How long until SNAP reaches kitchen tables?

Speaker 1 This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth.

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

Speaker 1 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.

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Speaker 2 Well, let's see. More private sector data, some rare earth elements,

Speaker 2 and pumpkins from American public media. This is Marketplace.

Speaker 2 I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Monday, today 3 November.
Good as it always is to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to say, and I am for sure not alone, that while it's one thing to have to figure out what's up with this economy without federal data, we've all gotten used to our private data favors, after all, it is entirely another thing when those private data points point in opposite directions.

Speaker 2 The indicators of choice for us today are both what are called purchasing managers indexes.

Speaker 2 They track manufacturing, new orders, and factory production levels, prices for materials and for finished goods.

Speaker 2 They're usually pretty good leading indicators telling us where the economy and its factories are headed.

Speaker 2 But the PMI from the Institute for Supply Management shows an eighth straight month of mild contraction, while the SP Global PMI shows a third consecutive month of mild improvement.

Speaker 2 We asked Marketplaces Mitchell Hartman to spend his day trying to make sense of it all.

Speaker 5 Manufacturing is up, manufacturing is down, and there's no government data to help settle the question. Looking at it all together, Ned Hill at the Ohio Manufacturing Institute sums it up.

Speaker 6 You know, if you'd see me, I'd be shrugging my shoulders and going, meh, nothing's really growing. There's lots of uncertainty.
This tariff thing keeps on shifting.

Speaker 5 For industrial analyst Jonathan Secreda at CFRA Research, when two reports that survey corporate purchasing managers come up with opposite conclusions, he goes and finds other economic sources.

Speaker 5 Regional Fed banks have been reporting modest improvement in manufacturing, plus in corporate earnings reports.

Speaker 5 All that argues the more positive report from SP Global hits closer to the mark, except SP Global's own economist, Chris Williamson, says his survey isn't very positive looking into the future.

Speaker 10 Companies have grown increasingly gloomy about the outlook.

Speaker 5 He says companies ramped up production to try and get ahead of rising tariff costs on raw materials and components. Now, inventory is piling up in their warehouses.

Speaker 5 Overall, says Thomas Ryan at Capital Economics, the U.S. manufacturing sector has survived tariffs.

Speaker 7 It's not been unscathed. Definitely had a hit to manufacturers' order books and push-up costs.
They've not led to a complete destruction of the factory sector that some economists might have feared.

Speaker 5 But remember, President Donald Trump has insisted tariffs on imported goods will strengthen U.S. manufacturers, giving them a competitive advantage.
Again, Jonathan Secreta at CFRA Research.

Speaker 8 If the idea is these tariffs are bringing back our manufacturing base, then it has not happened yet.

Speaker 9 It's quite the opposite.

Speaker 5 He says since Trump's tariffs were announced last spring, spending by U.S. manufacturers to build new factories has actually declined.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Wall Street to start November, mixed, but without much enthusiasm either way. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 2 42 million people getting partial payment of their federal food benefits while the government is shut down.

Speaker 2 How's that going to work, do you suppose? Marketplacer Samantha Fields updates the snap story.

Speaker 11 Millions of people around the country were supposed to get their November snap benefits in the last few days and haven't. And it's been unclear whether they would get them this month at all.

Speaker 11 Now we know they will get something, but it's still unclear when and how much.

Speaker 12 I would anticipate that individuals are going to receive something like 50% of the amount that they normally get.

Speaker 11 Jimmy Chen is CEO of Propel, which has an app that lets people manage government benefits, including SNAP.

Speaker 11 He says the pot of emergency funds USDA will use to pay out partial benefits this month is about $4.6 billion,

Speaker 11 a little more than half of what it would take to pay out full benefits.

Speaker 12 It still remains to be seen exactly how this will get rolled out with states and how states will handle the payments.

Speaker 11 Chen says the federal government should release the funding in the next couple of days, but states will then have have to calculate how much every recipient will get.

Speaker 11 And according to USDA, that could take time, anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

Speaker 13 I think that that is people being incredibly cautious and not wanting to overly excite, particularly families in need.

Speaker 11 Anna Sieber is with Conduent, a company that works with 16 states to deliver SNAP benefits. She says the process is cumbersome.

Speaker 13 The funds have to flow from the feds. The states have to give us the names.

Speaker 13 But most of the processors of SNAP also went through events such as disaster snap or COVID snap where we had to be incredibly flexible and move on a dime.

