Are we spending more because we can, or because we have to?

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Speaker 2 On the program today, you, the humble American consumer, we are going to revisit the European economy circa 2010.

Speaker 2 And look, just put down your phone, will you?

Speaker 2 From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 2 I'm Kai Rizzel. It is Wednesday today.
This one is the 12th of November. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of confounding things about this economy right now. And right near the tippy top of that list is the American consumer.

Speaker 2 Specifically, the way we keep on spending, even though survey after survey after survey shows we are getting crankier and crankier.

Speaker 2 Today's data point comes to us from the Bank of America Institute, which tracks credit card and debit card data, which in turn shows consumer spending was up a bit in October.

Speaker 2 That's month to month and year over year.

Speaker 2 But we're spending more in part because we can,

Speaker 2 and we're spending more in part as marketplaces rebenish or reports because we have to.

Speaker 5 Last month, at the dawn of holiday shopping season, consumers turned up the spending by almost 2.5%.

Speaker 6 The year-over-year growth rate is the fastest since early 2024.

Speaker 5 David Tinsley is senior economist at the Bank Bank of America Institute.

Speaker 6 It's been increasing for the last five months.

Speaker 5 But spending more did not mean we got more. Tinsley says the amount of stuff we buy hasn't actually changed that much since January.

Speaker 2 We are just paying more for it.

Speaker 7 In part due to tariffs, in part due to just overall inflation.

Speaker 5 Matt Schultz is chief consumer finance analyst at Lending Tree.

Speaker 7 Anybody who's thinking that the budget from last year is going to get them the same amount of gifts this year

Speaker 7 is probably going to end up being a little disappointed.

Speaker 5 On average, consumers are actually planning on spending less this holiday season, according to conference board senior economist Stephanie Guichar.

Speaker 8 On average, $990

Speaker 8 on both gifts and non-gifts. This is down 6.9%

Speaker 8 from last year.

Speaker 5 That is what we have been telling ourselves and people who do surveys. What we say and what we do are different, though, and in reality, according to forecasters, we will probably spend more.

Speaker 9 We're expecting holiday spending to grow between 3.7 and 4.2% this year. That is a pretty positive number.

Speaker 5 Mark Matthews is chief economist at the National Retail Federation. One reason shoppers may end up spending more is because some of them can.

Speaker 9 They're supported by strong fundamentals like continued wage growth, near record levels of household wealth, good disposable income growth, and relatively low unemployment.

Speaker 5 That said, there's a big divide between lower income and higher income spending right now.

Speaker 5 One tip from Lending Trees Matt Schultz on staying within your holiday shopping budget, make a list before you go out.

Speaker 7 Impulse buys have wrecked a whole lot of holiday budgets over the years.

Speaker 5 Good luck, everyone. In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Seeing as how we do talk about consumers a lot on this program, maybe I should explain why we talk a lot about consumers on this program. It's not going to take long, I promise.

Speaker 2 According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in the second quarter of this year, spending by or on behalf of consumers was 68.2%

Speaker 2 of the entire economy. That's why.

Speaker 2 All right, with President Trump's plans for a 50-year mortgage getting, well, an underwhelming reception, it is worth remarking that we have just about come to that time of year when the housing market starts to hibernate.

Speaker 2 Schools well underway. There are, of course, the holidays and the cold weather.
NFL games, perhaps, taking priority over those Sunday open house visits, what have you.

Speaker 2 But come snow or rain or Thanksgiving dinner, there are signs would-be home buyers are more active now than in years past.

Speaker 2 The Mortgage Bankers Association reports mortgage applications were up 31% last week from the same time last year.

Speaker 2 Marketplace's Matt Levin has more now on the art and the science of holiday home buying.

Speaker 10 November and December are usually slow months for Craig O'Boyle, a real estate agent in Colorado Springs. But so far, slow season has been, well, less slow.

Speaker 11 On Friday, I got three offers on two listings that had kind of just sat for a while. And then I got an offer on another listing.

Speaker 11 They span all price ranges, like the lower end to the extreme higher end out here.

Speaker 10 The offers came in below listing price, which wasn't surprising. Tis the season for bargain house hunting.

Speaker 11 It's the same kind of mentality. People going out on Black Friday.
Hey, I've had my eye on this house for a while. Maybe now I can get 10% off.

Speaker 10 Except instead of waiting in line outside Target, ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat over the same TV, you're much less likely to run into competition at an end-of-year open house.

