For every action, something can go sideways

Speaker 1 This marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance, it takes a plan.

Speaker 1 They're ready to build your wealth blueprint for retirement, investing, taxes, and everything else your financial life brings.

Speaker 1 It reveals gaps and highlights opportunities you may have missed at no cost to you. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com slash blueprint.

Speaker 2 This podcast is supported by Odo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth.

Speaker 2 Others say Odo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable.

Speaker 2 And some describe Odo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odo is fertilizer, magic beanstock building blocks for business.

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Speaker 1 Here is today's macroeconomic reminder. For every action,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 something can go sideways.

Speaker 1 From American public media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 1 In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Monday, today, the 25th of August.
Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 1 We delve only rarely on this program into corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for reasons that one hopes are readily apparent. Scintillating reading, they are not.

Speaker 1 But every now and then, one does find a diamond in the fine print, and that is where we find ourselves today.

Speaker 1 The filing in question is SEC Form 8K, filed by Intel on Friday afternoon, right around the time President Trump was trumpeting the government taking an $8.5-ish billion dollar stake in the troubled chip maker, the grants, authorized during the Biden administration, you might remember that, in return for about 10% of the company.

Speaker 1 Let me just read you the relevant package here, highlighted in bold in the original document, by the way. The U.S.

Speaker 1 government's ownership of significant equity interests in the company may subject the company and its stockholders to a number of additional risks and uncertainties, any of which could have a material adverse effect on the company's business.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 corporate lawyers are notoriously cautious. Risk disclosures are boilerplate to an extent.
But what we have here is the law of unintended consequences made real.

Speaker 1 Marketplace of Novosaffo starts us off with what can happen when governments own companies.

Speaker 4 In some ways, taking an ownership stake in Intel makes sense, says Todd Tucker at the Roosevelt Institute.

Speaker 5 If the public's going to be putting up the money, the public deserves more of the upside upside to that investment, if and when it pans out.

Speaker 4 Of course, it might not pan out. Michael Strain with the American Enterprise Institute worries about how the deal might affect Intel's future.

Speaker 5 Intel will be making decisions in part based on

Speaker 5 what's going to make the White House and the president happy or unhappy.

Speaker 4 For example, by potentially avoiding layoffs it might otherwise make to improve its profitability.

Speaker 5 This is going to shape the decisions of Intel's customers as well. Do they renew contracts at favorable rates or unfavorable rates for fear of attracting unwanted attention from the government?

Speaker 4 In essence, the Intel deal and potentially others like it, something President Trump indicated he'd welcome, could mean a significant level of government involvement in private industry.

Speaker 4 China, of course, has been doing this for decades to varying degrees of success. But the country has recently started to embrace more free market principles.

Speaker 4 Khanan Ramaswamy at Arizona State University School of Global Management says Beijing has figured out what others in Europe, Asia, and Latin America have learned.

Speaker 6 The evidence is, I mean, really, it is irrefutable from every country that we can think of. Lots of evidence suggesting that governments are poor owners.

Speaker 4 Of course, there was the financial crisis of 2008 when the U.S. government did take ownership stakes in General Motors and Insure AIG.
Daryl West is at the Brookings Institution.

Speaker 6 That was really an unusual situation in the sense of companies that were deemed as very vital to the future American economy, but they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Speaker 4 The federal government sold its ownership stakes in those companies once the emergency was over. The difference now?

Speaker 4 No plans for an exit. I'm Nova Safo for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 We pointed out a number of times in the past couple of months the way President Trump has unilaterally decided American capitalism is going to work from now on.

Speaker 1 CNBC took up that very issue this morning. Kevin Hassett, the director of the President's National Economic Council, was the guest.
Okay, so we should expect the U.S.

Speaker 7 government to be taking more equity stakes in businesses around the country.

Speaker 7 That is something that if you're a CEO this morning watching us, you should say, okay, the Sovereign Wealth Fund may be coming and

Speaker 7 trying to effectively buy in some kind of equity stake.

Speaker 8 It's possible. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Speaker 1 Intel shares today down about a percent in a down market. Details, numbers, you guys know the drill.

Speaker 1 For all the news there's been about President Trump's tariffs, they're on, they're paused, they're huge, they're a less than people had feared.