Speaker 11 And she's optimistic it will be possible to get benefits out quickly. Still, Stacey Dean at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University says this is just a temporary fix.

Speaker 13 The contingency funds that USDA have available will run out in November, and so that creates just another serious concern for December.

Speaker 11 If the shutdown continues, I'm Samantha Fields from Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Rare earth elements. So So much in the news of late are not, in fact, all that rare.
They're just not found in easy-to-extracted concentrations. So actually, getting them is hard and it's expensive.

Speaker 2 China has an all-but-stranglehold on rare earths, a market power it had chosen to exercise in response to President Trump's tariffs until the two sides put the trade war on pause last week.

Speaker 2 But truth notwithstanding, the United States is still in a global competition for these elements, elements that find their way into everything from MRIs to intercontinental missiles.

Speaker 2 Marketplace Sabri Benishore looked at how that competition is going.

Speaker 3 Back in April, China started to restrict how seven rare earth elements and magnets made from them were exported. Manufacturers freaked out.

Speaker 14 Ford had to stop manufacturing its Explorer model in Chicago. Suzuki had to stop manufacturing the Swift model.

Speaker 3 Gracelyn Baskarin is director of critical mineral security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Speaker 3 Chinese exporters had to apply for licenses and prove to the Chinese government they weren't supplying foreign militaries or even suppliers of suppliers of suppliers to those militaries.

Speaker 3 The application backlog snarled the global supply chain for months. And then, in October, the restrictions were expanded to include more, more exotic rare earths.

Speaker 14 It would have crippled access to rare earths and permanent magnets for our defense sector.

Speaker 3 Yttrium is used to coat jet engine parts so they don't melt. Dysprosium Dysprosium and terbium are in the magnets that guide hypersonic missiles.

Speaker 14 This year made us realize how vulnerable we are, not just for our national security, but also for the sustainability of key industries.

Speaker 3 The one-year pause on some, but not all, of China's restrictions is giving the U.S. a little more time to build its own rare earth supply chain.
China has made that difficult too.

Speaker 15 They've had the monopoly in this space for a really long time.

Speaker 3 Niha Mukherjee is research manager for rare earths at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. China controls more than 90% of the refining of rare earths.

Speaker 3 Mukherjee says it has used its monopoly power, low-cost production, and subsidies to hold down prices.

Speaker 15 Any new producer that is trying to come online is not being able to make any money.

Speaker 3 The U.S. government has gone to extraordinary lengths to get around this.

Speaker 16 We are restoring the full supply chain end to end.

Speaker 3 Matt Slosher is chief communications officer for MP Materials, which owns the Mountain Pass mine in California, about an hour south of Vegas.

Speaker 3 It is the second biggest rare earths mine in the world, and two years ago, it started refining rare earths too.

Speaker 3 In July, the Pentagon announced it was becoming the largest shareholder, investing $400 million.

Speaker 3 It also guaranteed a minimum price for certain refined rare earths.

Speaker 16 That enables us to earn a fair return and enables us to continue to have reinvestment economics.

Speaker 3 As China has bent market forces, the U.S. is learning to do the same.

Speaker 3 The Pentagon promised that if MP Materials built an additional large rare earth magnet factory, it would buy 100% of the magnets that came out of it for 10 years.

Speaker 3 That factory is now being built in Texas.

Speaker 16 We're going to be scaling up to 10,000 tons of production, which is more than we import.

Speaker 3 That is on top of the rare earth magnets being produced by another U.S. company, Novion.

Speaker 16 The U.S. is well on track to being self-sufficient for magnet production by 2030.

Speaker 3 Ryan Castillo is managing director at Adamas Intelligence.

Speaker 16 The major bottleneck today that the industry is facing is with respect to the so-called heavy rare earth elements.

Speaker 3 These are the more exotic ones that are harder to find and harder to refine. They go into laser crystals and super magnets that can still work while hot.
Mountain Pass mines them.

Speaker 3 So does uranium mining company Energy Fuels, which has also started to refine heavy rare earths in a pilot project this year.

Speaker 3 Still, a full rare earth supply chain that meets all of the U.S.'s needs with no missing links may be decades away, says Benchmark Minerals Nihamokerji.

Speaker 15 The capacity that is coming online is not enough. There needs to be more investment.

Speaker 3 Time is of the essence, says Adamas Intelligence Ryan Cassiou, because the reason for China's restrictions on the market in the first place are not just about competition in defense.