Speaker 10 People are just busy for the holidays. And if you do find a property still on the market, the sellers are usually eager to negotiate.

Speaker 12 You are kind of dealing with the leftovers from the year, to use a Thanksgiving metaphor.

Speaker 10 Daryl Fairweather is an economist at Redfin.

Speaker 12 Those homes have been sitting on the market for longer. The sellers, they start to get a little motivated.

Speaker 12 Most people who own a home, they want it to be done with by the time Thanksgiving and the holidays roll around.

Speaker 10 Investors and second homeowners are usually the big buyers this time of year, but this season they may be joined by more regular home buyers looking to lock in a 6% mortgage rate on a 30-year fixed.

Speaker 13 Economist Danielle Hale at Realtor.com says even though rates started dropping a few months ago, we know that it takes some time for buyers to find out about and then react to lower mortgage rates.

Speaker 13 And last year when mortgage rates dropped in September, we saw the pickup in home sales in November-December timeframe.

Speaker 10 Buyers may also be trying to lock in rates while they are relatively low. Again, economist Daryl Fairweather with Redfin.

Speaker 12 I think that there is a good chance that this might be a low point for rates and they might be higher come January. It's definitely not guaranteed that the Fed will cut.

Speaker 10 Mortgage rates are loosely tied to Fed rates, and it's unclear what Jay Powell and company will do next month, let alone what they'll do in 2026. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Let alone indeed. Wall Street today, kind of mixed, kind of meh.
We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 2 Here's one from the man, what a difference 15 years makes file. Think back with me now to 2010 or so.
The worst of the financial crisis was in the rearview mirror.

Speaker 2 But over in Europe, there was a lingering debt hangover, most particularly in a handful of countries in southern Europe, Portugal and Italy, Greece and Spain as well.

Speaker 2 Now, though, those four have seemingly gotten their mojo back, and it's a different group of countries that has become Europe's economic problem children.

Speaker 2 Chelsea Delaney of the Wall Street Journal wrote about it the other day. Chelsea, welcome to the program.

Speaker 14 Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2 For those unfamiliar, would you just remind us what it was like in Europe in the 2010s-ish?

Speaker 14 I mean,

Speaker 14 yeah, I think the 2010s were a really fraught time in the Eurozone. You know, after the financial crisis, it spilled over into this massive debt crisis in Europe.

Speaker 14 And we saw particularly in these southern European economies like Greece and Spain,

Speaker 14 huge, huge distress. And there were times when they thought the Eurozone was going to break apart, that they would have to leave the Euro.

Speaker 14 So it was a very, very politically, economically, financially fraught time for Europe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, my memory of that time is everybody was talking about ring-fencing all that Greek debt. Now, though, as you point out in this piece, you and your colleagues,

Speaker 2 it's almost flipped a a little bit. And Northern Europe are the ones, those are the countries that are somewhat challenged.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I think we called it the role reversal in our piece. And to some degree, I think that is really what's happened.

Speaker 14 You know, the problem economies in Europe today are countries like France, which is having a lot of problems balancing its budget, the UK, the same problem, Germany, whose economic model has been really broken over the past couple of years.

Speaker 14 And then you have the southern economies, which are doing really well.

Speaker 14 So, Spain has been the fastest-growing economy in Europe, but also one of the fastest-growing economies in the entire developed world. You have Greece growing a lot as well.

Speaker 14 Even Italy, which is still stagnating a bit, has gotten a lot of praise from investors for really getting its budget in order.

Speaker 14 Its stock market has had one of the best performances this year across Europe. So, yeah, we've definitely seen a bit of a flip-flop across Europe.

Speaker 2 Okay, why?

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's an excellent question.

Speaker 14 It's rooted in the Eurozone debt crisis. So back then, a lot of countries in southern Europe received bailouts.
And as part of those bailouts, they were basically forced to do austerity.

Speaker 14 So they had to cut pensions, they had to raise retirement ages, they had to privatize some of their industries. And that was at the time extremely painful for those economies.

Speaker 14 We saw unemployment soar, a lot of people got poorer. But what it did was sort of set the stage for these economies to emerge a lot stronger.
They're more dynamic. And so that was one factor.

Speaker 14 As well, a lot of southern European economies depend a lot on tourism. And post-pandemic, there's just been this massive surge in tourism towards Europe.
So that's really benefited places like Greece.

Speaker 14 And then if you look at the Northern European side, it's kind of the opposite.