Speaker 1 The fact is they haven't led to much additional consumer inflation yet. Companies are doing what they can, for now, to keep prices under control.
Marketplace Adjustin Ho has more on that one.

Speaker 9 One big factor that's blunting the effects of tariffs on prices is inconsistency.

Speaker 6 It's not just a one-size-fits all, right? And it definitely depends on the category. It depends on their sourcing, depends on timing.

Speaker 9 That's Chip West with RRD, which advises companies on marketing, product packaging, and supply chain logistics.

Speaker 9 West says there are just so many different tariff rates in effect, depending on the country or the phase of negotiation it's in or the product.

Speaker 9 That means any price hikes consumers will see will be staggered and harder to notice.

Speaker 6 It's not like one thing is going to happen, right? And it's going to affect prices in such a way that everything will be going up drastically at once.

Speaker 6 So that's why I think that it'll be a little bit more quelled.

Speaker 9 Retailers, in particular, have an incentive to keep price hikes to a minimum. Wes says consumers are price sensitive after dealing with inflation for several years.

Speaker 9 So he's advising companies to stay competitive.

Speaker 6 Our message has always been, you know what, the consumer mindset has definitely changed.

Speaker 6 More folks are deal driven and do what you need to do to make sure that it's either a really great offer or you're really promoting value.

Speaker 9 Companies can do that by sacrificing profits, shelving expansion plans, letting go of employees.

Speaker 9 Sarah House, senior economist with Wells Fargo, says companies can also try to minimize their own tariff bills.

Speaker 10 Even as we've seen broad increases in tariff rates across different countries, across pretty much all products, we could see U.S.

Speaker 10 businesses look for suppliers in countries where tariff rates haven't gone up quite as much.

Speaker 9 And while companies will still feel pressured to pass along the cost of import taxes, House says many will only pass along some of it.

Speaker 10 Maybe increase prices 1%

Speaker 10 in a given period, even if their own costs went up 10%, just trying to see how much does that dent demand. And maybe if it doesn't, then they increase prices a little bit more later on.

Speaker 10 So slowly clawing back some of the margins.

Speaker 9 As a result, House expects that inflation will only pick up a little into early next year.

Speaker 10 I think just this slow pass-through means that maybe inflation doesn't spike quite as high, so you don't get quite as rapid of price increases, but also inflation stays elevated a little bit longer.

Speaker 9 That doesn't mean that the economy has dodged a bullet. House says she expects that economic growth will suffer as companies continue to hold off on hiring and spending because of tariffs.

Speaker 9 Menzie Chen, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, says those companies will eventually have to raise prices.

Speaker 12 Because they've got to protect their profit margins to a certain extent. They just cannot absorb the hit forever.

Speaker 9 Chen says as more companies realize that they can't keep absorbing the cost of import taxes, the impact on inflation could eventually start to snowball.

Speaker 12 If everybody's sort of facing the same game, they know they all can't keep prices low forever and take a hit to the profit margins, they're going to sort of start raising them more rapidly.

Speaker 9 A recent report from Goldman Sachs found that consumers have only been paying about 22% of the cost of tariffs, at least through June.

Speaker 9 But if today's tariffs stick around, that share consumers are paying could rise to almost 70%.

Speaker 9 I'm Justin Ho from Marketplace.

Speaker 1 The corporate news of this Monday was actually two stories in one. Story number one is that the soda and coffee giant Keurig Dr.

Speaker 1 Pepper, as you probably heard, is going to spend $18 billion to buy the Dutch company JDE Pete. That's Pete's Coffee for those unfamiliar.

Speaker 1 Story number two is that once that deal closes, the company is going to split itself in two soft drinks in one part, coffee in the other, the latest in a now decades-long corporate trend of spinning off disparate business segments into independent companies.

Speaker 1 Daniel Ackerman is on the deconglomeration beat for us today.

Speaker 8 Dr. Pepper got into the coffee business back in 2018 when it merged with Keurig's parent company.

Speaker 13 It was a bit of a grand experiment.

Speaker 8 Dwayne Stanford of Beverage Digest says the firm wanted to quench customers' thirst every moment of the day.

Speaker 13 Morning, afternoon, nighttime, by having refreshment beverages and having your coffee.

