patches.

You treat each patch as a word.

Once images became words, the power of language model AIs could start to be unleashed on them.

And we get what are are called vision language models, vision AI.

We've just seen a proliferation of usage in areas that I don't think we ever would have had the imagination to think of.

Jay Allen is CEO of M87 Labs, which created an open source vision language model called Moondream.

There was a rancher who owned just an incredible amount of tracts of land.

And once in a while, cows would get lost.

And the rancher used Moondream to have a drone fly around and to try to identify errant cows.

M87 Labs also trained its AI not just to look, but to look at people looking, something called gaze detection.

And we had people start building retail applications where they could start collecting retail telemetry data to understand when somebody goes into a store, what do they look at and what tends to get the most types of eyeballs.

One challenge is how to train these models.

We have civilization-sized amounts of writing for large language models to learn from, but images with a ton of description of what's happening, what the context is, not nearly as much.

The type of data is very limited in the sense that it's imagined what people upload to the internet represents maybe a very small fraction of what we see every day.

Meng Yi Ren is an assistant professor of computer science and data science at NYU.

He says it can be hard for AIs to generalize, like a self-driving car knows what a stop sign is, but could get confused by a graffitied stop sign or a scooter that's driving weirdly.

Even though AI models have been seeing so much data on the internet, they may still lack some knowledge in terms of how to control themselves.

So, some companies are training their vision AIs themselves and then combining those AIs with existing language models, like from OpenAI or Anthropic.

James Stripe is chief product officer at Drone Deploy, which uses AI to monitor safety hazards at construction sites and track construction progress.

It understands the difference between, say, ladders, structures, drywall, insulation, those kinds of things.

And then there's another layer which has much more detailed understanding of the world, and that's the layer that applies judgment.

Like you need to block off that ledge so someone does not fall off of it.

So what does the future hold for vision learning models?

Imagine robots that breeze into an Airbnb and change the sheets, or eyeglasses that can tell you where to find that bracelet you haven't seen in a week, or things we just have not imagined at all.

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

Coming up.

I just need seven mountain goats a year.

That's all, guys.

The material costs of making art.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Town Industrial is down 152 today, about 3 tenths percent, 44,785.

The NASDAQ down 72 points, also 3 tenths percent, 21,100.

The SP 500 off 25 points, 4 tenths percent there, 63, and 70.

Waiting on Jay Powell.

They definitely are.

Yet another big box store reported earnings today.

Walmart boosted its full-year outlook despite higher costs from tariffs.

The retail giant has been inching prices up on some goods, but for others, prices are kind of holding steady.

Walmart sank 4.5% today.

Clothing brand Guess has negotiated a deal to go private and be bought by its founders and Authentic Brands, which owns Reebok.

It's a complicated world out there.

Very complicated world.

The deal is worth some $1.4 billion.

Guess shrank two-tenths of 1% today.

The U.S.

and Europe have negotiated a tariff deal for a number of sectors, including pharmaceuticals.

The EU is the U.S.'s top source for drug imports, as you might be aware.

Pharmaceuticals, tariffed at 15% starting next month.

Novo Nordisk, based in Denmark, climbed to a 10th percentile.

AstraZeneca, global headquarters in Sweden and the UK, slid about a 10th percentile today.

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

You're listening to Marketplace.

Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better, clean and cold water?

Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold.

Butter?

Yep.

Chocolate ice cream?

Sure thing.

Barbecue sauce?

Tide's got you covered.

You don't need to use warm water.

Additionally, Tide pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new coldzyme technology.

Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide.

Need to restock inventory, cover seasonal dips, or manage payroll?

Ondex Small Business Line of Credit provides immediate access to funds up to $100,000, exactly when your business needs it.

With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and full control over repayment, you can tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat.

Apply today at on deck.com and funds could be available as soon as tomorrow.

Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by ONDAC or Celtic Bank.

ONDAC does not lend in North Dakota all loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

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.

Bubba Wallace here with Tyler Reddick.

You know what's more nerve-wracking than waiting for qualifying results?

Waiting for the green flag to drop.

