The case of the missing GDP report

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Speaker 2 We are going to operate today in the land of make-believe. Let's make believe we have a way to know what's actually going on in this economy.
From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 2 I'm Kai Ruzdahl. It is Thursday today, October the 30th.
Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 2 We've got this economic calendar we use around the office. Helps us keep track of what kind of data is supposed to be coming out day by day and week by week.

Speaker 2 As you know, since the shutdown started low these 30 days ago, more releases have been canceled than have actually happened.

Speaker 2 The two we are interested in today, and the absence of which is forcing us into the land of economic data make-believe, are initial claims for unemployment benefits.

Speaker 2 Mitchell Hartman's going to have that later on in the program. Don't sleep on the labor market, am I right? But we're going to start with the biggie.

Speaker 2 What was supposed to be an update on economic growth in the third quarter? G, D, and P are the initials there. Marketplace Daniel Ackerman is our guide.

Speaker 4 When I called up Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank, he was more than happy to engage in some educated speculation.

Speaker 5 I love the premise for this interview. We don't have an economic release.
We don't really know what's going on, but let's talk about it anyway.

Speaker 4 He says there's always some uncertainty about the state of the economy, but it's still useful to guess what GDP might be because.

Speaker 5 Over time, real GDP per person in the country is a great predictor of overall standards of living. It's also a really good measure of the business cycle.

Speaker 4 So, some Federal Reserve branches model GDP. The Atlanta Fed estimates the economy grew at a healthy annual rate of 3.9% last quarter.
New York has a more modest 2.4%, and the St. Louis Fed just 0.6%.

Speaker 4 Mark Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

Speaker 6 I will caution, though, I wouldn't put much stock in any of these numbers at the moment because they're based on data and we don't have any data.

Speaker 4 At least not the kind that typically feeds these models. But the estimates all agree that growth last quarter was positive.

Speaker 6 I'll take it. We're not in recession, but we're not going anywhere very quickly.

Speaker 4 Zandi pointed to two drivers for the growth. One is business investment.

Speaker 6 A lot of that's around artificial intelligence and expanding out that infrastructure.

Speaker 4 The other is consumer spending, especially by wealthier households on things like cars.

Speaker 6 That got a little juiced because of the expiration of tax subsidies for electric vehicles.

Speaker 6 Looking ahead, though, Tuan Nguyen, an economist with RSM, says, We are less confident that consumers will keep up the same pace in the final quarter of the year.

Speaker 4 Nguyen says, with a weakening job market and continued inflation, this quarter's GDP might not be so strong. I'm Daniel Ackerman from Marketplace.

Speaker 2 You look up the definition of deal, and the good people at Merriam-Webster will tell you it is an act of dealing, an arrangement for mutual advantage.

Speaker 2 You look up truce, and you'll see that it's a respite, especially from a disagreeable or painful state or action.

Speaker 2 Both arguably apply to the news out of President Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping overnight, our time.

Speaker 2 Both sides have suspended, in a manner of speaking, the tit-for-tat trade war that's been happening pretty much since Inauguration Day.

Speaker 2 More American soybeans will be bought, fewer Chinese rare earth metals will be restricted. It is pretty much a return to status quo ante.

Speaker 2 It does bear a mention here, though, that the effective tariff rate on most Chinese imports to this country are still up near 50%.

Speaker 2 Wall Street on this Thursday,

Speaker 2 traders were a little bit cranky. Truth be told, we will have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 2 as is true in life, sometimes it's in what is not said in business that the relevant details lie.

Speaker 2 My reference here is to the raft of corporate earnings reports we've been getting the past couple of three weeks.

Speaker 2 We have heard, just for instance, from some of the big banks that despite doing land office business in investment banking and trading, they are concerned, as are many, about where the labor market and the economy as a whole are headed.

Speaker 2 So far, so good.

Speaker 2 Not much discussed. A problem they've actually been citing pretty regularly ever since the pandemic, commercial real estate.
Marketplace Adjustin Ho explains what's going on there.

Speaker 7 Ever since the pandemic, certain types of commercial real estate have struggled with high vacancy rates.

Speaker 8 Really, where the greatest concern was was in the office sector.

Speaker 7 That's Tom Collins with the consulting company West Monroe.

Speaker 7 Office vacancy rates are still elevated, but Collins says big banks just aren't all that concerned because they've been making fewer commercial real estate loans.