Speaker 8 The merger seemed to pay off during the COVID lockdowns. Workers stuck at home, turned to Keurig machines for their caffeine fix and bought an endless stream of K-cups, or seemingly endless.

Speaker 13 Once COVID ended, people started migrating back to coffee shops, migrating back to the office.

Speaker 11 And since then, says Laura Bourne at the University of Chicago, Keurig is a business that is struggling to grow.

Speaker 8 Bourne says the coffee side of Keurig Dr. Pepper has been a drag on the company's stock as a whole.

Speaker 11 So by taking out the lower gross business, the left-behind business of Dr. Pepper should trade better than it does today.

Speaker 8 In fact, some recent breakups, including GE and Johnson ⁇ Johnson, have boosted the resulting firm's total valuations. Jared Harford is at the University of Washington.

Speaker 14 It's a lesson we've been learning since the 60s is to deconglomerate and that focus is king.

Speaker 8 He says focus makes it easier for investors to figure out how much a firm is actually worth.

Speaker 14 They want a stock that reflects just the one core underlying business.

Speaker 8 Firms do have to be careful when deconglomerating, says Eric Lewandowski of Wixam Equity Partners.

Speaker 15 There is risk of duplication of services in the back office. There'll be two separate HR departments, finance departments.

Speaker 8 But he says the benefits of being more focused and nimble outweigh the risks, particularly in uncertain economic times.

Speaker 15 I think we'll see more of these types of plays, especially given some of the question marks around tariffs in Washington.

Speaker 8 Right now, he says investors, like coffee snobs, prefer their firms pure and single source. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 There was housing data out today. The Census Bureau is the one that tracks it for us.
New home sales, they said, fell in July, down 8% from the year before.

Speaker 1 And there's a report out from Redfin as well. It says about 15% of pending home sales were canceled in July as cautious would-be buyers backed out.

Speaker 1 But in this uncertain world, some new homeowners are choosing to add a little certainty to their living situation by living in close proximity to family or friends on what are called family compounds.

Speaker 1 Here's another adventure in housing.

Speaker 16 My name is Olivia, and I live in Mississippi. Okay, I need you to be quiet, please.

Speaker 1 Sorry, let's try that one more time.

Speaker 16 Right now, I'm in my car at Sonic trying to get my kids some ice cream because they will not stop talking in the back seat.

Speaker 16 We actually, whenever me and my husband got married, we built a house about 20 minutes away from my family.

Speaker 16 And I just didn't like living so far from everybody.

Speaker 16 My parents actually had 130 acres at the time.

Speaker 16 They decided to sell and

Speaker 16 keep about 10 acres on the front of the property.

Speaker 16 Me and my husband bought some of the acreage from them and then my sister and her husband bought the property next door. And so they built their house next door.
We built our house on the 10 acres.

Speaker 16 And then my parents, once they sold, they built their house on the 10 acres. So we're all right there within walking distance.

Speaker 16 It's definitely a different relationship,

Speaker 16 you know, with their aunt and their cousins and their grandparents than your typical relationship that you would have.

Speaker 16 As soon as we wake up, me and my sister get on FaceTime and we're like, what are we doing today?

Speaker 16 She usually comes over to the house with her three kids and we'll cook breakfast, we'll make coffee together. The kids go and play in the toy room.

Speaker 16 And then usually once breakfast and everything is cleaned up, we walk over to my parents' house.

Speaker 16 Sometimes me and my sister will make a grocery order together for breakfast and lunch specifically because it usually is just me and her and the kids.

Speaker 16 So it kind of works out better that way than having to do a million different grocery orders and keep having to go back home. It's kind of fun

Speaker 16 usually around four or five o'clock.

Speaker 16 We, like me and my sister, will go to our own houses and we'll start cooking dinner, kind of winding down for the day, cleaning up the house, getting the kids ready for bed, and then our husbands get their downtime after work and they get to spend like one-on-one time with the kids.

Speaker 16 So that's kind of we spend pretty much half of our day one way and then half of our day at home.

Speaker 16 I started sharing little clips of my life over the last year. I've started posting across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
And people are really intrigued by the family compound concept.

Speaker 16 Some people are like, This is my dream. I wish that my parents were like this.
Or like, I hope that me and my kids can do this one day.