Speaker 2 The other thing that's happening, though, with the Northern European countries is there is nobody,

Speaker 2 you know, much as the Northern European countries forced the Southern European countries 15 years ago to adopt austerity measures and reform things, nobody's squeezing the Germans and the French and the Brits.

Speaker 14 Yeah, exactly. Like you don't make the choice to cut spending unless you're absolutely forced to.
And nobody's making the UK or France do that at this point.

Speaker 14 So they're just kind of continuing on with these patchworks of, you know, trying to get spending done a little bit, but also not really addressing it in a major way.

Speaker 14 So there is really really no consensus on how to address this right now, and nobody's really forcing them to.

Speaker 2 Just to bring it to U.S. shores for a second here, nobody's squeezing us either.
And we have many advantages globally. We've got the dollar, we've got all of that.

Speaker 2 But we also have a looming and ever-increasing debt situation here that nobody is forcing us to solve.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I think if you look at the problems that France and the UK are having, the U.S. has those problems on a much bigger scale.
Like the deficits in the U.S., it's about 8% of GDP. You know, the U.K.

Speaker 14 is 3% or 4%.

Speaker 14 So the spending problems are much, much bigger in the U.S. But as you say, like people want to buy U.S.
treasuries, they want to buy the dollar. And that allows the U.S.
to run bigger deficits.

Speaker 14 But confidence can be very fleeting. We've seen this many, many times.
And I think people are very nervous about the U.S.'s finances. But like France, investors are not yet forcing the U.S.

Speaker 14 to make these tough choices.

Speaker 2 Right, right. Slowly and then all at once.
Chelsea Delaney at the Journal. We got her in London.
Chelsea, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time.

Speaker 14 Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2 Corporate earnings season for quarter number three is coming to a close. NVIDIA is the last biggie we're going to get after the closing bell Wednesday next.

Speaker 2 In the meanwhile, the Dows hit a fresh record to high, and the S ⁇ P 500 is trading 16% higher than it was at the beginning of the year.

Speaker 15 The average PE ratio of the S ⁇ P 500 right now is 25.

Speaker 2 That's Michelle Lowry. She's a professor of finance at Drexel University.
That PE ratio she mentioned is what we're going to spend the next couple of minutes on. PE stands for price to earnings.

Speaker 2 It's a ratio, a company's stock price divided by its earnings per share.

Speaker 15 I think maybe the easiest way to explain this is to start with a really simple example.

Speaker 2 We do love some simple examples.

Speaker 15 Let's take a company. Let's suppose it has earnings per share of $1.

Speaker 2 $1, got it?

Speaker 15 And we're going to make this company go out of business in the very near future.

Speaker 2 Sad, but okay. Go on.

Speaker 15 When it goes out of business, it's going to pay out all of its earnings. So, how much would you pay for one share of stock of this company? You'd pay a dollar.

Speaker 2 Right. Pay a dollar, get a dollar.
That company's PE ratio is one.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 15 suppose that this company is going to live for the foreseeable future. We're not going to kill it off tomorrow.

Speaker 2 It might make another dollar next year or more than a dollar the following year.

Speaker 2 Investors, as they do, are going to price this stock based on their expectations of future growth, and the PE ratio thus goes up.

Speaker 2 Now, a huge chunk of the SP gains of late have come because of the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being invested in artificial intelligence.

Speaker 2 So, bearing in mind that the average PE ratio on the SP right now is 25, remember price to earnings, the ratio is 25.

Speaker 2 What does that tell us?

Speaker 15 People have very optimistic expectations of how fast these AI companies are going to grow into the future.

Speaker 2 That's PE present day. The historical context, it always is, I am obliged to point out, is helpful.

Speaker 17 There are kind of two episodes in the past where price earnings ratios have shot up to really high levels.

Speaker 2 John Steinsson is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley.

Speaker 17 One was right before the Great Depression.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 The other one?

Speaker 17 In the late 1990s during the internet bubble.

Speaker 2 Oh, great. Just

Speaker 2 great.

Speaker 17 Of course, this time could be different. You know, this is, you know, AI could turn out to be just as good as people are hoping.

Speaker 17 But certainly in the past, when price earnings ratios have been this high,

Speaker 17 people of ex-post been, you know, disappointed.

Speaker 2 Here's Michelle Lowry one more time.

Speaker 15 The reality is nobody knows. We're all just sitting here trying to figure it out right now.
And this is on average across the market how investors are thinking about it.

Speaker 2 Nobody knows, gang. Nobody

Speaker 2 knows.