Speaker 8 The bigger banks have been able to avoid it because they have far greater diversity of earnings and a far greater diversity in their loan book.

Speaker 7 But regional and community banks don't have that luxury. Colin says they've made most of the commercial real estate loans in recent years.

Speaker 7 And he says many of those lenders see value in their local office buildings, even if they're sitting vacant. So their strategy has been to work with their borrowers to help them avoid default.

Speaker 8 So that in the long term, we still have this borrower as a client, we are still collecting money on the asset, and we're not having to take a write-off and deal with the post-bankruptcy foreclosure and all the stuff that goes along with that.

Speaker 7 But there's an issue on the horizon. A lot of commercial real estate loans are maturing this year.

Speaker 11 When a loan matures, it forces an owner's hand.

Speaker 7 That's Xander Snyder, senior commercial real estate economist with First American. Building owners took out most of these loans back when interest rates were much lower.

Speaker 7 So when they try to renew their loans, they're going to face a much higher interest rate.

Speaker 11 As that progresses, more owners are going to have fewer options and they're going to have to do something with their property.

Speaker 7 Snyder says many property owners will end up selling their buildings. And that can actually be a good thing for the commercial real estate market.

Speaker 7 That's because prices on commercial properties have been falling. And anyone who can buy a building at today's lower prices is probably in a healthier financial situation than the seller.

Speaker 11 So you still have debt, but it's a new loan. It's probably at a higher interest rate.

Speaker 11 But the total debt service that you pay on that mortgage is low enough to bring that property out of the stress, essentially.

Speaker 7 Property owners are also trying to attract tenants by offering perks, including rent concessions, and by putting money into improving their buildings. Tom Taylor is with the real estate company Trep.

Speaker 12 So you'll have an allocation from a landlord to build out your space, perform small renovations or bring in fixtures or things that customize a space for a particular tenant.

Speaker 7 Taylor says that's happening with other types of commercial real estate, too, including retail space and apartment buildings.

Speaker 12 You know, one, two, three months free out of a 12-month lease just to get that unit occupied.

Speaker 12 And, you know, that is one way that folks start to realize renters, that is, that this is a renter's market, perhaps.

Speaker 7 Taylor says how healthy the commercial real estate sector is depends on where in the country we're talking about.

Speaker 7 For instance, vacancy rates are relatively low in New York and other big coastal cities, but they're higher in smaller markets, including Charlotte and Atlanta.

Speaker 7 David Ryling is CEO of Sunrise Banks in Minneapolis. He says office buildings are still in a slump in central business districts there and in suburban office parks.

Speaker 7 But things are looking a lot healthier outside those locations, in areas where there are more types of commercial real estate clustered together.

Speaker 12 You're going to see restaurants, you're going to see grocery stores, and then you'll see an office building. And that's the place where people will be.

Speaker 7 Ryling says the bank is seeing demand for commercial real estate loans pick up in those locations from owners who want to fix up their buildings, offer more amenities, or more flexible space configurations.

Speaker 7 That means the bank is seeing a lot of opportunity.

Speaker 12 A good property with a good borrower behind it is where Sunrise and a lot of community banks make their living.

Speaker 7 As a result, Rowling says competition for those borrowers' business is heating up. I'm Justin Hoe for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure I've seen some ads for Black Friday sales already. which never mind that it's not even November yet does mean there are some deals to be had.

Speaker 2 Among those deals, as always, new TVs, top-of-the-line offerings today can display in 8K ultra-high definition. That's got to be better, right?

Speaker 2 They've got deeper blacks, brighter brights, and are thinner and lighter weight than ever.

Speaker 2 And yet, those modern TVs do have their haters, a dedicated group of video purists who find them lacking in some really important ways. Marketplace Megan McCarty Carino has that one.

Speaker 13 There are some people who are just sensitive, you might say, highly attuned.

Speaker 12 I tend to be someone who is very, I guess, perceptive, very obsessive.

Speaker 13 Rahul Banerjee, a tutor in Long Island, is among the afflicted. So is food scientist Vikrant Lawl in New Jersey.
He notices weird things on screen that other people don't.

Speaker 10 And then you don't want to say anything because, like, other people don't see it or they don't get in. And you're like, I'm just going to pretend like I didn't notice that.

Speaker 13 No, this isn't a sixth sense kind of thing.

Speaker 13 I see dead people.

