Marketplace
Kanalaren Xehetasunak
Marketplace
Every weekday, host Kai Ryssdal helps you make sense of the day's business and economic news — no econ degree or finance background required. "Marketplace" takes you beyond the numbers, bringing you context. Our team of reporters all over the world speak with CEOs, policymakers and regular people ju...
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Retail feels the squeeze
In the Commerce Department’s retail sales report for July, sales at stores of all kinds were down 0.6%, when a modest increase in sales had been expec...
Long-term bond yields hit a long-term high
The government is selling 30-year bonds with interest rates at a quarter-century high. We talk with Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal about how that...
Steep inflation, meet slow wage growth
The average household’s buying power has slipped by about 0.1%, when the latest CPI report is compared to last week’s jobs numbers. In layman’s terms,...
Credit card delinquencies climb
Credit card delinquencies are sitting at 13% so far this year. It’s the highest national rate since the tail-end of the Great Recession. The aftermath...
Whoosh, there go our wage gains
More bad news from last week’s jobs report: Wage growth slowed to 3.2%, the lowest yearly rate in five years. Combine that with high inflation, and co...
Job losses reveal a shakier labor market
The July jobs report is out, and it’s a doozy: The U.S. labor market shed a net 23,000 jobs last month. Previous months, which saw moderate gains, wer...
Should there be an oil export ban?
As high gas costs pile up for drivers, Big Oil is getting jumpy. That’s because one way to bring prices down, at least temporarily, is an oil export b...
Want a raise? You might have to find a new job
You know how wages have, on average, stagnated when you account for inflation? Well there’s one group that saw some actual wage growth last month: Job...
Manufacturing boomed in July. Thank all that AI money
In July, the manufacturing sector grew at its fastest month-to-month rate in four years. A new tax law likely boosted company spending to some degree,...
High oil prices, big oil profits
Permian Basin oil companies are reporting strong quarterly earnings, as the Iran war keeps prices up and supply restricted. West Texas, formerly in a...
The future of self-driving cars
Amazon’s autonomous vehicle company, Zoox, can now roll out 2,500 of its vehicles annually in the next two years. Are more robotic cars coming, or wil...
Why price-squeezed consumers still shell out for organic
Since 2020, the cost of groceries has risen 26%. But contrary to what you might think, cash-strapped consumers aren’t necessarily staying away from pr...
The states making extra off of high gas prices
The Trump administration’s war in the Middle East has driven up fuel prices globally. As drivers pay more at the pump, some oil-rich states like New M...
No, Trump's tariffs haven't reshored manufacturing jobs
President Trump insists his economic policies have supported a reshoring of manufacturing jobs. At a rally held at a Michigan GM facility on Monday, h...
TPS cuts will tear through the labor market
More than 330,000 Haitians lost their ability to legally live and work in the U.S. this week. A recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the Trump administ...
A year later, is Trump’s investment in Intel… a win-win?
Intel’s sales jumped by 25% last quarter, the largest increase in over a decade — making the U.S. government’s stake in the company around $40 billion...
Unemployment filings hit a 55-year low
Sounds rosy, right? Not if you’re long-term unemployed, underemployed, or a new grad. In this episode, the labor market’s low-hire, low-fire status qu...
What's driving up the 30-year Treasury yield?
The yield on a 30-year Treasury bond has been hovering above 5% for a couple weeks — the longest stretch since the Great Recession. One reason is Trea...
What Anthropic's copyright settlement means
Anthropic settled a copyright case Monday, agreeing to pay out $1.5 billion to authors whose material had been scraped to train its AI chatbot. It com...
The four dollar threshold
Blink and you’d miss it — gas prices cooled earlier this summer as the Iran war reached a ceasefire, but the national average is back up to $4 a gallo...
Will Chevron-Iraq deal solve oil woes?
The short answer is no, the Chevron-Iraq deal won’t solve the problem. So why did the U.S.-based energy company sign a vague, preliminary deal to nego...
Businesses brace for tariff déjà vu
The White House has proposed new tariffs on 60 countries that allegedly aren’t doing enough to ban forced labor. Domestic businesses, already burned f...
The U.S. has the steepest inflation in the G7
Though the latest inflation reports show price growth cooled a bit in June, U.S. inflation remains higher than its peer nations, which include the U.K...
Inflation came down in June. Will it stay that way?
We got a better-than-expected June CPI report: Inflation slowed in both the goods and services sectors. But it’s hard to say whether that trend will c...
Big banks fare well in this rocky economy
Five major banks report earnings Tuesday morning, and analysts expect them to be rosy. Despite a volatile energy market and uncertain geopolitical cli...
The other war affecting fuel prices
Energy prices are up, and we’ve got a war to thank. Two wars, actually. While all eyes have been on Trump’s on-again, off-again conflict with Iran, Uk...
Return to war could fuel inflation
Inflation that resulted from the U.S. war with Iran had just begun to cool when President Trump called off a shaky ceasefire. Now, as the world turns...
Gas prices are headed back up
President Trump called off the a ceasefire with Iran Wednesday morning, sending the U.S. back into a military conflict — and sending oil prices back u...
Despite stellar earnings, Samsung's stock slumps
Samsung just reported a whopping 1,800% profit increase for the second quarter of this year. But its stock price fell nearly 7% in response to the new...
Back-to-school shopping? Already?
U.S. families expect to spend more than $900 on back-to-school shopping this year, according to one PwC survey. Big box retailers have taken advantage...
Trading up to an AI-proof career
Careers in the trades — a path that’s largely more AI-proof, less expensive, and more dependable — are attracting more attention. We visit Hope Renova...
An underwhelming June jobs report
The Labor Department’s June jobs report came in with just 57,000 new jobs added. Economists expected double that, and while the unemployment rate tick...
What would make Kevin Warsh consider a "Fed put?"
It’s unclear what Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh will do regarding interest rates, but would a “Fed put” actually help promote stability in financi...
A confusing economy means a less confident consumer
Fresh data on consumer confidence shows a lot of mixed signals — Americans are feeling better about the economy and where inflation is headed, but wor...
The president's new power over independent agencies
The Supreme Court’s ruling Monday expanded presidential power over agencies that would traditionally be viewed as independent, with the Federal Reserv...
The AI inflation roller coaster
Economists are forecasting that AI is likely to cause prices to rise over the course of the next year. On Thursday, both Microsoft and Apple said they...
Inflation sped up in May. What's to blame?
Inflation was up 4.1% in May, according to the BEA’s personal consumption expenditures index. We know hot energy prices, resulting from the war in Ira...
High inflation or ... high inflation?
When the U.S. launched a war against Iran, some Wall Street traders bet the ensuing energy shortages would push inflation up. Now that a ceasefire has...
A "starter" home for $1 million?
A typical starter home in nearly 250 U.S. cities is now worth $1 million or more, according to Zillow. Is that even a starter home anymore? In this ep...
Inflation is moving the wrong way
The last time Austan Goolsbee voted in an FOMC meeting, he was one of two policymakers opposed to cutting interest rates. Six months later, he doesn’t...