A quick GDP refresher

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The solution to today's economic math problem is 3.8.

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This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

It is Thursday today, 25 September.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Believe me when I tell you that math is not repeat, not my strong suit.

But being in this line of work means sometimes you gotta.

Which I offer as a preface to today's lesson.

From the Commerce Department this morning, by way of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, came a revision of gross domestic product for the second quarter, that is April through June.

And honestly, it was a bit of an upside surprise.

The economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.8% in Q2.

That's up half a percentage point from the earlier guest last month.

We will get to the why of how that happened in due course, but first we are going to look at the what of how we measure this economy.

Ethan Struby at Carleton College and Nicole Survey at Wells Fargo have today's seminar on beginning macroeconomics.

So, GDP is the market value of all final goods and services produced within the United States in a given quarter.

I'm being very specific because all of the little words in that definition are actually really important, and there will be a quiz later.

Start taking notes, gang.

I'm here to help you.

GDP is broken down into one relatively simple formula: the C plus I plus G plus NX.

We have spending by consumers, C, spending by businesses, investment, I, spending by governments, G.

and then you have trade, which we evaluate as a balance.

So you take exports minus imports to get an X net exports.

The caveat here, and it's a biggie, is that not all elements of that equation are created equal.

Consumption, consumer spending, that's that C in the equation, makes up give or take of 70%

of GDP.

So that's going to be concert tickets.

It's going to be cups of coffee at a coffee shop.

And then you have services, which is the bulk of what we actually spend our money on.

For Ethan Struby in the second quarter, it was childcare.

I have two kids that are under the age of six.

They were both in daycare then, and so I was spending a lot of money, like having somebody else watch them.

For Nicole Servey.

I think that I spent a lot of money at restaurants.

Services, both of those, which brings us to the why of today's lesson as promised.

The economy grew faster in the second quarter than anybody had been guessing because consumer spending, services spending, specifically restaurants and child care among them, was bigger than anybody had thought.

If we have dramatic changes in that C component, that can dramatically change our view on the economy as a whole.

Now, why consumer spending is growing despite sticky inflation and a very wary labor market?

You know, we'll save that for intermediate macro.

Yeah, that and the whole rest of that GDP equation.

Ethan Struby at Carleton College, Nicole Survey at Wells Fargo, helping us out with today's seminar.

Wall Street, by the way, gets a failing grade today.

Despite that GDP news, all three major indices fell during the session.

Third across the board, down day in a row.

If you are keeping track, which we are, it's our job.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

I promise you, we didn't plan it this way, but there is turning out to be a whole lot of data in the program today.

Housing is up next.

The National Association of Realtors says sales of existing homes, previously owned, you could call them, used homes is another option.

Anyway, they weren't selling all that well in August.

Sales down two-tenths percent from July.

Marketplaces Samantha Fields has more.

Most people who closed on a house in August likely went under contract in June or July when mortgage rates were still closer to 7%.

So we shouldn't have expected to see much of an impact of falling mortgage rates in this particular report.

Lisa Sturtevant at Bright MLS says even now that rates are down closer to 6%, the market still feels slow.

We haven't seen whether there's going to be impact of mortgage rates, and frankly, I think the jury's still out on whether that'll be a big boon to the market this fall.

The recent drop in rates has been enough to shave about $150 off the monthly mortgage payment for a median-priced house, Sturdivant says, which is not nothing.

The problem is, though, we've been seeing that drop in rates while we're also seeing home prices continue to rise.

So we've actually seen the fact that home prices are still rising offset any benefit of those declining rates.

Affordability is still a big issue.

Chris Salbiatti at Apartment List says that's especially true for first-time buyers.

The median monthly mortgage payment is basically doubled in five years.

And so, you know, that's going to really take some time for folks to be able to get into a market where prices are that high.

Mortgage rates coming down is a big factor, he says, but not the only one.

This is coming at a moment where the labor market is looking a little bit shakier than it has in a little bit here.

And so that's kind of a factor that's going to push in the opposite direction here.

If people don't feel secure in their job, he says they're going to be more hesitant to make the biggest purchase of their lives.

Still, Lawrence Yoon at the National Association of Realtors says mortgage rates do have a way of overcoming people's jitters if they fall enough.

Unemployment rates still at under 5%, which is implying that 95% of the labor force still has job and they respond to lower mortgage rates.

So if rates stay about where they are or fall a little more, he's expecting to see home sales increase in the coming months.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

It is, as we pointed out, a time or two not all that easy to find a job right now.

Companies just aren't doing a lot of hiring.

And even though the unemployment rate is still relatively low, 4.3%, it has been inching up.

And that leaves people who are looking more susceptible to a kind of fraud that's becoming increasingly common.