Speaker 16 And then the other half of them are like, I would literally rather die. No, thank you.

Speaker 1 Olivia D'Angelo, living on a family compound in Pearl River County, Mississippi. You can tell us about your adventure in housing and who's on it with you at marketplace.org.

Speaker 1 Coming up

Speaker 17 in broad strokes, uh, the caddy economy is looking up.

Speaker 1 Seeing green on the greens. But first, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 1 Dow Industrial is down 349 today, 3 quarters percent, 45,282. The NASDAQ subtracted 47, about 2 tenths percent, 21,449.
SP 500 down 27 points, 4 tenths percent, 64, and 39.

Speaker 1 Nova got us started talking about the unintended consequences of the federal government taking a roughly 10% stake in Intel in exchange for just shy of $9 billion.

Speaker 1 Works out to a discount of around 17%. Think about that for a second.
For its part, Wall Street pretty much meh on the whole deal. Shares in Intel down 1% today.

Speaker 1 Bonds down, yield on the 10-year T-note up 4.28%.

Speaker 1 You're listening to Marketplace.

Speaker 2 This podcast is supported by Odo. Some say Odo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth.

Speaker 2 Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Speaker 1 This marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance, it takes a plan.

Speaker 1 They're ready to build your wealth blueprint for retirement, investing, taxes, and everything else your financial life brings.

Speaker 1 It reveals gaps and highlights opportunities you may have missed at no cost to you. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/slash blueprint.

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Speaker 1 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
A glance at the calendar says it's still summer, but fall is just around the corner.

Speaker 1 And with September upon us next week, fall fashion has the apparel industry's attention. Retailers have been shuffling their inventories, trying to balance tariff drags against value-driven consumers.

Speaker 1 The economic calendar tells us consumer spending data for July comes out this week.

Speaker 1 So, ahead of that news, Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has more on what we might expect from the apparel business this autumn.

Speaker 19 This fall, clothing retailers are increasingly absorbing the cost of tariffs, says Moody's retail analyst, Christina Boney.

Speaker 20 That's while low and middle income consumers are very focused on value, given absolute higher prices and more pressures on their wallet.

Speaker 19 Consumers are more discerning. So retailers need to be on point with products that resonate.
Things like comfortable basics and timeless styles, says Brittany Steiger with Mintel.

Speaker 21 As consumers are increasingly price sensitive, we see them also focusing more on versatility. So items that they can wear across multiple occasions.

Speaker 19 But it won't be all pragmatism this fall. Retailers will be looking for ways to get consumers to indulge.

Speaker 21 Consumers are looking for sort of these smaller splurges to really add personality

Speaker 21 to give them a sense of enjoyment.

Speaker 19 Think bag charms like crystal cherries or a plushy big-eyed laboo-boo you can clip onto a purse or backpack, which are part of an expanding category.

Speaker 19 Independent trend analyst Mandy Lee says in times of uncertainty, customers are more apt to buy accessories at a high-end store.

Speaker 22 It's like a feel-good dopamine hit of getting that access of luxury at a price that is more reasonable than dropping like 4K on a bag.

Speaker 19 Accessories also help retailers sell more stuff, says Jessica Damirez with the Consumer Collective.

Speaker 19 Say you walk in to buy a pair of slacks for work, and then something sparkly catches your eye as you're about to check out.

Speaker 23 If you like walk into a store in the accessory stable, there's socks, there's caps, there's smaller bags, bigger bags, keychains, small luxuries that are easy to sell.

Speaker 19 I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 I was at the doctor's office the other day, picked up a magazine to flip through while I waited. Turned out to be golf digest.

Speaker 1 Not a sport I'm much into except for the majors, but everything, it seems, has a marketplace angle because caddies, they are a thing right now, not just for the pros.

Speaker 1 Max Adler is the editorial director of Golf Digest. He wrote the column that caught my eye.
Max, welcome to the program. Good to have you on.

Speaker 17 Yeah, good to be on.

Speaker 1 Do me a favor, would you tell me about the caddy economy right now? Because until I read your piece in the magazine, I really had no idea.

