'Tis the season for credit card debt

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Speaker 2 Did you do some holiday shopping today? And if so, how good or bad did you feel about opening up your wallet? The answer might tell us something about the state of the economy.

Speaker 2 From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 2 In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for ChirizDahl. It's Friday, the 28th of November.
Good to have you along. There's a lot to talk about today with the holiday shopping season officially here.

Speaker 2 Also, we got a pile of economic data this week, including reports delayed during the government shutdown. So let's dig in.
Jordan Holman is at the New York Times.

Speaker 2 Rachel Siegel is at the Washington Post. Hey, you two.

Speaker 4 Hey there. Hey, Kristen.

Speaker 2 Jordan, I want to start with you since retail is such a big part of your beat and today is the day.

Speaker 2 And I'm hoping you can make some holiday shopping predictions for us because we have some kind of contradicting data. Retail sales numbers for September were out this week and kind of whatever.

Speaker 2 And meanwhile, the National Retail Federation says Americans will spend more this season than ever before. So how do you score those?

Speaker 4 It is really confusing, but I think the way to look at it is that our economy has been bifurcating for years at this point right now.

Speaker 4 And so when you see those big numbers about a trillion dollars in sales for expected for this holiday season, we have to really think that that is going to be carried by higher income shoppers.

Speaker 4 And we're seeing this across many retailers. Even Walmart is saying that a lot of its sales are driven by higher income shoppers.

Speaker 4 When you think of higher end department stores like Nordstrom, they said that their customers are in a strong state.

Speaker 4 And Moody's even had the stats saying like the top 10% of households are making up nearly half of all spending. So that's really what's fueling the spending.

Speaker 4 But it is kind of hiding the fact that there are a lot of people who are pulling back, who are really thinking about the categories that they want to buy for for need compared to one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, if you're a retailer and you're looking at that K-shaped economy and you're balancing tariffs and inflation and grumpy shoppers, I mean, what do you do?

Speaker 4 You

Speaker 4 try to, you know, push as much deals as you can. But even I was looking at some numbers out today, early Black Friday numbers from Adobe, and the level of deals are pretty similar to last year.

Speaker 4 And they're not even that deep. Like 27% is kind of where it's hovering.
And when you talk to a lot of people, you think of Black Friday 40, 50% off.

Speaker 4 So retailers right now are really trying to protect their margins. They've spent a year trying to figure out the impact that tariffs will have on their business.

Speaker 4 And this isn't a time to just kind of give that up

Speaker 4 for these deep discounts. So they're trying to offer discounts where it's most impactful for people.
And then hopefully people will buy it full price is the thinking.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm wondering, you know, you're talking about those discounts, early discounts. Black Friday seems like it's a a month long now.

Speaker 2 Does that mean we're going to know a lot about the health of the consumer early? Or are we going to have to like wait for the whole season to happen to get an understanding of where consumers are?

Speaker 4 I was talking to someone in the retail industry last week, and they were saying, no one really knows how the holiday season will shape up until we're in it. And historically, today is the start of it.

Speaker 4 So it's probably still too early to tell. And also, given that we're delayed on some of the economic data, I think any reads that retailers will tell us will be really important.

Speaker 4 So any earnings reports that come out or just sometimes retailers will just say, like, this is what the first few weeks are looking at, that will be really important to getting a read

Speaker 4 because right now we're still in the dark.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Rachel, I want to turn to you and the Fed because they will have to make an interest rate decision in a couple of weeks. And it seemed like, you know, last week, markets were pricing in a pause.

Speaker 2 This week, they're pricing in a cut. What happened between then and now?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, in a way, a week is a long time for Fed policymakers to lean one way or another. And really, we've seen a couple of things.
There's been a trickle of data.

Speaker 4 We can talk about the jobs market data or what else we might be piecing together for some other reports that are delayed since the shutdown, but that are starting to come through.

Speaker 4 You're also seeing this emergence of sort of two camps within within the Fed that have pulled strongly for that pause because they're worried about inflation or that are pulling more strongly for a cut because they're worried about weakening in the job market.

Speaker 4 That later bucket may have looked at the last jobs report and seen the unemployment rate tick up to 4.4%.