Job scams, texts and emails, postings that promise often lucrative work.

Complaints about them, says the Federal Trade Commission, have tripled in about the past five years.

Marketplacer Kristen Schwab dung into it.

We've all gotten the texts.

A mysterious recruiter says they have the perfect job for you.

One that you can do from home on a flexible schedule for great pay.

They usually sound something like this message I recently got.

We are hiring remote online evaluator.

I'm not quite sure what that job is, but the pay looks good.

$100 to $600 per hour.

Usually I delete these messages, report them as junk.

But in the name of journalism, I decided to reply and say, yes, I'm interested.

And almost immediately.

Oh,

I got a like.

The text claims to be from someone named Shirley.

She's looking for part-time team members at a digital ad company.

Sounds good to me.

Hi, Shirley.

Nice to meet you.

I would love

to hear more about

the job.

Exclamation point.

Shirley hearts the message, and we text back and forth.

When I decline to move the conversation to WhatsApp, Shirley goes dark.

Of course, whoever is texting me probably isn't Shirley.

It might be a worker at a scam farm, a big operation overseas, or a scammer working on their own, or Shirley may be a bot.

Murat Kantar-Joel, a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, says AI has made it easier for scammers to send convincing messages that use perfect grammar and respond conversationally.

For example, the AI bot can do the first few messages and then can give it to the the human.

The human's job is to close the deal, which usually means steal your money.

Scammers might ask for banking information so new hires can get paid, or a credit card number for work supplies.

PSA, these are not things real jobs ask for, especially not over text.

Kantar Joel says applicants should always call the recruiter's company and the company that's hiring.

Never trust always verify.

Maybe you're rolling your eyes right now because, duh, Kristen, these scams are so obvious.

But Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, says scammers have gotten savvy, like this one text she recently got.

They had spoofed a legitimate business, spoofed the HR hiring manager's name, and there was an actual open position on the website for this position.

That was the level of sophistication.

She says job scams are especially common on job boards.

And what's tricky about this is companies are increasingly recruiting online, especially as more people work remote.

And it's really confusing for people to understand what is the real process now because it's a fundamental shift.

Imagine job hunting after years of being a stay-at-home parent or following a layoff after a decade at one company.

The job market is ripe for scams because job hunting is usually not something we build routines around.

And when people are looking looking for work, it can be overwhelming.

The longer they're out of work, the more they may be willing to ignore or just say, well, but I really need this.

So that red flag,

I'm just going to see what happens.

And it's out of desperation.

What's maybe most confusing of all, though, is there are recruiters out there who actually recruit this way.

over text.

So you truly are a recruiter.

Yes, ma'am.

Absolutely.

This is Joshua Turner, a healthcare recruiter.

I actually answered his text because I thought he was a scammer, but he has a well-built out LinkedIn.

He's on the staff page of his company's website.

He says he got my contact info from a medical professional's database.

He invited me to apply for an emergency room job in Maine.

So, um, I'm actually, I'm not a doctor.

Oh,

how interesting.

Turner says this happens sometimes.

A quick Google shows there is a Kristen Schwab in New York in the the medical field.

Turner says though he hires plenty of doctors via text, he's well aware that some people think he's a scammer.

But I get people saying wrong numbers, stop.

Sometimes people are super rude.

It's, you know, I mean, it is what it is.

We work with what we got, the resources we have.

I reached out to Turner's company and verified that he is a recruiter there.

And I believe them, but I gotta be honest.

After all this, there's a teeny, tiny piece of me that doesn't know what's real or not.

In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

Consider for a moment, the humble cardboard box.

And you might be thinking now, all right, Kai, cardboard boxes, what's your point?

And I get that.

My point is that there's a ton of ways to measure this economy.

GDP that we started with, durable goods that you're going to hear about later, unemployment, inflation, you know the list.

Sometimes though, you got to get back to basics all the way back.

Ryan Fox is a containers and packaging analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence and a corrugated container expert too.

Ryan, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

I want to give credit where credit is due here.

We heard you on the Odd Lots podcast at Bloomberg the other day with Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway, and I was like, this is the most interesting conversation about a subject I know nothing about that I have ever heard, and I must talk to this guy.

So

here we are.

Would you give us the state of play in the cardboard box industry?

And more importantly, why it matters, what it tells you.

Cardboard boxes, they do have some price inelasticity, right?

So it doesn't matter what the price is, people are going to choose to ship a correlated box.

However, we have noticed over the last probably two years where that number, that calculation on price elasticity is actually getting a little bit larger.

If it holds up in the future, we don't know.

But if prices continue to rise for corrugated boxes, maybe that demand goes away.

And so through the first half of this year, demand for boxes fell by about 2.3%.

