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Okay, quick. What's a four-letter word that can tell us where this economy is going?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdall. It is Thursday today, December the 4th.
Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. The theme of the program today, the first eight or so so minutes, is

time,

T-I-M-E. What is it, really?

We begin with the lagging, lagging indicators, think about it, that have been coming to us as federal data plays catch up from the shutdown.

The delayed September jobs report, a tardy retail sales release, and then tomorrow the September, again, September personal consumption expenditures index of intense interest to Fed Chair Jay Powell and the gang ahead of their last interest rate setting meeting of the year next Tuesday and Wednesday.

You know, we're going into year end and we're going into the holiday season. So data from September, I don't know about you, but September feels quite a long time ago.
Yeah, sure does.

Andrea Eisfelds, a professor of finance at UCLA Anderson. That said, some economic trends do tend to be more slow moving.

So I think we have seen from several data sources that in particular for smaller businesses, businesses, there have been fewer jobs created, and we probably see a bit of a softening in the labor market there.

Remember, we talked about small businesses yesterday and their job losses. Labor market softness, of course, is something the Fed is watching as we've been talking about.

But the big shadow over all of this is what we don't know. And by that, I mean the releases we are never going to see, in particularly the unemployment report for October.

Nina Eye Hackers at the University of Rhode Island. If anyone wants to make a case for a cut, having access to that jobs data is extra important in all of this.
Go on.

The Fed can maybe make more reasonable estimates about the effects of tariffs and whatever on the costs of production, which they're certainly doing.

I mean, I think that that's a big part of the uncertainty with the Fed right now.

But those job numbers are really, really important for that other mandate that the Fed has.

Two things the Fed is required to do, right? The dual mandate, stable prices and maximum employment. J.
Palace press conference Wednesday next. You will be hearing a lot about both of those things.

Do not miss it.

You know, sometimes to go forward in time, to understand what is going to happen, which we're going to do with Mitchell Hartman in a minute, you got to go back in time.

Our point of entry is a report in the Financial Times this week that bond investors, which remember the bond market can tell us where the economy is going, those investors have been letting the White House know, shall we say, that they are concerned about who President Trump might pick to replace Jay Powell and how independent or not that person's going to be.

Marketplace Subenashore takes things from there. The easiest way to understand why it is so important for the Fed to be independent is to look at a time when it was not, more than 40 years ago.

History provides a warning here. David Kraus is Emeritus Professor of Finance at Marquette University.

Arthur Burns and William Miller succumbed to pressures of Nixon, Ford, and Carter to keep interest rates low, which continued to allow inflation to run unchecked.

Inflation reached more than 13% in 1979. Eventually, a new Fed chair, Paul Volcker, had to clean up the mess by severely raising interest rates, and it was grisly.

I lived through this. We went through a double-dip recession in the early 1980s because we just had to wring inflation expectations out of the economy.

It's the inflation part of all this that scares the bond market. Inflation is really the enemy of bonds.
Colin Martin is head of fixed income research at the Schwab Center for Financial Research.

When you own a bond, you are kind of stuck with whatever interest rate it pays out. And if all of a sudden everything in your life is more expensive because of inflation.

What makes that bond investment just less attractive in a high inflationary environment?

Investors do not like losing money, so if they do start getting a whiff that inflation might ramp up again later, they'll just refuse to buy long-term bonds that do not give them a little something extra to make up for it.

So then long-term bonds have to start offering that little something extra. And then all kinds of investments start doing the same, which makes borrowing in general more expensive.

There is really no place you can hide in that environment. Fahad Malek is a portfolio manager at Alliance Bernstein.

Treasure yields are rising, equities are most likely selling off, and credit is most likely selling off as well. That's not necessarily good for capital markets.

All that said, the name of the person who becomes the next Fed chair isn't as important as what they do. Marvin Lowe is global macro strategist at State Street.

All of the candidates that are being floated do have credentials that would make them efficient leaders for the Federal Reserve. It really depends how they approach it.

And whether history starts to rhyme. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshore for Marketplace.
Speaking of history rhyming, you remember I said the other day traders are just marking time.

There's that word again, waiting on the Fed meeting. Yeah, I'm sticking with that.
We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

So again,

time.

What is it, really?

We know with a reasonable degree of certainty what the central bank's meeting next week is going to bring.

A quarter percentage point cut in the Federal Reserve's main interest rate, the federal funds rate, it's called.

A perhaps better and maybe more important question is what the Fed's December meeting next year is going to be like if, as again, we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty, a very low interest rate-friendly person becomes the next chair.

Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman is the ghost of the federal funds rate yet to come.

Good day to you, Kai. Well, as you know, the summer of 2026 was blazing hot.
Then we had that freak Thanksgiving Day blizzard.

And just like this time last year, the Fed's Open Market Committee will gather next week to set interest rates in its final 2026 meeting.

By which point, economists I have just polled agree the federal funds rate will be lower than it was one year ago. Approximately 2.75%,

3%.

3, 3.25%.

Okay, now I'm back in December 2025. And yeah, the economists I interviewed predict a range of federal funds rates one year from now.

Jay Hatfield at Infrastructure Capital Advisors came in with a lowest estimate below 3%, which would certainly stimulate the economy.

Our models show that inflation is contained and likely to decline, particularly as shelter inflation gradually drops down to market rates. And 275 is the historical 30-year average of Fed funds.

Economist Joe Brusselis at RSM predicts a 3% Fed funds rate, a bit below where the Fed itself predicts the rate will be. He thinks rates could end up higher, though.

There's risk to the upside around growth and

We know the White House would like to see rates much lower, maybe as low as 2 percent. Kevin Hassett, as the new chair, could try to steer the Fed in that direction.

But Daniela Hathorn at capital.com says it wouldn't be a slam dunk. Kevin Hassett is expected to be more pro-growth, but of course he can't completely ignore inflation.

And there are other unknowns that make prediction really hard, says former Fed economist Claudia Sommme.

Big changes that could happen at the Fed in terms of a Supreme Court allowing the president to remove a governor.

I think at the end of the day, the economy is going to drive where rates go, but it could be a pretty uncomfortable ride.

And she says, one thing that financial markets do not like is economic uncertainty or, you know, being haunted by ghosts. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

How you're experiencing inflation depends a whole lot on what you're spending money on. And for a lot of families, the high and rising cost of childcare has been especially tough to handle.

Between 2020 and 2024, and this is from the organization Child Care Aware of America, the average cost of child care in this economy rose nearly 30%.

That data point brings us to the next story in our series, Lived Economies.

Marketplace's Kristen Schwab has been following people from across the country as they negotiate the changes in this economy, which for us today means two families that have been trying to figure out whether it makes sense for one of the parents to keep working or to stay home with the kids.

Here's Kristen. Life at Julie Yang and Daniel Tao's house in St.
Paul Park, Minnesota is a little chaotic these days. But then again, life is always busy when you have six kids.
I'm sorry.

I have Austin and Tatum right here with me. Julie says the family has been going through some kid drama.
Asher, who's in the third grade, has become a bit of a class clown.

We just had conferences and I heard really bad reviews, so I was pretty upset with that. So now he's grounded.
Meanwhile, Isla, who's five, had a falling out with a friend.

Something had happened at school, and she was like, Yeah, well, she yelled at me and told me she wasn't my friend anymore. And then she told all the other girls not to like me.

Typical kid stuff, really. What's not so typical is what's happening with their newborn.
Saatchi was born preterm with a congenital heart defect and had to have a major surgery.

Julie says he requires a lot of care. We just left a three-hour genetic appointment yesterday.
I feel like I've been at the doctor's every week.

Julie recently made the difficult decision to cut way back on her hours at her job as a nurse.

It means the family lost their state child care assistance and Julie's part-time nursing pay, about $30,000.

So the two have been dipping into their savings. They've told the kids to expect one gift each this Christmas.
One special gift.

Though Julie's family is dealing with some particularly big challenges, raising kids in the U.S. has always required families to improvise, especially when it comes to juggling schedules and finances.

Taryn Morrissey is a professor of public administration and policy at American University.

To have young children in general is somewhat of a leap of faith and an economically scary prospect, right?

But Morrissey says the rising cost of health care, daycare, and groceries is coming to a head. It's an intense, economically uncertain moment, and families are facing a lot of pressures.

Those pressures may be pushing some parents to restructure their lives.

The number of households paying for child care, it's down more than 1.5% from a year ago, according to recent data from Bank of America.

Meanwhile, the number of households receiving multiple paychecks is also down. The trend is most common among lower-income families.
People are making these complicated calculations.

It's just that many families don't seem to have real options. Still, even families that do seem to have options are making tough decisions.

Hannah Tamari and Karim Adassi in Sacramento had their second daughter, Summer, earlier this year. Honestly, she's our dream child.
She's a great sleeper. She's such a happy baby.

She's always smiling. She's your buy-the-book baby.
Hannah considered leaving her job in real estate to become a full-time mom, but the budget wasn't budgeting.