Speaker 4 They're a little bit worried about a shakier job market more so than they are widening inflation.

Speaker 4 On the other side of that coin, you have policymakers who fear that inflation is starting to spread, that they can't get a little too cozy.

Speaker 4 And so that division is really something that has kind of opened itself up as the weeks have gone by.

Speaker 2 Well, you have the two sides of the coin, Rachel, as you're talking about. We also have a bunch of kind of old data, right, from September that we got.

Speaker 2 I'm wondering how useful is that data? And is it enough for the Fed to make a confident decision?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not ideal, right? There's a reason that these reports come out as frequently as they do.

Speaker 4 And for years, or as long as we've all been paying attention to the Fed, there is a

Speaker 4 hard message that they go by the data. So what happens when they don't have that data? Now, policymakers are really quick to point to things that they have been looking at

Speaker 4 instead. Things like

Speaker 4 regional data or Jordan mentioned earnings reports, other ways that they can kind of piece together. that picture.
They also feel confident that they're not just going to be totally flying blind.

Speaker 4 But, you know, that's not the most ideal situation to be in, right? You're not going to want to piece together information when you have to make such a consequential decision.

Speaker 4 And then they're also kind of bound by their calendar. There are days every year that they have to commit themselves to these decisions.

Speaker 4 So I think they might be operating in a kind of best case scenario, but I'll definitely be curious for, you know, what answers they have in the December meeting about what information they feel that they've been able to lean on and what information they're trying to make up along the way.

Speaker 2 Well, Rachel, is there any information they might get in the next couple of weeks that could change their mind?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, they're going to be sort of locked in, right?

Speaker 4 And slowly we're starting to see this delayed calendar trickle out from the BLS about inflation numbers or about the jobs report.

Speaker 4 But eventually, that calendar kind of runs out and, you know, they'll be looking at the last meeting of the year.

Speaker 4 But I think that, you know, in a way, Fed policymakers might say that it's never about one specific data point. It's never about

Speaker 4 one specific report that's supposed to turn them one direction or the other. It's more about the totality.
So it's almost like a yes, all of the above all at once.

Speaker 4 They need all of those reports, especially ones that are delayed since the shutdown, but then they have to be able to make a big picture assessment.

Speaker 4 And there's a certain point where they're just going to have to make that call.

Speaker 2 Rachel Siegel is at the Washington Post. Jordan Holman is at the New York Times.
Thanks, you two, and have a good weekend.

Speaker 4 Same to you. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Malls weren't the only thing open today, so was Wall Street, and it was feeling some holiday cheer. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 2 We We were just talking about how consumers are feeling stretched this season. Here's one way it's showing up in people's wallets.
Americans are leaning more and more on credit card debt.

Speaker 2 Outstanding card balances jumped to more than $1.2 trillion in the third quarter, according to the New York Fed's running tally. That's up 6% over the same time last year.

Speaker 2 And between inflation and forecasts showing Americans plan to ramp up holiday spending this year, the debt burden is is set to grow. Marketplace's Savannah Peters has more.

Speaker 7 Between gifts, travel costs, groceries for festive meals, the winter holidays are the splurgiest time of year for many Americans, and our collective end-of-year debt burden tends to reflect that.

Speaker 8 What we've seen is a big jump in credit card balances across consumers and Q4.

Speaker 7 Charlie Wise, head of global research at TransUnion, says we get more financially disciplined in the new year and usually pay that extra debt down by the end of the first quarter.

Speaker 8 It's a typical cycle that we see absolutely every year.

Speaker 7 But in 2026, consumers could have a tougher time managing that holiday spending hangover, says Ted Rossman, an analyst with BankRate.

Speaker 9 The problem is that a lot of people already have a lot of credit card debt.

Speaker 7 Rossman says low-income Americans, especially, are carrying bigger balances heading into the holiday season just to cover essentials.

Speaker 9 Think about how much everything else in our lives has gone up. Your rent payment is up, your grocery bill is up, utilities, insurance, all these other things.

Speaker 7 Rossman says there'll be less fat to trim in household budgets come January, so it could take longer to catch up.