It appears that it is slowing down even more in the third quarter.

We've published that we think it's going to be down about 3%.

Candidly, I don't know that I'll be very surprised if it's more than 3%.

Now, if it's more than 4%, I will be very surprised.

And what's that going to tell you?

What are you going to read into that if it's 3%, 4%-ish?

So there's two things.

First, the American consumer is broadly under threat, right?

We have a very high amount of credit card debt.

And we also just published a piece here recently where we correlated or tried to show that there is a correspondence between real personal disposable income and box shipments.

And so that real personal disposable income is going away, and we're also seeing box shipments kind of go away with it.

So that's part of it.

The other part of it is there are now viable substitutions like the bags that you're seeing from Amazon, whether they're plastic or whether they're paper, they are becoming more and more a reality.

and more and more end markets are using them, especially in e-commerce.

So it's a very good litmus test for the broader consumer economy, right?

Because such a high percentage of goods travel in these boxes, if we stop making boxes or if that goes down, it's typically indicative that there's something happening in the consumer economy and people are not buying to the same extent that they once were.

Change of gears here then.

Get away from the consumer and talk to me about corrugated boxes and packaging as a business because, you know, there's been demand and we all use cardboard boxes and companies have said, hey, let's make cardboard boxes.

What do we know now about the business side of this?

So on the business side, we've seen several very big mergers in the last year.

And so now we have three really big companies that control about 65% of the marketplace.

And

that is a real power play.

I mean, it's a classic oligopoly.

Last thing, and I'll let you get back to your analyzing and discussing of this market.

How does one become such an expert on corrugated boxes?

I mean, on Odd Lots, you were like, I can tell by the stamp on the box where it's from and where it's made and who made it and how long it's been around and all that jazz.

So I got into the industry in 2010 by complete accident.

The company that I'd been working for during the 2000s went bankrupt and I was in school to get an MBA.

My MBA had a concentration in innovation management.

So there was a lot of new product design development and manufacturing stuff in it.

And yes, I, I mean, I just completely nerded out.

In fact, my youngest daughter,

she slept her first eight months in a corrugated box.

Oh, stop it.

I kid you not.

We put her baby bed inside the box and she slept in the closet.

It was fantastic.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness.

Ryan Fox at Bloomberg.

Cardboard boxes are the place that you go for him.

Ryan, thanks a lot.

I appreciate your time.

Yes, sir.

Coming up.

Obviously, we get ribeye, tenderloin, strip.

Denver is a really popular cut of ours.

Beef, demand, and supply.

But first, let's do the numbers.

Now, Industrial is off 173 points today, about 4 tenths percent, 45,947.

The NASDAQ subtracted 113 points, a half percent, 22,384.

SP 500 down, 33 points, half percent, 66.04.

There, Starbucks is going to close hundreds of locations, lay off 900 corporate workers, and eliminate some open positions in an effort to cut costs and revamp itself.

Shares in the coffee chain cooled about a half percent.

Amazon agreed to, you might have heard about this, two and a half billion dollars to settle a federal trade commission complaint.

Amazon shares down nine-tenths percent today.

Bonds down, yield on the ten-year-old T-Note up 4.17% on the tenure.

You're listening to Marketplace.

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 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.

Odoo, exactly what businesses need.

Sign up at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

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Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient.

But they're not just fast and efficient, they're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business.

Fifth Third Bank has the Big Bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size, but they also have the FinTech Hustle that got them named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune magazine.

That's what being a Fifth Third Better is all about.

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Big Bank Muscle, FinTech Hustle.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

Elsewhere in government economic data on this Thursday came new orders for durable goods.

They were up 2.9% in August.

That's a month-over-month number from July.

These are things that are supposed to last a while and run on the pricey side too.

The data comes courtesy of the Census Bureau.

Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman has the details, which which is, as always, where the devil is.

Overall, the jump in durable goods was more than most economists expected.

But there was one category that really took off.

A lot of that strength was concentrated in aircraft.

Bill Adams is an economist with Comerica Bank.

He says aircraft orders tend to be volatile and not all that useful as an economic indicator.

So stripping out transport equipment?

Orders were up four-tenths of a percent on the month, which seems high until you consider that producer prices for goods rose three-tenths of a percent on the month.

In other words, much of the apparent rise isn't because more stuff is being ordered, just that the stuff is getting more expensive.

But Jason Miller, a supply chain researcher at Michigan State, says one sector where orders did outpace inflation was machinery.

That is not surprising because the Triple B, the big beautiful bill, reintroduced 100% bonus depreciation.

Meaning, companies that buy new equipment can earn bigger tax benefits.

Miller says orders for many other categories were basically flat.