Instead of pacing, you rev up with Chumba Casino's weekly new releases.

It's like a fresh set of tires for your brain.

Play for free at chumba casino.com.

That's chumba.

No purchase necessary.

VGW group void where prohibited by law.

CTNC's 21 Plus, sponsored by Chumba Casino.

This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

You got your Dow and your NASDAQ to measure equities.

You got your K-Schiller to measure home prices.

You got your GDP to measure economic growth.

And you got your Scoville scale if you want to measure how hot chilies and peppers are.

And if you can extend the tortured metaphor just a little bit, how businesses are using that heat.

Because spicy, it turns out, is the hottest flavor in town right now.

according to data central which collects data on the food and beverage industry 19 out of every 20 restaurants in these united states features an item labeled as spicy ellen cushing wrote about it in the atlantic the other day ellen it's good to have you back great to be here always would you do me a favor please and just to set the scene here uh tell me about the carolina reaper would you

Well, I can't tell you from personal experience because I am too scared to eat it, but it is a very, very spicy pepper.

So by means of comparison, Tabasco sauce, you know, the standard sauce is 5,000 Scobil heat units.

A Carolina Reaper is 2.2 million.

So this is a very, very, very hot pepper.

It was invented in 2012

and it is just super duper hot.

It makes people hallucinate.

It makes people pass out.

It does not seem that fun to me, but a lot of people are eating them.

Well, so that gets to the point of this piece.

We have become, I mean, you say this in your piece, Americans are setting their mouths on fire.

We are

an overwhelmingly spicy food nation now.

We are.

And this is a relatively recent phenomenon, though it's been sort of building for a while.

But I have definitely noticed this in the last decade or so.

I bet you probably have too.

Like at the grocery store, at restaurants, on recipe websites, previously bland food is spicy, and then previously spicy food is spicier.

And this is happening everywhere.

It's great.

You point out, or you compare

our spicy food tolerance to calluses, right?

The more spicy food we eat, the more spicy food we can tolerate.

So we're looking for ever spicier foods.

Yeah.

And, you know, there are a lot of more macroeconomic trends that are pointing us in this direction, too.

So, for example, food costs are really high, and spice is a great way of masking cheap.

flavors or sorry cheap ingredients so for example if you have noticed that a lot of chicken nuggets are spicy now, that's because chicken is a pretty cheap, flavorless meat, but if you put a bunch of spice on it, it starts to taste like something.

I will also point out here that this is a business opportunity just straight up for food companies.

Frito-Lay, you write, has like 25, 26 different varieties of Flamin' Hot, whatever.

Yeah, they sure do.

You know, the Flamin' Hot brand is hugely impactful for them.

If you go to the chip aisle now, you'll see that at something like six out of 13 of Dorito's flavors now are spicy.

Food companies are responding to a real desire in people.

And, you know, it's like food manufacturing has gotten a lot more sophisticated recently.

This is why, at least when I was growing up, there were like five flavors of chips and now there are hundreds.

It's a lot easier to inject new flavors in spicy food.

And people have proven themselves really interested in buying it.

So it's a great opportunity for companies that want to make money.

At the risk of alienating our younger listeners, you point out that 51%

of Gen Z

consider themselves hot sauce aficionados.

35% of them have signed a waiver so that they can eat atomically spicy foods.

Yes, they're the flaming hot generation.

And it makes sense.

You know, these are the people that were raised with all of those different flavors of doritos these are the people who were raised in a truly global food culture where you have influences from non-european countries you know most people have sriracha in their refrigerator now the most popular fast casual chain in the country is named after this mexican pepper food culture has really changed in the last few decades and they are the beneficiaries of that and so i guess part of that is that they just love spice what about you?

I mean, I'm a spicy food guy, not like Carolina Reaper Hot, but what about you?

I'm about probably the same as you.

I don't like to torture myself for no reason.

But I tend to put

chalula is my hot sauce of choice, and I tend to put it on most things I eat.

Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic.

Thanks, Ellen.

Thanks, guys.

This past weekend, more than a thousand Native artists were able to put their work in front of casual shoppers and museum curators, collectors, too, at the Santa Fe Indian Market.