Speaker 13 It's a problem with watching cinematic content like that on modern TVs.

Speaker 13 All those spooky, slow pans and tense tracking shots meant to pull viewers into the imaginary world just look wrong to them somehow.

Speaker 12 The only way to describe it is just like it's very surreal and unnatural.

Speaker 10 The motion seems off to me, like as if there's a skip, like as if the internet connection broke down.

Speaker 13 Banergy is actually bought and returned to top-of-the-line OLED TVs.

Speaker 12 Even though this is like supposed to be a better technology, I'm really not enjoying this. I'm really distracted by the unnatural motion on it.

Speaker 13 So he bought an old plasma screen on Facebook Marketplace for $40.

Speaker 13 Lol 2 is a plasma partisan.

Speaker 10 I don't care that it's 15 years old. Like, I love that old TV.
To me, that sounds better, looks better than anything that's on the market right now.

Speaker 13 New LED and OLED TVs can display images in much higher resolution than plasmas.

Speaker 13 The picture is so clear, bright, and sharp, it can feel like you're right there at the 50-yard line of a football game, and you can actually follow the passes downfield.

Speaker 13 But the same advances that have made TVs better for sports have actually made them worse in some ways for movies, says Samuel Bretton at the TV testing site Readings.com.

Speaker 12 It is always a trade-off, right?

Speaker 14 Like there is no perfect TV.

Speaker 13 Movies and most prestige narrative content are shot at a lower frame rate than other TV. It's a relic of film reels, but helps create the dreamy aesthetic we associate with cinema.

Speaker 13 On older tech, like projectors and plasma, those frames were displayed in imperceptible flickers. Our brain filled in the gaps.
But new TVs hold one frame and instantaneously show the next.

Speaker 13 And because movies have fewer frames per second, they hold each one longer, giving almost a slideshow feel at times.

Speaker 14 The difference in space between the two frames sometimes is large enough that it looks like it's jumping between. It looks like the image is like flashing and bouncing back and forth.

Speaker 13 The more clear and bright a TV is, the worse the stutter appears, particularly in panning shots.

Speaker 13 There is a fix on new TVs, a setting, if you can find it, that inserts fake frames to smooth motion out.

Speaker 15 The unfortunate side effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film.

Speaker 13 That's Tom Cruise in a 2018 PSA warning viewers about the dreaded soap opera effect, where everything just looks digitized, overly sharp, and almost hyper-real, like surveillance video of actors on a soundstage.

Speaker 13 But without motion smoothing, stutter just keeps getting worse.

Speaker 14 You can actually make these systems more intelligent.

Speaker 13 Mahesh Balakrishnan is VP of Consumer Technology at Dolby, which has developed a new system to turn motion smoothing on selectively, only for shots or scenes where it's needed.

Speaker 13 Creators can encode their preferences in the metadata.

Speaker 14 We also have built systems where this can be to a certain extent automated.

Speaker 13 Yep, AI could hold the key to more natural cinematic motion. For those more interested in the tried and true tech of yesterday, I hear you can get a pretty good deal on a used plasma.

Speaker 13 I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

Speaker 17 Coming up.

Speaker 18 People are wanting to drink less, and so instead they're going for premium waters.

Speaker 2 H2O my.

Speaker 2 But first, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 2 Dow Industrial's down 109 points today, just shy of a quarter percent, closed at 47,522. The NASDAQ descended 377 points, that's nearly 1.6%, 23,581 there.
The SP 500 down 68 points, 1%,

Speaker 2 68, and 22, 22, sorry. Meta reported record revenues for the last quarter, but it also took a one-time charge tax-wise of nearly $16 billion.

Speaker 2 Warned investors that it's going to, quote, aggressively boost spending on AI infrastructure. Apparent to Facebook and Instagram dropped 11 and a third percent today.
eBay is

Speaker 2 forecasting its profits for the holiday quarter are likely to come in below expectations. Why, you ask?

Speaker 2 Tariffs, the elimination of that de minimis exemption, of course. eBay Get This gave back 15 and 9 tenths percent your listening to marketplace.

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Speaker 1 This podcast is supported by Odoo. 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 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 Odo.com.

Speaker 2 That's ODOO.com.

Speaker 17 This marketplace podcast is supported by by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance, it takes a plan.

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Speaker 17 I'm Ira Glass.