$50 boxes of diapers, the $8,000 hospital bill from Summer's birth, paying for all that without Hanan's $85,000 salary while also trying to save up to buy their first home felt impossible.

It was a hard decision, you know.

There are days where I do want to stay at home, you know, and I wish that the financial reality of living in California was a lot easier for a family just living on one income to have that full security.

Plus, Hannah likes working. She wants to set that example for her daughters.
And she's heard people in her mom groups talk about how hard it is to get back to work after time off.

I go back and forth. I do have mom guilt about, you know, wanting to be at home, be present, not miss anything.
It's a decision that so many parents are familiar with.

Stay home with the kids, go back to work. One way or another, you feel like you're missing out.

I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

Coming up.

Well, why haven't you guys, you know, done anything yet? Tough, but fair. Let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial's down 31 points today, about a 10th percentile, 47,550. The NASDAQ rose 51 points, about two-tenths percent, 23,505.

The SP 500 notched seven points to the good, a 10th percentile, 68, and 57. Grocery train Kroger reported third-quarter earnings today and said it now expects slower sales growth for the full year.

The interim CEO said today that high-income families are still spending. Middle-income families are beginning to feel more pressure, he said.

Kroger slid four and six-tenths of one percent, Walmart up four-tenths percent, Costco down 2.9%

on the day. Consumer Reports just published its annual list of top car manufacturers based on reliability, safety, and owner satisfaction.
Top of the list this year, Subaru BMW is a close second.

Here's the interesting part: Tesla moved from 18 last year to 10 this year. Go figure that out.
You're listening to Marketplace.

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With offices nationwide, there's an advisor who's ready to listen and craft a blueprint for your future. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/slash build.

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

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

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.

Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com. This podcast is supported by Talkspace.

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This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl.
We are now less than a month out from subsidies for the Affordable Care Act going away.

As you know, one of the defining disagreements between Democrats and Republicans before, during, and after the government shutdown.

It's anybody's guess what Washington's going to do, but there is, in the meanwhile, a slice of the U.S. healthcare economy that is expanding with bipartisan support, no less.

Patrick Cooley wrote in the Washington Post the other day about low-cost health plans for farmers that are now being offered through farm bureaus in 12 states.

It should be said that these plans are not ACA compliant, which means, among other things, they don't have to cover people with preexisting conditions. Patrick, welcome to the program.

It's good to have you on. Thank you.
Would you first of all tell us, just so we all know,

what these state farm bureaus are, what they do?

I guess the simplest answer would be advocacy organizations. They also provide certain services, like, for example, they set farmers up with crop insurance.
They do things like lobby state lawmakers.

And from my end, they occasionally work with journalists providing commentary and things like that. And working on stories like this one.

So let's take it to the next step in the subject of this piece. They also offer healthcare insurance.
And I need you to help me understand the challenge that farmers have with healthcare coverage.

Yeah, so it's a couple of different issues. One, their income is not the same from year to year.
You know, the price of corn, the price of milk, the price of beef, it's not always the same.

So, you know, they can't go into the year saying, this is how much I'm going to make.

So in that respect, it's difficult for them to get insurance on these marketplaces because they don't know what their income is going to be from the year.

Most of them also don't qualify for subsidies. A lot of them end up buying insurance on the AC exchanges anyway, but it's incredibly expensive.

One of the farmers I talked to said that her father gets healthcare through the affordable characteristics exchanges, but he pays something like $2,400 a month.

Those subsidies have for sure been in the news. And as we have talked to many a farmer on this program, they are price takers, not price makers.
What generally do farmers,

and we should be clear here, this is a relatively small number of people, but the farm economy is huge,

just net net. So what do they think of this coverage that they were able to get from coverage from their state farm bureaus? Well, it runs the gamut.

The farmers who are able to get coverage that I talk to, they like it, but a lot of them don't qualify.

their employees don't qualify because they might have pre-existing conditions. So they're a little reticent.

The farmers that don't qualify, for them, it's like, why even bother offering this if I can't qualify? But the ones who are able to get it,

they seem to really like it. You know, they don't have to pay too much for it.

It covers most of what health insurance would cover, you know, medical procedures, doctor's appointments, things like that.

Yeah. You point out in this piece, we should say, that these plans from these state farm bureaus are not unlike what the Trump administration has proposed, right?

Cheap, short-term plans as an Affordable Care Act sort of alternative. Make sense of that for me.
Yeah, so the way they're pitched is as an affordable option for farmers.