That includes primary metals, like the ones the Trump administration has tried to protect with tariffs.

We're not seeing really any movement right there in terms of new orders.

And so that would not be something consistent with some type of widespread domestic increase in steel or aluminum manufacturing activity.

On balance, Ari Schwader of the University of Michigan views the news on last month's durable goods orders as not bad.

I think my headline is like positive but cautious.

He says the fact that orders haven't dropped off means that businesses think someone will be buying all the stuff they make with their new machinery.

Businesses either see currently or think they're going to see in the relatively near future consumer spending continue sort of on the path that consumer spending has been.

Which is pretty resilient.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

The Department of Agriculture tells us that almost 85% of the beef we eat in this country comes from this country.

And if you're in that tranche that is the American beef eating public, you have no doubt noticed that your costs are going up.

Not only up, but they're at a record high, $9.85 a pound, in point of fact.

Even so, there is still a bull market on beef.

Sorry.

From the Texas Standard, Michael Marks has more.

At the Saturday Barton Creek Farmers Market in Austin, Texas, Richardson Farms Booth is tucked into the far back corner.

There's a long line of customers here to buy meat and dairy.

We raise beef, we raise pork, we do eggs and chicken.

That's Jim Richardson who owns the farm.

We have milk and we have cheese that we make.

He and I talk under his tent while his grandson fetches items from the many coolers at the booth.

There are lots of requests for beef, stew meat, steak, and ground beef.

And lately, Richardson has had to raise prices.

I went up roughly a dollar a pound.

My processor went up that much or more.

So without kind of keeping up, it erodes your profitability.

Richardson has worked with cattle as a rancher and a veterinarian for more than 50 years.

He says it's unusual for prices to stay this high for this long.

Do you have any notion of when prices might come down again?

You know, I don't, and I'd say it's going to be years.

It's a real complex.

issue and it's not going to remedy quickly.

Complex for a bunch of reasons.

One is that the U.S.

cattle herd is the smallest it's been since the 1950s.

Years of drought in cattle country have made it harder to feed the cows, and many ranchers have been forced to sell their animals.

As the cattle population declines, each cow becomes worth more.

The higher sticker price further incentivizes producers to sell.

And that means then that we don't grow the herd.

And that's the situation we've been in here for a while.

That's Brenda Battelle, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.

And she doesn't see beef prices dropping anytime soon.

When I'm talking year over year, I don't really see that declining at least through 26.

Still, consumer demand is not declining either.

I'm actually surprised at how resilient beef demand has continued to stay with the very high prices.

Now, there are other factors playing into those very high prices, including tariffs on Brazilian imports and a USDA ban on Mexican cattle due to a parasitic fly infecting cows across the border.

3.6 General, a small butcher shop and grocery store in San Marcos, south of Austin, is crammed with display cases of cheese and proteins, plus coolers lining the walls with veggies, sausage, and chicken feet.

In the back, Workers marinate ribs, cut sheets of butcher paper, and grind black pepper.

Owner Maddie Bills is conscious of her prices.

I used to be really afraid to price things appropriately because everything seemed so expensive to me already and my accountant was always like Maddie, you need to work on your cost of goods sold.

She still sells plenty of beef though.

Obviously we get ribeye, tenderloin, strip.

Denver is a really popular cut of ours which is a better value but it's still really marbled and tender.

Bills mostly buys from local ranchers which she says helps keep prices down but she still has to be strategic about what she stocks.

Maybe we decided to stop selling a certain cut because it was so expensive, or we added another cheaper cut and we started looking, you know, for something that would be more affordable just so we could keep that price point in the case.

But ultimately, those higher costs get passed on to her customers.

In Austin, Texas, I'm Michael Marks for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today, a call back to my conversation yesterday with April Hemmes, our soybean farmer in Iowa, and how the Trump administration's trade policies have torpedoed a whole lot of American agriculture.

Well, here's the kicker.

It's a quote from the president today.

We're going to take some of that tariff money that we've made, the president said.

We're going to give it to our farmers who are, for a little while, going to be hurt until it kicks in.

The tariffs kick in to their benefit.

That's the end of the quote, but I am ethically and professionally required to remind you here that the president's tariffs are in fact taxes, taxes that are paid by American consumers and American businesses.

Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillain, Maria Hollenhorst, Iru Ekvinobi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio.

I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

This week on Million Bazillion, we're giving you an extra special history lesson on bubbles.

Economic bubbles, that is.

We'll learn all about the housing boom and bust of the 2000s.

Plus, we'll explore other famous bubbles like tulips and dot-coms to uncover why they happen and why it's so hard to know you're in one until it pops.

Don't miss this week's episode of Million Bazillion.

Listen on your favorite podcast app.