While the art itself is rooted in indigenous traditions, it's being made in a global economy.

Marketplace's Savannah Peters explains how tariffs are shaping the indigenous art economy.

Most artists come to Indian market with lots of inventory.

But when I visit Beverly Bear King Moran's booth, she has just one piece for sale.

So this is a traditional Dakota horse mask.

It's red, fully beaded, and meant to adorn some very spoiled horse.

It took Bear King Moran nine months of full-time beading.

She tries to pay herself at least minimum wage, plus the cost of materials.

There's actually 300,000 beads on this mask.

Bear King Moran values this piece at $47,000, though it might ultimately sell for less.

People don't always understand beadwork and why it's so expensive.

And Bear King Moran says pricing and marketing beadwork is about to get harder.

All 300,000 of those beads sewn onto the mask are imported.

mostly from the EU.

Bear King Moran purchased materials for this piece long before President Trump's tariffs took effect.

But now?

Finding these is getting harder and then you're gonna be paying more for them.

She expects she'll have to raise the price of her next piece and probably accept a thinner profit margin.

Other artists work on a shorter timeline and don't have that buffer.

Like Choctaw seamstress Yasmine Del Rosario.

A customer asks the price of one of her linen dresses.

Um, that's 500.

Oh, thank you.

Del Rosario makes contemporary clothes with what she calls culturally appreciative elements, like this orange mid-calf skirt with satin ribbon sewn into a herringbone weave.

I have the long strips and I weave it just like a basket.

It took an immense amount of time.

She's hoping it will sell for $400, in part to account for the surging cost of imported textiles.

That's also making a lot of our garments more expensive, and people are kind of surprised by that because we want to use quality.

Del Rosario worries about staying competitive with other booths, where artists might be selling from a pre-trade war stash of materials or finding other ways to blunt the effect of tariffs, like localizing their supply chains.

Chillcat weaver Lily Hope is working on that.

They just need seven mountain goats a year, that's all, guys.

At her booth, Hope has earrings for sale and a blue and yellow dancing blanket on a loom, about two-fifths of the way done.

The materials are 100% merino wool with cooked yellow cedar bark spun into it.

Right now, that wool comes from New Zealand.

Tariffs have given Hope fresh motivation to make the switch to mountain goat hair, the traditional chill cat weaving material.

She's put out a call for help in her community in southeast Alaska.

Hey, if you guys are going hunting, I'm gonna come with you and just bring down the hide because I need that yesterday.

What she saves on import fees, Hope will make up for in labor.

She guesses processing processing each hide will take up to 45 hours, but she says sourcing from her homelands.

Instead of having to continue to utilize the world market, I think that's going to be pretty powerful for my work going forward.

Passa Maquati artist Gabriel Frey weaves baskets from a different material, black ash.

Sourced from the woods.

So Frey is very much insulated from tariffs, but still felt anxious ahead of this market.

I don't have a business if the people who are buying the art are affected to the point of not wanting to buy art.

Collectors surprised Frey by basically buying him out of baskets, which are priced in the thousands, in less than a day.

I've had multiple people come up today who have said, I've been wanting to do this for a long time and I'm going to do it.

So they're very well maybe that sort of like the Titanic sinking, let's just play the band.

Frey says something is in the air.

Like in these uncertain times, people want to take home something beautiful.

In Santa Fe, I'm Savannah Peters for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today comes to us from the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and it goes out to all the citrus growers here.

According to Statistics Canada, the United States sent $12 million worth of orange juice north of the border in June 2024.

This June,

not even $6 million.

You all know why, right?

Our daily production team includes Andy Corbyn, Nicholas Guillain, Mia Hollenhorst, Iru Ekbinobi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio.

I'm Colin Rizdahl We Wills.

See you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

Businesses that are selling through the roof, like Untuck It make selling and for shoppers buying simple with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet.

And with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%.

Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.

Upgrade your business and get the same checkout on Tucket uses.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/slash podcast free.

All lowercase.

Go to shopify.com/slash podcast free to upgrade your selling today.