Speaker 7 And Chi Chi Wu, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, says the rise of buy now pay later lending adds extra risk.

Speaker 10 We see consumers sometimes get into trouble when they think, oh, well, I can deal with this payment for this one buy now, pay later loan to buy this item.

Speaker 7 Next thing they know, they're juggling multiple pay-in-for installment plans for their whole shopping list and their plane ticket home.

Speaker 7 Wu says between inflation, a weakening job market, and still high interest rates, it's a precarious time to go into the red for nice to haves.

Speaker 11 And yet, All of the cultural messages are pushing you to do it.

Speaker 7 Christine Whelan, a consumer scientist at Emory University, says we can plan to pare down our gift list or rein in our holiday hosting budget.

Speaker 11 While you can talk about all the wise economic choices, really we're talking about values of giving and sharing.

Speaker 7 And what it means to feel like you're doing well in 2025. I'm Savannah Peters for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 These days, there is a whole genre of social media content devoted to homesteading.

Speaker 2 Story after story of people who traded in their lives in big cities to live in rural areas where land is cheaper and life is quieter.

Speaker 2 But there are also people out there making a move in the opposite direction. Here's the next installment of our series, Adventures in Housing.

Speaker 12 My name is Laura Griggs and I live in central Missouri.

Speaker 12 My husband and I and our children, we lived on a 10-acre rural American homestead for 10 years.

Speaker 12 We really were trying to figure out a way to be able to raise a family that wasn't going to cost us just gobs and gobs of money. We really were struggling to find jobs that paid well.

Speaker 12 And for us, the solution seemed to be, was to change up our lifestyle, to live ultra-frugally, to do as much as we could for ourselves.

Speaker 12 And that's really what drove us to decide to move out to rural Missouri and start our homestead at that time with what was two very young children.

Speaker 12 Homesteading can cover a lot of different things. For us, what that meant was we had a very large garden every year.
We raised chickens for eggs. We also raised dairy goats for five years.

Speaker 12 We had goats and sheep that we raised for meat.

Speaker 12 Our hope was that eventually we would be able to live off of the homestead as our job. So my husband still commuted back to town for his job in ministry.
I still taught music.

Speaker 12 I eventually had to stop teaching because we had a child while we lived on the farm. We had a child was born with a lot of medical issues and then she needed a full-time caregiver.

Speaker 12 So I stopped being able to work because my whole life was going to appointments because out there there isn't any health care. So commuting now to a large city, which just takes all day.

Speaker 12 We made the decision to make a new plan during COVID because at that time the government was giving child payments.

Speaker 12 That was a big chunk of change and we realized that this was the one opportunity we were going to have to be able to send my husband back to school or one of us. We decided it was my husband.

Speaker 12 As soon as he graduated and started nursing, he was able to triple his salary.

Speaker 12 But it was a five-year investment.

Speaker 12 Took him two years to get through the school and then save enough money because you got to move to the city where the cost of living is a lot higher and housing is very expensive.

Speaker 12 We were able to sell our homestead and move. this summer, so the summer of 2025.
We're in walking distance of multiple parks, walking distance of like little pizza shops and a grocery store.

Speaker 12 I mean, it's a different existence. And I feel so thankful now.

Speaker 12 I understand now, like what my grandmother fought so hard for for, you know, like the freedom to be able to be like, you know what, today I don't want to cook dinner.

Speaker 12 I think we're just going to go, you know, get something. Or I want to.
go meet a friend for coffee and I have the freedom to go and do that now where before I just there was just no way

Speaker 12 it was like just the biggest relief to have found a house, to have sold it, and to be able to move.

Speaker 2 Laura Griggs there now living with her family in Jefferson City, Missouri. You can tell us about your adventures in housing at marketplace.org.

Speaker 2 Coming up.

Speaker 13 Why do you care so much about Monopoly? It seems so silly.

Speaker 2 It's the board game you either love or love to hate. Me, I'm a fan.
But first, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 2 U.S. markets had shorter trading hours this Black Friday.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 289 points, 6 tenths percent, to finish at 47, 716.

Speaker 2 The NASDAQ rose 151 points, 7 tenths percent, to close at 23,365. And the SP 500 gained 36 points, half a percent, to wrap the day at 68.49.