The caveat, though, is that it is not regulated the same way as the insurance you might get through your employer or the insurance you get on the marketplace is regulated.

In a lot of ways, goes back to insurance, the way insurance was before the Affordable Care Act, in that if you have preexisting conditions, they can deny you.

They are also not required to continue insuring you if you develop some sort of chronic condition. Now, I want to be clear, the farm deals I talked to at least said that they will not do that.

But since this doesn't follow the same rules as most other insurance, there's nothing stopping them.

And I should clarify, in most of these states, they're not allowed to call it insurance for that very reason because it doesn't follow those regulations.

Those seem to be pretty significant caveats, just saying.

Yes.

I actually talked to a farmer who said that they probably wouldn't consider this because they have several employees who have ongoing medical conditions and they wouldn't want to offer a plan that couldn't get those employees.

So, yeah,

it's a pretty big caveat. For sure.
Patrick Cooley writes for an outfit and works for an outfit called Industry Dive. He wrote this piece for the Washington Post.
Patrick, thanks for your time.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, no problem.
Thank you for having me on.

Here's today's entry in the, yeah, we got data for everything file. The global market for the restoration of historic buildings sits at more than $120 billion.
So says Archive Market Research.

And we do, of course, have plenty of historic buildings out there just waiting for the right person to come along and give them a second life.

So, here with today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Dan Winook.
I am the executive director for the Livingston Arts Council, and today we are at the Howell Opera House.

It's seen a lot in this time. Opera houses were more of like a community gathering place.
So, every graduation from the high school was here, court was here, performances.

Ironically, only like one or two operas, according to our historians.

It was built in 1881 and closed in 1924 for fear of it burning down. You know, this is all lath and plaster and clearly just wood.
So, you know, it was common for opera houses to just burn down.

So for us, they said, nope, fire marshal shut it down and it's sat here since.

I've been working in nonprofits for over 15 years. And when I saw this position open up, I came into the interview and they walked me in and showed me the space.
And I was like, this is so cool.

Like you can almost hear the space, you know, wanting to be active.

And I'm like, well, why haven't you guys, you know, done anything yet? And they had said, well, we're volunteers.

We've been working on this for 20 years, but at a volunteer space, we just really need someone to come in and do this every day. And I'm like, I can totally do this.

We've got about $2 million from the state in a grant and then another half million promised from a couple different private donors. So that $2.5 million will go do a few things that you can see here.

We'll level up the floor, we'll redo most of the plaster.

We are actually planning to launch our first opera in May. We're going to do Pirates of Pinzanz.
That's the kind of production that would have been done here.

The production will be a little bit toned down because there's no technology on this stage. Even all the light bulbs that you see are knob and tube that have been cut because it's a fire hazard.

And you can even see, like, if we go look, you can see the old limelight, like the old gas lights, which makes sense why this place was burning down.

I mean, why these places are burning down? Because you literally got open flame just standing here on the stage.

You know, and then here we come in in May. I don't know, is it going to be 100 degrees? Is it going to be 32 degrees?

And you can feel it is, there's no heat, there's no cooling, there's nothing in here. And then we can put 500 people in here, but they all have to climb stairs.
You want it to be a community center.

You want everyone to be involved. Everyone should have access to it.
So we've got to find an elevator. An An elevator is about a million dollars.

Everyone who comes up here is, they always say, oh, it'd be so cool to just see this place up and running again.

You know, and the work that goes into that, all of these stamps have to be traced and recreated, right? Because there's also, you know, there's a difference between build new and preservation.

I don't think the work will ever be done, to be honest with you. I really don't.
Like, it's a historic building.

Every time you find something and when you think it's just at rest, something else happens.

So, you know, just kind of getting it to a spot where it can maintain itself and bring in really cool things for the community and the surrounding neighbors. That's my goal.

Come on, tell me again, history's not amazing. Danaoks, the executive director of the Livingston Arts Council in Howell, Michigan.

Whether you are revamping something old or make it something totally new, tell us about it. Marketplace.org/slash myeconomy.

This final note on the way out today, in which I regret to inform you that not only is the gender pay gap still alive and well, it is getting worse.

This is data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out today. In the third quarter of this year, on a full-time basis, women made just shy of 81%

of what what men made. The record narrowness of that gap, by the way, almost 85%

women to men in early 2023.

Our daily production team includes Livby Brudette, Andy Corbin, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio. Will Story is the supervising senior producer, and I'm Kai Risdell.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein.
And we used to host a show called Planet Money.

And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it Business History.
You know why? Why?

Because it's a show about the history of business. Available everywhere.
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