Speaker 17 Yeah,

Speaker 17 in broad strokes, the caddy economy is looking up. Golf is a sport that's experienced a bit of a boon the last few years.
And along with that,

Speaker 17 the number of people who have jobs as caddies, the number of golfers taking caddies is on the rise.

Speaker 17 And it's one of those things where most courses don't have caddies. And so if you don't play at those courses, it's one of those things you would assume is sort of a dying job.

Speaker 17 It feels like a vestige of a bygone era when people had servants, but it's not the case.

Speaker 1 The thing that most interested me about this piece when I read it, as I said in the introduction at the doctor's office, as one does,

Speaker 1 is that it's now increasingly an app-based economy. There are apps that both kids and adults can sign up on and get loops.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Caddy Now, Club Up.

Speaker 17 You know, there definitely are a lot of technology platforms recently that have pitched themselves, you know, like the Uber for X or Y, but these truly are that.

Speaker 17 You know, you want a caddy at this course in your area. You go on the app, you find

Speaker 17 a kid or a caddy on the other side who's willing to take that job. The price is locked, the time is set, and it kind of eliminates that role of having a caddy master at a golf course,

Speaker 17 which was just a little bit of extra overhead that a lot of places didn't like to carry.

Speaker 1 There is a supply-demand disconnect here, though, as you point out in this piece.

Speaker 1 Something like single-digits worth of courses offer a caddy service, but a third of all golfers, you say, want caddies at their home courses.

Speaker 17 Right. It's sort of counterintuitive.
So if you're a golf course, the idea of having to operate a caddy program, that means you need a boss to train and run the caddies. You need to pay them.
And so

Speaker 17 it's just like an extra burden.

Speaker 17 And also on top of that is a course will lose out on some revenue because they'd rather rent you a golf cart and keep that revenue for themselves than have you pay a caddy to carry your clubs.

Speaker 17 But all that flies in the face of the feeling, which is, you know, golfers go to play golf. It's a special experience.
It's more fun and enjoyable to walk.

Speaker 17 It's even more fun and enjoyable to have someone at your side who kind of feels like they're on your team.

Speaker 17 And, you know, if you're playing golf, it's a way to feel like maybe a little bit of a big shot that on Saturday or Sunday you

Speaker 17 flip a kid a little bit of extra money for carrying your clubs adults too though right I mean it's not just kids who are caddying yeah no that's very true in fact you know really if you go to the greatest golf courses in the country yeah their caddy programs tend to be filled with adults.

Speaker 17 These are guys who know golf. They've been around the game for decades.
And, you know, I kind of equate it to like, you know, a server at a high-end restaurant.

Speaker 17 You know, you go out to a really nice meal. The server, he's kind of part of the experience.
He knows the menu backwards backwards and forwards.

Speaker 17 He kind of elevates your whole time there with his presence. And then there are other restaurants where you just need someone to bring you your cheeseburger and be gone.

Speaker 17 And that's what a kid caddy more often does.

Speaker 1 When you're out playing 18,

Speaker 1 you want to caddy or not?

Speaker 17 If I can choose, I think it's a fantastic part of the experience. I'm biased.
I spent eight years every summer of high school and college caddying myself.

Speaker 17 And now I love love having a caddy on my bag. It's just,

Speaker 17 you know, you can talk through the shot. You're going to try to attempt to hit with someone and just putting it into words.
And, you know, it's just the way the game is meant to be played.

Speaker 1 Max Adler, editorial director of Golf Digest. Max, thanks a bunch for your time.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 17 You got it, Kai. Thank you.

Speaker 1 This final note on the way out today, my annual exhortation for all you kids to get off my lawn.

Speaker 1 Notwithstanding that the calendar, as I noted earlier, still says August, forgetting for a moment that the U.S.

Speaker 1 temperature map today is all oranges and reds, 70s to 90s and higher, setting aside the fact that actual pumpkins aren't going to be harvested for another month, Starbucks is going to start serving pumpkin spice lattes tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Lest you think, by the way, that my disdain is merely superficial, there is a video somewhere on our website of me drinking one of those things. Marketplace.org.
Search.

Speaker 3 It's there.

Speaker 1 Amir Bibawi, Caitlin Ash, John Gordon, Noya Carr, Amanda Petron, Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director, and I'm Kai Rizdahl.

Speaker 1 We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 1 This is 8 p.m.

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