Speaker 2 This was also the last trading day for the month, and November was a shaky one. The Dow and the SP 500 finished the month in the black, both now on a seven-month winning streak.

Speaker 2 The NASDAQ, however, lost its momentum and was down this month for the first time since March. Bonds were almost flat.
The 10-year treasury yield rose very slightly to 4.01%.

Speaker 2 You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 2 This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab.

Speaker 2 Okay, close your eyes and imagine a table of sugary holiday treats. Maybe you see some peppermint bark, a Yule log cake, or crinkle cookies.

Speaker 2 Well, a common denominator in all those recipes is chocolate. And unfortunately, chocolate is becoming a more precious food.

Speaker 2 Extreme rainfall, drought, and heat caused by climate change have pushed cocoa prices to record highs in recent years.

Speaker 2 And some experts caution that most of the land used for cocoa production won't be farmable in the future.

Speaker 2 Marketplace's Amy Scott, who hosts our climate show, How We Survive, she brings us this story about new ways tech entrepreneurs are making chocolate so that hopefully we can keep enjoying it for years to come.

Speaker 2 Here's Amy.

Speaker 14 I'm in West Sacramento, California, visiting a company called California Cultured, where they make chocolate out of cocoa cells. No plants required.
Safety glasses? We don't need them?

Speaker 18 Yes, we actually do. Good corn.

Speaker 14 CEO Alan Perlstein is showing me around.

Speaker 19 We sort of wrangle the cells and make them do what we want in this part of the lab.

Speaker 14 By wrangle, Perlstein says they're actually sort of tricking the cells to only grow the tissues they want, targeting certain compounds, flavors, and fats.

Speaker 14 Part of how they do that is by feeding the cells certain mixtures of food, like sugar and plant extracts. Perlstein opens up a retrofitted pizza fridge with racks for stacking pans of pizza.

Speaker 14 Only instead of pizza, there are trays of petri dishes filled with tiny brown blobs. They look like little like boogers, basically.

Speaker 5 I don't know how else to describe this.

Speaker 19 It's basically little clumps of brown cells, so that's what they look like when they're growing inside of the cocoa pods.

Speaker 14 Each little blob, Perlstein says, contains thousands of cocoa cells. From here, he says, it's a bit like repotting plants.

Speaker 14 The bigger the cells grow, the bigger the container the cells need to keep growing until they're ready to be harvested.

Speaker 14 To make chocolate, the cells get fermented, roasted, and ground into a powder or liquid.

Speaker 18 We do have some chocolates if you guys are interested in tasting them.

Speaker 14 Oh, no, thanks. I'll pass.

Speaker 5 All right, well, then let's get out of here.

Speaker 14 Have you not seen my mouth watering over here? Steve Stearns is head of strategy for California Cultured and a former chef.

Speaker 14 He has three different chocolates laid out on a platter for me to try, all grown in the lab here. The first two chocolates are a bit too sour for my taste.

Speaker 14 It's not my favorite, I'm going to be honest. Okay.
Stearns says I'm picking up on the fruity, more acidic notes. But the third one is a nice, toasty, dark chocolate.

Speaker 14 I think that's my favorite of the three.

Speaker 18 It's got a little bit more bitterness to it,

Speaker 18 but it still has those fruity notes.

Speaker 14 You and I can't buy California Cultured's chocolate yet, but the plan is to sell the ingredients they make here and also lease the technology to large-scale producers.

Speaker 14 Next year, they plan to release a product with Meiji, the company that makes those little chocolate pandas. I'm Amy Scott for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 That's just one story about the changes coming to your dinner table. Amy has more as a part of a Marketplace special called Feeding the Family, a collection of stories about the economics of food.

Speaker 2 You can hear the episode in the Marketplace podcast feed.

Speaker 2 Holiday gatherings tend to be a time of year when people dust off some classic board games. Monopoly is maybe the most classic of them all.

Speaker 2 Growing up, Mary Palan would play it with her family every Christmas Eve. Inside the box was the game's origin story.
Monopoly came along during the Great Depression.