Speaker 19 Coming up. And I have to do either push-ups or squats or something like that.

Speaker 2 I mean, how badly do you want to be on your phone, you know? First, though, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 2 Dow Industrials added 326 today. That is 7 tenths of 1%, 48,254 on the blue chips.
As I said, another record high. NASDAQ down 61 points, about a quarter percent, 23,406.

Speaker 2 The S ⁇ P 500 ticked up 4 points, a 10th percentile, 6,850. Matt Levin was telling us about the stronger-than-expected activity in housing.
RE-MAX down 6-10%.

Speaker 2 Zillow down two and three quarters percent. Anywhere real estate, parent company of Coldwell Banker and Century 21, among others, moved up four tenths of one percent.
Ticker symbol on that one?

Speaker 3 It's a good one.

Speaker 20 H-O-U-S.

Speaker 2 On holding rang up 18% today. That's after the shoe company posted quarterly results that exceeded expectations.

Speaker 2 They expect sales to jump some 34%.

Speaker 2 This year, that's a lot for shoes. Bonds up, yield on the 10-year T-note down 4.06%.
You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 1 Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable.

Speaker 1 And some describe Odo'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 1 Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com.
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Speaker 2 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
Here's a phrase you might not have heard in a while. Subprime borrowers.
If you're having flashbacks to the financial crisis right now, I get it.

Speaker 2 So many mortgages given to the riskiest of borrowers back then. The 2025 version of that is car loans.

Speaker 2 Last month, Fitch Ratings tells us, 6.6% of subprime borrowers were at least 60 days late on their car payments, the highest delinquency rate on record, which for this data set goes back to the early 1990s.

Speaker 2 The why of this thing, you can probably imagine.

Speaker 2 What's it going to mean? Here's Marketplace of Daniel Ackerman.

Speaker 20 A car can be an economic lifeline, says Jessica Caldwell of the car buying site Edmonds.

Speaker 23 Going to school, going to work, taking their kids where they need to go.

Speaker 23 It's, you know, it is really kind of the cornerstone of your life for most Americans, especially in places that don't have good public transportation systems.

Speaker 20 And unlike many mortgages or student loans, which have more borrower protections, Caldwell says the consequences of missing car payments can happen fast.

Speaker 23 Their car could be repossessed.

Speaker 20 And the reason subprime delinquencies are rising now should be clear to anyone who's gone car shopping lately.

Speaker 24 Car prices are at record highs.

Speaker 20 Ted Rossman is senior analyst at Bankrate.

Speaker 24 We're talking about roughly $50,000 on average for a new car.

Speaker 20 Combine that with higher interest rates in recent years, and it means the cost of financing a car is rising even faster than the cost of everything else, says Ricard Bandibo of VantageScore.

Speaker 25 When we look across all different loan products, the average loan size amongst auto loans has increased more than any other loan product.

Speaker 24 For Christopher Palmer, a finance professor at MIT, the delinquencies suggest that the vulnerable part of the economy is having an even tougher time making ends meet.

Speaker 20 But if issues with subprime lending call to mind the subprime mortgage crisis, Palmer says not so fast.

Speaker 24 There is a substantive difference between subprime car loans and subprime mortgages in that the mortgages tended to be systemic.

Speaker 20 Mortgage balances economy-wide are nearly eight times greater than auto loans, according to the New York Fed.

Speaker 24 And so, you had a lot of financial institutions that could not withstand the foreclosure crisis in houses.

Speaker 24 We don't see a lot of institutions right now that seem so tied up and so exposed to car loans.

Speaker 20 Plus, Mike Brisson of Moody's Analytics says, even though more people are behind on car payments, we're not seeing them going into bankruptcy and defaults.

Speaker 20 Which means banks aren't writing off these loans just yet. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Hey, so how's your screen time these days? Three hours a day?

Speaker 2 Seven?

Speaker 2 More?

Speaker 2 No judgment year, I promise, but any guesses what it is on average? According to the healthcare data company Harmony Healthcare IT, it's five hours and sixteen minutes.

Speaker 2 And you know what that is, right? It's a business opportunity for the cottage industry that's developing to help you get off your phone. Marketplace's Maria Hollenhorst reports.

Speaker 16 About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine told me about an app she downloaded to help curb her screen time.

Speaker 19 It turns on a camera and it watches me like camera physically tracking your movements.

Speaker 19 And I have to do either push-ups or squats or something like that for every minute of free use of the apps that I've chosen to lock.

