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Okay, work with me on this one.

What we've got right now is Schrödinger's economic data.

It is simultaneously good and bad until we open the box.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

I'm Kyle Risdahl.

It is Monday, today, the 20th of October.

Good as always, nice to have you along, everybody.

I would start things off today by reading you a list of the economic data we are going to get this week, but it would be a real short list, as you know, what with the government not governmenting low these past three weeks.

We will get a delayed version of the Labor Department's Consumer Price Index on Friday, good for the Federal Reserve as it gets set for its interest rate meeting next week, and good for Social Security recipients whose cost of living adjustments depend on it.

But the damage being done to the government economic data machine is going to mean not great things for the public and for the private data that this economy relies on.

Marketplace Adjustin Ho gets us going.

Economists have reason to be concerned about upcoming government data releases, including the Consumer Price Index.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, which puts out the CPI, their operations have essentially been curtailed.

That's Liz Ann Saunders, chief investment strategist with Charles Schwab, a marketplace underwriter.

Saunders says the big concern is that government workers haven't been collecting price data this month.

Same goes for jobs numbers.

Once we get the October report, that is obviously not going to be clean data because the government was shut down for that period.

That's because even if the government finally cobbles together a report, the data might be less reliable, says Mindsi Chin, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The question is, how much of it is it sort of backwards looking?

How much is guesswork?

How much is just like related to other series that they think are correlated with the missing data?

The government shutdown is affecting private sector data too.

Eustena Zhabinska-Lomonica is senior manager of business cycle indicators at the conference board.

Her company was supposed to release a report today called the Leading Economic Index, which relies on government data that hasn't come out.

So the conference board held off.

We don't want to publish something which is not up to the standards we're standing behind.

Shabinska Lomonica says the conference board will get back to releasing the index when government data starts coming out again.

But she says she's going to have to keep an eye out for shifts in that data that might not reflect reality.

And maybe look at those data with a little bit of skepticism, considering that it might not fully reflect the time that's usually covered.

And skepticism about the economic data can have consequences, says Laura Veldkamp, a finance professor at Columbia.

If we don't know what the quality of the data will be, maybe it's good, but maybe it's not.

Well, that's uncertainty.

That's risky.

And that can cause companies to freeze up.

What firm wants to say, let's engage in a risky and costly new investment project that has uncertain rewards in an environment where you don't have clear information about what the current state of the economy is.

That's why Veldkamp says unreliable data can take a toll on the broader economy.

I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace.

On Wall Street today, I mean government shut down a weaker we think

because we don't know because government shut down labor market, consumers being cranky ain't nothing going to stop traders from buying.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

The government economic data set most missed right now is the monthly jobs report.

We're without the September data.

October, honestly, is a toss-up, which is not great given where the labor market might be right now.

I say might be, as I said a minute ago, too, because we don't know, which is not great.

So, Marketplace of Kristen Schwab took matters into her own hands and made some calls to people for whom hiring is their job.

I asked recruiters to describe, in a word or two, the job market in their eyes.

And here's what I got: Sluggishly recovering.

Very active.

Confusing.

Quite a mix, because there's a split in the job market that echoes something happening in the greater economy.

This K-shape where higher earners are thriving and everyone else, not so much.

Michael DeStefano is CEO of Corn Fairy's Professional Search and Interim Group and hires across the labor market for different industries and experience levels.

The low end of the market is hurting, but the high end of the market is pretty robust.

DiStefano says there's always demand for high earners, even in a sluggish economy.

The higher up and the bigger the organization, the fewer people there are on the planet that can do those jobs.

But he says the rest of the job market relies on an expanding economy.

And right now, the picture is mixed.

Most of the jobs that we have seen at the mid-level and lower levels are replacement jobs.

They are not growth-oriented.

Not growth-oriented because companies have been holding back from investing and taking big risks because of interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty.

And then everyone's favorite keyword.

Tariffs.

Chris Alaire is CEO of of Averity, a tech recruiting firm that focuses on software engineering.

He says, added together, all these factors are creating too much uncertainty.

And that just put a lot of organizations into some type of like, okay, hold on a second.

It means a lot of Alair's work right now is about finding talent who he might have jobs for when companies are ready to invest again.

He says there are lots of excellent candidates, workers who companies would normally start bidding wars over, on the sidelines.

The quality quality of talent that availables right now on the market has never been higher.

It is phenomenal.