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Speaker 2 This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdahl.
Our journey into the land of economic data make-believe continues now with jobs.

Speaker 2 Should have gotten the regular weekly report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today on jobless claims, both the first time and continuing. We did not.

Speaker 2 And you don't have to be Jay Powell to know that this is a dicey time for the American labor market.

Speaker 2 So we sent Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman off this morning on the search for alternative information.

Speaker 9 The last thing we know we know about the job market comes from the August jobs report, which told us job creation had already slowed down heading into the government shutdown in early October.

Speaker 21 Obviously, everything's not looking great.

Speaker 9 That's Lisa Simon at Revellio Labs, which is crunching job numbers of its own, based on 105 million employment profiles on sites like LinkedIn.

Speaker 9 Revealio teamed up with private sector payroll processor ADP and came up with an estimate of job creation for September if the jobs report had been released, around 30,000. For October, says Simon.

Speaker 21 I sort of expect a number that is essentially around zero.

Speaker 9 So no job growth this month. Another useful private sector data source is employment sites, which track online job postings.
Here's ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bashot.

Speaker 22 ZipRecruiter's marketplace data shows job postings started to fall towards the end of September into October.

Speaker 9 We don't have an official update on unemployment, which was still pretty low at 4.3% in August, but we do have sentiment data on how American workers are doing, says Sophia Baig at polling firm Morning Consult.

Speaker 23 It's just really difficult to find a job if you don't have a job, and that's been characteristic of the economy over the past year.

Speaker 9 Consumer sentiment has been in the dumps, and major companies announcing thousands of layoffs recently surely won't help. They include UPS, GM, and Amazon, which is a marketplace underwriter.

Speaker 20 John Challenger at outplacement firm Challenger Gray and Christmas says this level of downsizing big mega cuts you only see in conditions where the economy is beginning from a labor standpoint to take a turn for the worse.

Speaker 9 Like we saw in the Great Recession and early in the pandemic. And at least then we had up-to-date government data to help understand what was going on.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Fact of the matter is, even when there's no regular government data release release scheduled on that calendar I mentioned up top, private data can be instructive. Case in point right now, housing.

Speaker 2 The SP K-Schiller Home Price Index was out earlier this week. Turns out the growth in home prices is slowing.
Still growing, those prices are, just more slowly.

Speaker 2 And Freddie Mac reported today the interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is down for the fourth consecutive week, 6.17%.

Speaker 2 All of that should, emphasis there on should, mean home ownership is becoming more affordable. But as Marketplace's Carla Javier reports, it hasn't really moved prospective buyers off the sidelines.

Speaker 16 Around the country in August, home prices rose just 1.5% on an annual basis, says Nick Godek at SP Dow Jones Indices.

Speaker 24 Basically, home prices are underperforming. Inflation, so on a net basis, are declining in value.

Speaker 16 Not great news for homeowners, but Godek says for home buyers, it's potentially more attractive than it has been because

Speaker 24 we're not seeing just the rapid increase of prices that we've seen in the past.

Speaker 16 But a lot of buyers are still staying on the sidelines. The National Association of Realtors reports no change in pending home sales in September.

Speaker 16 And year over year, pending sales decreased a little less than 1%, says senior economist Nadia Evangelou.

Speaker 25 What's interesting is that the market isn't pinking up as we expected, but it's not strangling either.

Speaker 16 Evangelou anticipates activity will increase next year.

Speaker 25 The primary reason is like because of affordability. Affordability remains the main challenge.

Speaker 16 Though affordability is slowly starting to improve with moderate price growth and lower mortgage rates, says Redfin economist Chen Zhao.

Speaker 26 But the economy is also shakier, so a lot of buyers are still sitting on the sidelines.

Speaker 16 They're worried about the job market, Zhao says, and timing.

Speaker 26 I think a lot of buyers are saying, hey, if rates are falling, they might fall more.

Speaker 26 And if home price growth is moderating, maybe we'll see home prices start to fall, you know, later this year or early next year. And I just want to wait.

Speaker 26 I don't want to be the one to like catch a falling knife, essentially.

Speaker 16 Zhao says it might just take more time for home prices and mortgage rates to fall significantly enough to motivate buyers to take plunge. I'm Carla Javier from Marketplace.

Speaker 2 When you think fine dining or something to order at a restaurant if you want to splurge, what comes to mind?