Speaker 16 I know. Terrifying.
Her name's Hannah Palma, and the app is called ClearSpace.

Speaker 16 You can tell it how much you want to use certain apps like Instagram or TikTok, and it will prompt you to do an exercise or take a deep breath each time you open them.

Speaker 16 Oh, and it costs $50 a year, which Hannah pays gladly.

Speaker 19 I realize like it's kind of silly that I'm paying monthly for my phone and then I'm paying yearly to not use it.

Speaker 19 But I think that's the best way that I've like stayed healthy in in managing my screen time.

Speaker 16 ClearSpace is just one of dozens of companies that have popped up in recent years that are in the business of screen time reduction.

Speaker 16 And Hannah, who's actually a mobile app engineer, convinced me to sign up too. And for a while, it kind of worked.

Speaker 16 I found that just taking a pause before opening TikTok at least helped me become more conscious of my scrolling. And like a lot of these new apps, it had a dashboard where I could track my progress.

Speaker 18 It's fascinating, isn't it? Don't use your phone, but like come to this dashboard, which will show you how much you've not used your phone.

Speaker 16 Zotanya Sujan is a reader in communication and social technologies at the London College of Communication.

Speaker 16 And she said that those gamified features like stats tracking, streaks, and the ability to add friends are the same ones that social media companies use to make their platforms so sticky in the first place.

Speaker 16 It's that little dopamine hit we all get when we see notifications from our virtual lives.

Speaker 18 I think digital well-being and digital detox and these apps are trying to give people, well, weirdly, using the same systems and tools to try to give people a sense of control over very pervasive interfaces and technologies.

Speaker 16 Some startups, including Brick, Bloom, and Block, yes, that's three different companies, sell physical devices that restrict apps when you tap them.

Speaker 16 They're priced between $30 and $60, sometimes with an additional monthly subscription fee. But almost all of these systems have ways to cheat a little, break the rules that you've set for yourself.

Speaker 2 I've used all of them.

Speaker 26 The Lockbox Phone Case, Brick, Freedom software, like lots of different things. I think the challenge is the magnetism of the phone is strong and the functional use of the phone is strong.

Speaker 16 Ben Goldhirsh developed his own homemade screen limiting solution, which he calls the staff of destiny. It's a big walking stick.

Speaker 16 He picked it up while camping in Alaska that he screwed his phone case into.

Speaker 26 Which is super embarrassing to kind of walk through the airport with your phone on a stick, but it did have kind of a wizard vibe.

Speaker 16 It's designed to make scrolling inconvenient. And with that same idea, a company that Goldhirsch co-founded called Matter Neuroscience is now developing a six-pound phone case priced at $209.

Speaker 16 And if you're hearing this and screaming, $200 phone case, $50 app? What in the capitalism is going on here?

Speaker 18 Yes, it is crazy. I think it's crazy to pay to not use your phone.
I think you'd think that it would just be up to people to be able to do that.

Speaker 16 Zotanya Suzanne again at the London College of Communication.

Speaker 18 But the thing I think the most is that being chronically online and being deeply engaged with your phone is not like a personal fault.

Speaker 18 It's something that, you know, we are using these technologies the way that they're designed to.

Speaker 16 When I checked in with Hannah a few weeks ago, it was clear she'd been a lot more dedicated to her screen limits than I have.

Speaker 19 I have a 74-day streak that I'm really proud of.

Speaker 12 My streak is only three days.

Speaker 16 So she invited me to join join a challenge where we can compare our scrolling minutes and do exercises to earn more.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 14 time to do some squats.

Speaker 16 And I know that this gamified strategy is straight from the big tech playbook. It's not going to let me cheat.
But it does make me feel a little bit closer to my friend in real life.

Speaker 16 I'm Maria Hollenhorst for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 What in the name of capitalism indeed? This final note on the way out today, which I will observe, is the 12th day of the month.

Speaker 2 Perhaps not remarkable to most of you, but for those of us who mourn the loss of government economic data, it means we are all but for sure not going to get the November jobs data on schedule the first Friday of December.

Speaker 2 Why, you ask? Because the BLS and the Census Bureau do their surveys during what is called a reference week, which is the seven-day week, Sunday to Saturday, that contains, yes, the 12th of the month.

Speaker 2 So they are not doing the surveys. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Fokey, Montana Johnson, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Alex Simpson, and Charlton Thorpe.

Speaker 2 Jeff Peters is the manager of media production, and I'm Kai Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 2 This is APM.

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