So tech jobs outside of AI, not doing so well.

Neither are government jobs with all the federal downsizing.

On the positive side, there's healthcare.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 1.9 million job openings in the sector each year through 2034.

Also doing well are companies that cater to luxury tastes.

Susan Levine is CEO of Career Group Companies, which has worked with Prada and Waldorf Astoria Hotels.

I mean, there's no shortage of successful, wealthy people.

Inflation is affecting top earners less because price increases don't hit them as hard.

So they're still spending on cars, vacations, and clothes.

We've never been busier.

We are as busy today as we were coming out of COVID.

Levine is very much an optimist.

And as tough as it might be in different parts of the job market right now, DeStefano at Corn Ferry is too.

It feels as though brighter days are ahead.

And each month, Touchwood seems to be getting a little bit more buoyant.

And we'll keep on that path, he says, if the Federal Reserve continues to lower interest rates.

I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

I know we've been lamenting the absence of government economic data the past couple of weeks, and it is a real loss, don't get me wrong.

But there are transactions in this economy that just don't show up in data, like when you do a favor for a friend or lend some of your time in exchange maybe for some goodwill down the road.

But what if there was an app for that?

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

My name is Jonathan Sims.

I was born and raised in Alabama, but I'm currently up here in New York City.

I am a social entrepreneur who has recently launched a platform called Barter Block.

It is a community platform where people are able to exchange skills, services, hobbies, and eventually items without the use of cash.

My day job is: I am a software engineer working at an investment bank.

And last year was a very heavy-hitting year.

And the thing that kept me going outside of work was all of my different hobbies.

So I was into chess heavily.

I was into Muay Thai.

I was into weightlifting.

And I realized that every single hobby that I went to,

people were asking about the other hobbies that I did.

So, in chess, people noticed that

I had the physique of a bodybuilder, so they would ask me questions about that.

And then the same thing happened when I would go to Muay Thai class.

When people found out that I was a coder by trade, they always mentioned, I would love to learn about coding, but I don't know where to get started.

And so, that's really how barter block came about.

If you think about it, we go through life and we barter informally already when someone's like hey I need to borrow your car for the next hour in exchange is it cool if I just cook you a home cooked meal or hey I know that you mentioned that your grass hasn't been cut in a while I can just do that in exchange that is the reason I decided to go down this route of allowing people to either exchange their skills and services using time banking or exchange their skills and services using bartering.

So, for me, one of my offers that I have on the app right now is to teach people the basics of weightlifting.

I can then take that one-hour time credit to learn another skill, or service, or hobby that I've always been interested in.

So, someone on the app is offering first aid basics, so I can use that time credit that I just earned from teaching to learn about first aid.

To be candid, I am overwhelmed.

I am wearing a lot of hats on top of trying to, you know, show up fully for my full-time job, as well as all of the other stuff outside of both, like going to the gym, making sure that I'm tapped into source.

My brother, he's always been in my corner supporting me and even my mama as well.

And we had a very close, heart-to-heart conversation this past weekend.

And she just doles on me.

She's always like hyping me up.

She's doing her best back home in Alabama to tell everyone about the app as well.

And so I have people who rock with me and people who are excited to see, you know, where this vision goes.

That's great, right?

Jonathan Sims in Brooklyn, New York.

Tell us, would you, about your vision?

Marketplace.org/slash my

economy.

Coming up.

Markets has loved to treat generations as animals in a zoo.

And that makes Gen Zers.

What

do you think?

First, though, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is up 515 points, 1.10%, 46,706.

The NASDAQ climbed 310 points.

That is 1.4%,

22,990.

The S ⁇ P 500 up 71 points, 1.1%, 6,735 there.

The week did not start well for Amazon.

As you know, Amazon Web Services, in particular, an outage hit its cloud computing services early this morning, knocked Snapchat, reddit and thousands of other websites offline things had of course improved by afternoon but there were still some issues nonetheless amazon.com accumulated 1.6 percent snap toted up one percent reddit improved about three and nine tenths of one percent today steel maker cleveland cliffs reported revenue that came in below expectations and a bigger loss than they had been expecting even so quarter is an improvement over a year before cleveland cliffs heated up 21 and a half percent also they're going to start looking for rare earth minerals Always a winner.

Bonds up yield on the 10-year T-note down 3.9 or 8%.

You're listening to Marketplace.

This podcast is supported by Odo.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

The big oil services companies are getting their ride on the earnings report merry-go-round this week.