Speaker 16 It's also about undermining and slowing the progress of key industries with which China is competing with the rest of the world for EVs, for robotics.

Speaker 3 China, he says, is using its rare earth muscle to buy time. Time to develop an insurmountable lead in the industries of tomorrow.
In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 If you could buy your childhood home to live in again,

Speaker 2 would you? Nostalgia is a powerful thing, right? Because last year, Zillow did a survey that showed 44% of Americans would, in fact, buy their childhood home, assuming cost wasn't an issue.

Speaker 2 But what if we replace childhood home in that survey with previous home?

Speaker 2 Here's today's installment of our series, Adventures in Housing.

Speaker 18 My name is Meg Tipton, and I live in Alexander, North Carolina for the second time.

Speaker 18 Four years ago, I sold my ramshackle dream house and was able to buy it back all fixed up and shiny and beautiful. When I first saw it, I immediately fell in love with the place.

Speaker 18 It just felt enchanted to me. It's tucked out in the country.
It has a beautiful little creek. It's surrounded by pasture land.

Speaker 18 But I brought my mom out to see it with me. And there was a retaining wall in the back that was falling apart.
There were carpets all over the floor with like stains on them.

Speaker 18 The roof had a rock holding down a part of it that I called Rocky the Roof Patch.

Speaker 18 It was absolutely terrifying. My mom looked at me at a certain point and was like, do not buy this house.
And I was like, I'm going to buy buy it anyway

Speaker 18 I thought I'd be able to fix it up over time but being a single mom and a community college professor I did not have the funds to do it

Speaker 18 then I ended up meeting my husband but he lived in South Carolina so I sold it and I was in South Carolina for almost four years

Speaker 18 Every day I missed this house and occasionally my husband and I would drive by just to check on it. And finally, he's like, okay, we can move back to North Carolina.

Speaker 18 We looked for real estate for a while. And our budget, we thought, was very generous.
It was like $500,000. We're like, we can totally find something great.

Speaker 18 But we wanted a little bit like an acre of land. We wanted to be kind of removed from neighbors.
And we couldn't find anything in our price range.

Speaker 18 And that's when I was sitting around looking at Zillow, a little bit defeated, and saw a familiar address. And I sat bolt upright in my chair.
I was like, oh my gosh,

Speaker 18 that's my house.

Speaker 18 We came out and saw it the next day and my realtor said that it was less like a normal house showing and more like an HGTV reveal where it's like check out what we've done with your fixer-upper.

Speaker 18 She opened the door and we were like, oh my gosh, it's beautiful.

Speaker 18 New roof, new retaining wall, new deck, like everything in it is completely gorgeous and completely not the way that I would have done it, but so much better.

Speaker 18 Everybody thought that was the craziest thing they'd ever heard and the seller's agent came to get the lockbox off and I started to explain the story and he's like, I know the story.

Speaker 18 Everybody knows the story.

Speaker 18 There's never been a story like this.

Speaker 18 Even if it hadn't been perfect, I would have been okay because it's my house and I would have been glad to have it back. We plan to stay here forever.

Speaker 2 Pretty good story, right? Meg Tipton back in Alexander, North Carolina. Whether you are thinking of your last home or your next one, tell us about it.
Would you will get it on the radio?

Speaker 2 Marketplace.org slash adventuresinhousing.

Speaker 2 Coming up.

Speaker 19 Pumpkins, I don't think pumpkins are cheap.

Speaker 2 How much is too much to make your house look good?

Speaker 2 First, though, let's do the numbers. Tow Industrial is off 226 points today, about 15%, 47,336.
The NASDAQ rose 109 points, 12%, 22,834.

Speaker 2 The S ⁇ P 500 added 11 points, close to two-tenths percent, 6,851 there. Mitchell was telling us about the state of manufacturing in this economy.

Speaker 2 So checking on a few big thing makers on Wall Street today. Apple downed about 1 half percent.
Ford, which reported a big drop in EV sales, dipped nine-tenths of 1% today. Caterpillar.

Speaker 2 maker of really big things lost 1.1 percent rare earth firms had a not so good day on wall street mp materials slipped more than eight percent energy fuels slid more than 13%.

Speaker 2 NioCorp fell away more than 11%

Speaker 2 today.

Speaker 2 In corporate news, the maker of Tylenol and Nicorette jumped after agreeing to be absorbed by the maker of Huggies and Kleenex for more than $48 billion. That's Kenview rose 12%.