Speaker 2 I'm guessing maybe a really good bottle of wine, some of that Wagyu beef, something you'll linger over and remember for a while, right?

Speaker 2 How about water? Not just any water, though. Natasha Dangore wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day about the world of fine water, which is, I now know, a thing.
Welcome to the program.

Speaker 18 Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 Let's start here the same way you start this piece. A woman is at a high-end restaurant here in Los Angeles looking over the drinks menu, and the waiter says to her, what?

Speaker 18 So she's ordering a steak that she's sharing with her friends, and she's looking for a drink, specifically a drink of water.

Speaker 18 So she opens the drinks menu, and the server comes to her table and recommends that

Speaker 18 if she's having a steak, she wants something smooth and full-bodied, something that will complement her food. So she goes for this bottle of still water from the east coast of America called Saratoga.

Speaker 18 And yeah, it's part of this wider trend of fine water where people are wanting to drink less.

Speaker 18 And so instead they're going for premium waters that have characteristics that complement certain food types.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the whole people drinking less alcohol thing is no small part of this. But there are descriptions in this piece of people who you spoke to who are in the know about water.

Speaker 2 They talk about them as salty and complex. They talk about them as smooth and easy to swallow.
My response here, and I'm not trying to be facetious at all, is it's water.

Speaker 18 Yeah, that's what I thought too originally.

Speaker 18 But so they say every water has a different flavor profile, and so it's not just water.

Speaker 18 And actually, what these water sommeliers will tell you is that the taste of your food will change depending on what water you have.

Speaker 18 Just as if you ordered a red wine versus white wine, that would change the taste of your meal.

Speaker 2 As I understand the chemistry of this, or whatever it actually is, it all depends on something called total dissolved solids TDS. What might that be?

Speaker 18 Exactly. So that tells you the mineral content of the water.

Speaker 18 So a water with a higher TDS would make it potentially more acidic or more metallic tasting or just a general stronger flavor, like a red wine.

Speaker 18 Whereas a water with a lower TDS might pair well with fish because it's kind of lighter and has a lower minerality content.

Speaker 2 This fine water segment of the market, as you point out in this piece, is still relatively small, all things considered, when you get to restaurant beverage sales.

Speaker 2 But you do point out that at this restaurant in LA where we started this story in the interview, they make $100,000 a year in water sales.

Speaker 18 Yeah, absolutely. I think it's something new and it's something different.
And like we spoke about before, people drink less alcohol, they want options. And also, it's a novelty, right?

Speaker 18 You know, they see this water menu. People are stealing the water menu from the restaurant.
It's become that popular because it's kind of like this. Seriously? Yeah, it's got so much to it.

Speaker 18 It's got descriptions of all the waters, pictures, tells you whether it's sweet or salty or smooth or complex. You know, it's got all these elements to it, just like wine, but not.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 as you were reporting this piece,

Speaker 2 there are devotees, yes? I mean, there are people who like go specifically for the water.

Speaker 18 Yeah, people love it. People go and they enjoy water as a fine dining experience.
It's just like you know, going to a bar and choosing which vodka you like. For them, it's the same thing.

Speaker 18 And yeah, people laugh at it. And one guy wrote on Reddit, next they'll be charging for air because obviously it's, you know, can be perceived as a silly thing.

Speaker 18 You can get tap water for free, but other people really love it. It's an experience for them.

Speaker 2 We should point out that the water menu at this place here in LA does point out that tap water is free on their menu, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah, it does.

Speaker 2 Natasha Dangore at the Wall Street Journal. Natasha, thank you so much.
I appreciate your time.

Speaker 18 Thank you so much. It's great to chat.

Speaker 2 This final note on the way out today, in which not all central banks are created equal. Both the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank held their key interest rates steady today.

Speaker 2 The BOJ at a half a percent, the ECB at 2%. They did take this page from J-PAL's playbook, though.
They said they are going to be...

Speaker 2 Wait for it.

Speaker 2 Wait for it.

Speaker 2 Data dependent. At least they get data, right?

Speaker 2 Our daily production team includes Livbi Burdett, Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillong, Riel Hanhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio. I'm Kai Rizdo.
We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 2 This is APM.

Speaker 13 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 13 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 16 We have had dry spells that have lasted years.

Speaker 13 I'm Amy Scott.

Speaker 13 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 13 Listen to this season of How We Survive on your favorite podcast app.