Halliburton makes its announcement tomorrow.

Baker Hughes later in the week.

These are the companies that do the actual drilling and fracking in places like the Permian Basin out in West Texas.

And that has been a tougher business of late.

With low prices for a barrel of crude, West Texas down around $57 today, and an oversupplied global market.

Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has more.

Oil services companies do a lot for the BPs and chevrons of the world, like drilling.

Dan Pickering is with Pickering Energy Partners.

A drilling rig sits out there and helps you drill two miles into the earth.

You're putting pipe down that hole.

That rig would cost anywhere from between 20 and 40 million dollars.

Rigs run 24-7 and can drill two to four wells per month.

Just one employs dozens of people.

The companies that own them compete for drilling contracts.

So when the market is soft like it is now, they don't want their high-cost equipment gathering dust in some stockyard.

And therefore, pricing gets competed down, and that's what's been happening for the past year.

Because of global oversupply, U.S.

crude oil has been priced in the high 50s, below the break-even point for a lot of oil companies, says analyst Sir Rob Pont with Bank of America Securities.

A lot of people are not making money at below 60, right?

So they're not going to drill.

And that's going to show up in the recount.

That's going to show up in the revenue for our companies.

But this is more of a North America thing because of higher break-even points and faster drilling cycles.

But companies with big footprints outside the U.S.

are in better shape because it can take years to develop new projects.

So they're less affected by oil price swings, says Gregory Brew with Eurasia Group.

In some areas, they're not expecting to be dinged quite as badly.

In places like Guyana, for instance, activity is likely to remain fairly robust.

And even in the U.S., there's still an upside to consider for oil services companies.

This sentiment on the gas side, particularly in the U.S., is still very strong.

Rate count for gas continues to increase or remain fairly steady even as the oil rate count falls.

Companies need to get that natural gas out of the ground to power growing electricity demand, whether it's shipped abroad via LNG or used in natural gas plants domestically.

I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.

Earnings season is kind of like a smorgasbord.

You get a little bit of everything as publicly traded companies fulfill their obligations to securities law.

Netflix reports tomorrow.

The streaming giant has been rolling out a bunch of new offerings beyond its standard TV show and movie library.

You got more live sports, video games, podcasts too.

Hello?

And Netflix being, you know, Netflix, all the other streaming platforms are watching them pretty closely.

Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman looked into what it takes to get a leg up in the streaming wars these days.

Fans of the steamy Netflix dating show Too Hot to Handle can write their own love story in a mobile game version of the show.

Available exclusively to Netflix members age 17 plus.

All of this is about brand extension.

Jawad Hussein is with SP Global Ratings.

You take a piece of content and you expand it out and then you can monetize it in so many different ways and you can extend the franchise life.

He says it's like how Disney has mastered the art of making a movie, then selling its characters on t-shirts and toys and coaxing families to visit Disney World.

Netflix is going in person too with Netflix houses for movie screenings and photo ops with your favorite characters.

All of these efforts are to increase engagement.

Alicia Reese is with Wedbush Securities.

She says Netflix wants to keep people watching for longer, in part to sell more ads.

Then to do that, they have to have a pretty broad array of content.

And with such a massive global footprint, those tastes vary pretty widely.

Reaching the widest possible audience is a somewhat unique strategy.

Analyst Dan Rayburn Rayburn says other platforms are going more niche.

In terms of who they want to reach, the type of content that they're going after.

For example, HBO Max sold off its rights to stream new episodes of Sesame Street last year.

They came right out and said publicly, our members just aren't watching it.

Because who thinks of HBO Max as a child's platform?

Probably not the folks watching The White Lotus after their kids are in bed.

Netflix picked up Sesame Street, by the way.

And while HBO is focused on premium content for grown-ups, Jawad Hussein of SP Global Ratings says Disney has doubled down on the superhero set, also live sports through its purchase of ESPN.

Hussein says early in the streaming wars, other platforms wanted to do everything and be Netflix.

The problem was Netflix had just gotten a bit too much of a head start.

So now, Hussein says the streaming wars have reached something of a détente, with most competitors choosing their own lanes and settling in for the long haul.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

That Netflix story from Dan Ackerman was about one company trying to appeal to all kinds of consumers.

Now, how all kinds of companies are trying to attract one specific kind of consumer, Gen Z by name.

They are give or take 13 to 28 years old right now, meaning their spending power is on the rise.