Speaker 2 Kimberly Clark of Scott and Cottonail Bathroom Tissue Fame fell 14.5%.

Speaker 2 We do everything here on this program. You're listening to Marketplace.

Speaker 21 This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe.

Speaker 21 With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps and save up to 55% compared to major banks.

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

Speaker 1 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 1 Odo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Speaker 2 This marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance, it takes a plan.

Speaker 2 They're ready to build your wealth blueprint for retirement, investing, taxes, and everything else your financial life brings.

Speaker 2 It reveals gaps and highlights opportunities you may have missed at no cost to you. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/slash blueprint.

Speaker 20 This is Iron Glass, the host of This American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office.

Speaker 20 It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what. Let's try and do that.

Speaker 20 We've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling, and you get to see people everywhere adapting and making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in.

Speaker 20 If you haven't listened in a while, I honestly think these are some of the best stories we've ever done. This is American Life, every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahal.
Here comes a story about marginal changes in supply and what that can mean in the global industry that is crude oil.

Speaker 2 We produce, give or take, 100 million barrels of oil a day. We use, give or take, 100 million barrels of oil a day.
So even small changes can matter.

Speaker 2 OPEC Plus, that's the cartel and its allies, announced over the weekend it's going to pump more oil in December, 137,000 more barrels per day for the third straight month.

Speaker 2 So more supply, never mind that crude has been falling this year. Daniel Ackerman explains why.

Speaker 22 The story starts a few years ago, says Jorge Leon of Reistat Energy, when OPEC began a different push, one to limit pumping.

Speaker 23 OPEC has since October 2022 been cutting production to support prices until December 2024.

Speaker 22 Leon says those cuts did prop up oil prices, but they had a side effect for OPEC.

Speaker 23 Gradually but steadily giving up market share.

Speaker 22 Elevated prices prompted non-OPEC countries to muscle in.

Speaker 22 The US, Brazil, Argentina, Guyana, Norway, and Canada raised output to the point that this year, OPEC finally decided they don't like giving away market share to other players.

Speaker 22 So, Mark Finlay of Rice University says OPEC is now reversing course and trying to undercut those other players. That's why the cartel is boosting production amid an oil glut.

Speaker 17 The group has been on a program for much of this year of trying to gradually unwind large production cuts that have been in place for several years.

Speaker 22 But the market can only soak up so much oil. China had been buying and stockpiling crude on the cheap this year, but that's now slowing, says Matt Smith, an analyst with Kepler.

Speaker 10 Now that China isn't stock building, they've been absent from the market, and so we're seeing prices moving lower.

Speaker 22 Meanwhile, global sales of electric vehicles keep growing, and the geopolitical risk built into the price of oil has declined since the Gaza ceasefire.

Speaker 23 All of which leads Jorge Leon of Reistat Energy to say, Next year, there is going to be a market that is going to be heavily oversupplied.

Speaker 22 OPEC says starting in January, it'll finally stop pumping more oil. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Where are you on pumpkins? Not pie,

Speaker 2 not for the love of peat spice lattes, but the actual gourd as a decorative item, specifically outdoors on your porch, because it seems pumpkin scaping is a thing.

Speaker 2 Lane Florsheim had the story in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Lane, thanks for coming on the program.

Speaker 19 It's great to be on.

Speaker 2 These pumpkin scapers, pumpkin stylists, what do they do exactly?

Speaker 19 Well, the way that I've been explaining this story is that, you know, you've probably gone by a porch that's been elaborately decorated with pumpkins and maybe some mums and Halloween decorations.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 they're very festive. What you might not know is that there's very likely a pumpkin stylist or pumpkin entrepreneur behind that who

Speaker 19 brought the pumpkins to that house, did the styling.

Speaker 19 It's this kind of new micro industry that's sprung up in recent years.

Speaker 2 It is an amazing small business. Let's say I wanted to pumpkin style my front porch in a mid-range kind of way.
How much is it going to cost me?

Speaker 19 You know, all of the pumpkin entrepreneurs who I interviewed have a variety of packages that kind of start in the low-ish hundreds, like $300 or so dollars, and go up to over $1,000.

Speaker 2 I sound like a cheapskigo, I know, but oh my goodness.

Speaker 19 Pumpkins, I don't think pumpkins are cheap.

Speaker 2 No, but we should make sure people understand this. I mean, we're talking like lots and lots and lots of pumpkins of all sizes.