Speaker 2 A man named Charles Darrow is often credited as the inventor. He eventually sold the game to the Parker brothers.

Speaker 2 But Mary went on to discover another story about Monopoly, one that led her to write a book called The Monopolists.

Speaker 13 I came to this story by total accident. In 2009, I was working as a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 13 As I'm sure as many people remember, there was a lot going on in the world of Wall Street in 2009, and a lot of people were drawing comparisons to the Great Depression.

Speaker 13 So I thought, oh, I'll just mention in passing, you know, Monopoly came out of the Great Depression. And I was looking everywhere for the true story and I wasn't finding it.

Speaker 13 We were doing these really complex stories about securitization and, you know, policy and derivatives. And I was like, I can't get the sentence about the board game right.
I'm so dumb.

Speaker 13 And then finally, I reached out to this man, Ralph Onsbach. I saw that he had been involved with litigation with Parker Brothers years ago in the 1970s, 80s.
And I said, hey, I know this sounds crazy.

Speaker 13 I'm just trying to find out what the deal is with Monopoly. And he immediately got back to me and said, Oh, I waited 40 years for someone to ask me about this.

Speaker 5 Like, the story's all wrong.

Speaker 13 It was actually invented by this woman, Lizzie McGee. She received a patent for her landlord's game in 1904, and she created this game as a teaching tool to teach people about the evils of monopolies.

Speaker 13 In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, there's this huge boom of wealth.

Speaker 13 And the term monopolist, you know, is being used in a really different way because it's not just that people are getting wealthy in a way that we had never seen in the United States.

Speaker 13 It's that a few people are getting very, very, very wealthy. And these are names we all still know today.
J.P. Morgan, you know, Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers.

Speaker 13 There's some people who just believe that this class of people shouldn't exist. There's some people who say, you know what, if you want to make billions, that's okay, but we need to be taxing it.

Speaker 13 And with that, we also got a lot of technology. There was a lot of excitement about railroads and steel and big cities,

Speaker 13 you know, but it was kind of a double-edged sword, I think, for folks like Lizzie McGee, who were really kind of asking these bigger philosophical questions about it all.

Speaker 13 What was fascinating to me in looking at her original landlord's game is that a lot of people don't know, but she had two rule sets.

Speaker 13 She had a monopolist rule set, which is similar to what we play today, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Speaker 13 You try to gather everything on the board and clobber everybody in sight, but she actually also creates this anti-monopolist rule set, which is all about breaking things apart.

Speaker 13 And so I think part of her genius is that she makes this game to teach people, hey, there's another way.

Speaker 13 But unfortunately, you know, that anti-monopolist rule set kind of gets lost.

Speaker 13 As somebody who kind of came up through very traditional journalism, I would get asked a lot like, why do you care so much about monopoly? It seems so silly. I think that it's an American icon.

Speaker 13 It's a huge piece of intellectual property. It's so rare to have a hit in the board game industry.
And it's even more rare to have an intergenerational one, one that you play.

Speaker 5 You know, I played with my grandmother.

Speaker 13 And I think that's part of it because I think part of the American experience is we're going to be arguing about money forever.

Speaker 13 We're a capitalist country and we're just always going to be arguing about who gets money, how it's distributed.

Speaker 13 And, you know, board games can provide kind of a role playing for us to explore those ideas in a way that's maybe more attainable. Property, land, money, I mean, those are all still core to the U.S.

Speaker 13 economy today.

Speaker 2 This final note on the way out today, saw this in Axios. We've been talking about how many families' budgets are stretched this year.

Speaker 2 That has a big effect on charitable organizations that are preparing for less giving and more demand.

Speaker 2 The Salvation Army predicts its bell ringers will need more than the $100 million it raised last year to help the 28 million Americans it serves.

Speaker 2 Another group, One Warm Coat, has seen a 25% increase in nonprofits applying for coats this year.

Speaker 2 And in Feeding America's most recent survey, 95% of food banks reported equal or higher demand in October than in September.

Speaker 2 Our theme music was composed by B.J. Lederman.
Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargalli. Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer.

Speaker 2 Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager. And I'm Kristen Schwab.
Have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday.

Speaker 2 This is 8 p.m.

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