And companies and brands like Barilla, the maker of Italian foods, also Advil and Meta, have been looking for help reaching that generation specifically.

Katie Dayton wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day about how companies need some help with their Gen Z translations.

Katie, welcome to the program.

Good to have you on.

Thank you so much for having me.

So it is not news that

companies need help advertising to younger generations, though.

Gen Z is a little bit of a challenge, right?

Gen Z has proven very tricky for marketers, I think, primarily because of the speed at which their trends come and go.

Marketers, you know, largely rely on a lot of insights and data and cultural teams to help them keep their fingers on the pulse, but they're not able to keep up with the way that TikTok trends come and go, for instance, or what's cool and what's not comes and goes.

And

also the proliferation of media channels.

So it's very just hard to keep up.

How are companies doing it?

Because obviously they got to keep doing it because they need to sell stuff.

Well, enter this sort of influx of companies that say that they can help.

So Gen Z agencies have really branded themselves as very vital for right now.

Some Some of them are staffed by Gen Z people themselves.

One company I spoke to is full of marketers that graduated in 2020, very difficult to find a job back then, and they have been able to sort of sell themselves as an agency you can turn to if you need help there.

And then there are established companies that have formed these sort of mini agencies within them to say,

we'll take the task of understanding the generation plus keeping up with all these trends so you don't have to.

And you can just pay us to do that.

The interesting, several interesting things about this piece, but about

Gen Z specifically, number one, they're really attached to brands, but also number two, and this really kind of got me, they're not afraid to tell those brands what they think.

They share feedback like all the time.

I know, and it's funny, you know,

I'm 33, right?

I think when I was younger, it would be so embarrassing to care so much.

I don't think I would be writing or emailing brands, but this generation does.

And they just seem to connect with them on a level that has been different to what's come before them.

You know, they really connect their identities to the brands that they purchase and interact with.

And therefore, they have more of a sort of paraso relationship with them, you know.

And because they've come up in a world where they can very, very easily get in contact with these companies, you know, we've we've all had instances before now where it's very hard to get in contact with a company and share your feedback.

They've never grown up in a world where that's been the case.

So

they're happy to tell them.

Right.

And we should say here, and you alluded to this earlier, right?

There are the big companies that have these Gen Z divisions, if you will.

Also, Gen Zers are just starting these companies themselves, as you said.

Yeah, and I think it's a really smart way for them to cut through.

The marketing industry right now is going through a little turmoil,

being totally disrupted by AI, and particularly at the junior level, you know, companies, agencies are already telling me that those are the jobs that are going first.

So, if you're graduating with a marketing degree, I think to be able to pitch yourself as someone that knows the audience because you are part of that audience, I think it's a really smart decision on their part.

We should say here, it's not like this problem for companies is going away because right behind Gen Z is Gen Alpha and they're like, you know, the older ones are like 10, 11, 12 now, just, you know, they're getting that consumer consciousness and pretty soon companies are going to be like, oh man, how do we market to them?

Exactly.

And let me tell you, my inbox is full of people that seem to have insights on Gen Alpha too.

You know, it's, it's, it can be overblown, you know, these differences.

At the end of the day, the, the marketing departments that succeed are the ones that just, you know, know how to really speak to audiences in the moment.

But yeah, marketers love to treat generations as animals in a zoo sometimes and sort of subscribe traits to them.

But I think in the case of Gen Z, it's been really needed because they have been so different in their consumer behavior to everyone that came before.

Katie Dayton at the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks, Katie.

I appreciate your time.

Thanks, Guy.

This final note on the way out today, in which the operative number is 3.89 trillion,

that's in dollars, and it's Apple's market capitalization as of the close today.

This is close, given, you know, $100 billion or so, to making it just the third publicly traded company with a valuation topping four with 12 zeros after it.

The iPhone 17, it seems, is the rainmaker here.

Amir Babawi, Caitlin Ash, John Gordon, Lilya Carr, Amanda Petra, and Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff.

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

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is is APM.

How did we go from free-range chicken and grass-fed beef to lab-grown meat?

It's just this very simple notion that basically the animals that we eat are using an awful lot of the earth.

And it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I'm Amy Scott, and this week on How We Survive, we traveled to San Francisco to meet someone who went from growing human heart cells to producing cell-cultivated salmon.

Could it be the future of meat?

Listen to How We Survive on your favorite podcast app.