Speaker 19 Yes, one of the most fun parts of working on this story was kind of learning some of the names of these pumpkins. You have like some of the small white ones are called baby booze.

Speaker 19 You have Cinderella pumpkins. You have all sorts of fun names.

Speaker 2 Attentive listeners to this program will realize that we are speaking to you after Halloween.

Speaker 2 So it's not a news peggy kind of story, which I feel okay about because these folks leave it up through the fall and it becomes their fall decoration.

Speaker 19 Yes, these pumpkins can last for weeks and even months depending on the climate.

Speaker 19 And I think that a big draw for committing to a purchase like this is that they do last last for so long, and you can hit both Halloween and Thanksgiving and really have the pumpkins up all season long.

Speaker 2 So you pointed out in this piece that it's basically started for reals 2020-ish.

Speaker 2 Where did this come from? How did it start?

Speaker 19 So this woman, Heather Torres, who's the founder and CEO of Porch Pumpkins, she was living in Dallas at the time.

Speaker 19 She lived across the street from the Dallas Arbitorium, and they do this really incredible pumpkin village every year.

Speaker 19 And so she felt really inspired. And she went out and bought a bunch of just orange pumpkins and said, Honey, I'm going to decorate the porch.

Speaker 19 And she cracked me up because she was like, My first design was quite heinous. But then she added some other sizes and colors and varietals.
And she won

Speaker 19 porch of the month from her neighborhood association. And this was actually in 2013.
And people kept asking her, Will you do this for me?

Speaker 19 And she said, no, no, because she knew how much these pumpkins cost. And she thought, no one wants to spend that much on pumpkins.

Speaker 19 But then when the pandemic hit,

Speaker 19 lo and behold, now she decorates 1,300 houses a season and sells out every year and is very in demand just kind of across the state of Texas in different areas.

Speaker 2 You know, it's interesting because I could pile a bunch of pumpkins on my porch and it would look, as this woman said, heinous. So there is some, there's some artistic skill involved here.

Speaker 2 There's a design element.

Speaker 19 Definitely.

Speaker 19 A couple of the people who I interviewed for the article are also, their day job is being real estate agents, and they said that doing things like staging and marketing helped them really have an eye for this.

Speaker 2 A little curb appeal, right? A little curb appeal. Yep.

Speaker 2 Do you have a porch and have you pumpkin scaped it?

Speaker 19 You know, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn, and so I share a porch with a lot of people, and I cannot say that I pumpkinscape it.

Speaker 2 You should try it. Just take up a collection plate for all the people in your building.
Let's see what they have to say.

Speaker 19 It's something to aspire to, for sure.

Speaker 2 Maybe next year. Lane Florsheim at the Wall Street Journal.
Lane, thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

Speaker 19 Thank you.

Speaker 2 This final note on the way out today, in which cardboard boxes figure prominently. Saw this on Bloomberg.

Speaker 2 Data from the Fiber Box Association that shows shipments of corrugated boxes, that is, shipments of the boxes that retailers use to ship stuff to us, had their lowest third quarter reading since 2015.

Speaker 2 You roll that in with consumer sentiment and tariffs. Could be a challenging holiday shopping season, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 Amir Babawi, Caitlin Esch, John Gordon, Noya Carr, Manda Peacher, and Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director.
And one more thing on the way out.

Speaker 2 We usually do our engineer credits on Wednesdays around here, but we do have some goodbyes to say on this Monday.

Speaker 2 Jake Jake Cherry, Jessen Dueler, and Juan Carlos Torado have done virtually every production job we have in this shop, both out in the field and here in the studio.

Speaker 2 They leave us today, and they need to know that they are going to be sorely missed. I'm Kyle Risdall.
We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 2 This is APM.

Speaker 24 Imagine a future where chocolate and coffee are rare and expensive, where cheap nutritional staples like corn and wheat are threatened. Sounds unpleasant, doesn't it?

Speaker 24 Well, we could be heading there if we don't recognize that the climate crisis is also a food crisis.

Speaker 2 I've seen yields drop because of drought.

Speaker 2 And believe me, boy, have I seen them drop.

Speaker 11 We have had dry spells that have lasted years.

Speaker 24 I'm Amy Scott.

Speaker 24 This season on How We Survive, we investigate how the climate crisis is threatening our most vital food systems and how scientists are racing to develop alternatives that will shape the future of food.

Speaker 24 Listen to this season of How We Survive on your favorite podcast app.