Marketplace - Big Tech trust-busting

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

The federal government is seeking a legal remedy for Google’s monopoly on internet search, as adjudicated by a federal judge. That remedy could include a breakup of its parent company, Alphabet. But when similar accusations were leveled against Microsoft a couple of decades ago, the software titan emerged from its trial intact. Also in this episode, Shohei Ohtani is a star in the baseball card market and California’s battle with planet-clogging plastic bags enters a new phase.

The macroeconomic word of the day today is exogenous. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal. It is Friday today. This one is the first day of November if you can believe that good as always To have you along everybody. All right, so exogenous relating to or developing from external factors Used in a sentence. It might go something like this those hurricanes and the machinist strike at Boeing or Exogenous variables in this morning's jobs report

12,000 new jobs in this economy in October, as you've heard by now. The unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%. That is where we start on this Friday. Neela Richardson is at ADP. Courtney Brown is at Axios. Hey, you two. Hi, Ty. Hello.

Hi. Neela, let me begin with you, the trained economist in the room, trained, I'm sure, in data analysis. You look at this morning's data on jobs and you say what? Exogenous is a technical term for messy. It was a messy jobs report. I love that you're playing along with my vocabulary day. Absolutely, always. It was a messy month for government to collect survey data and so it was hard to read the 12,000 job gain that the government reported this month next to the over 190,000 job average that the government has

reported over the last 12 months. But there were some clear signs, I think, in the data. And those clear signs are worth mentioning. One, we've seen very low jobless claims, so that's a proxy for layoffs. Firms aren't letting people go and the unemployment rate held steady and that's what the Fed has been playing very close attention to for signs of a recession.

Courtney, you and your colleague, Neil Irwin, at Axios today wrote, I think the headline actually was signal to noise or something like that. There is, as and your colleague, Neil Irwin, at Axios today wrote, I think the headline actually was Signal to Noise or something like that. There is, as Neil alluded to, there's a lot of signal in the noise of this jobs report, right? What else do you like? Yeah, you kind of have to squint to see the signal, but there is some signal there about the health of the labor market, maybe not as big of a signal as we're used to getting.

One of the things that we noticed was the labor force participation rate, or the number of people in the labor force went down in October. That comes from the survey that the government said wasn't terribly impacted by the hurricane, so something to watch there. Obviously, there are two surveys that make up the jobs report, household survey and the survey of establishments. It was a survey of establishment that the government said was a little funky because of the hurricanes. So you have that drop of people in the labor force,

which is a little bit troubling. And then, you also had an increase in the people who said they were not employed. So is that a warning sign that layoffs are starting to tick off? I mean, I don't know. It's so messy. Sometimes the jobs report is easy. Not today. Neila, can you actually draw any conclusions from this report or is it, it's one data point, let's see where the trend goes next month. And generally speaking, the job market is doing what we thought it was going to do. Well, you're asking me, and I sit on 25 million payroll records at ADP, so I have probably

a different perspective than most economists. I would say that we saw a clear sign of strong hiring in October. We reported 233,000 private sector job gains, and that matched some other signals from private sector sources of strength. So I really do think that we need to look at the overall trend of where the job's going, not a single month, not even a month as important as October. It's really, what does the job gains look like over the next three months that are going to be more telling? Along those lines, Courtney,

just on looking at the whole big picture thing, you know, there was that headline article, I forget whether it was opinion piece actually, in the Wall Street Journal this week, saying, and I think this was verbatim, the next president inherits a good economy. Interesting to me that number one, that comes from the journal, but number two,

it seems not to make a difference in the politics of this election right now. Times are so weird because the economy is good. We got the GDP report for the third quarter this week as well, so much data this week. 2.8% growth rate, that's so good. That's really good. And we talked about the unemployment rate. Even though this month was messy, unemployment rate still largely held at, you know, a historically low level. One of my colleagues pointed out that the

unemployment rate hasn't been this low heading into a presidential election since 2000. That's incredible. So there is this incredible disconnect between what the data show us and what people seem to feel about the economy. But the data is good. Yeah. And we should say here, Courtney, that people's opinions on this economy were baked a very long time ago. This data out today, the chances that it sways more than like a vote are negligible, yes? Yeah. But I feel like the narrative has been pretty consistent over the last, I don't know, year or so. The economy has been doing well. I think there was a little bit of a scare earlier this year about whether inflation was moving up. But we also got inflation data this week.

2.1%, that's basically the Fed's target. I think we're on a good path here. Neil, I wanna talk about inflation, but I wanna talk about it in terms of wages, wage growth slowing a bit, but still trending positive. Right, so that inflation number that Courtney mentioned, that 2.1%. Well, let me just put it this way. Have you ever tried to lose weight, Kai?

Yes, I have. Thank you very much. Let me tell you as an expert on this, it's always the last few pounds that are hardest, especially if you're trying to target a place. And for the Fed, the target is not just that headline 2.1%, it's the core, which has been stuck on 2.7% for the last three months. And I think one of the reasons why is that we do have this healthy, robust jobs market, and we're seeing a pretty robust pay gains, pay growth. Now, that's not triggering inflation higher, but it could keep inflation at that core measure that the Fed prefers a little bit higher for longer.

And so it's not a foregone conclusion that we'll get by this preferred measure all the way back to 2%. The Fed may take the two points up, just like I will maybe take those extra five pounds because it's just so hard to get it down. I appreciate what you're saying, but it is worth pointing out here, Nilly, that the Fed has said, especially in their last big review that they did, I guess, four or five years ago, they want symmetrical inflation, right? So if it's 1.8%, that's fine.

If it's 2.2%, the implication is that's fine too, right? Somewhere near 2%. They said that was fine when the biggest problem that the Fed was facing was too low inflation, not too high inflation. And starting at the end of this year, and I'm sure Courtney will be covering this, the Fed is going to start rethinking that framework for the state of the world that we're in now, not the state of the world that we were five years ago before the pandemic. Fed meeting next week, Wednesday, Thursday, by the way, day after

election day. Courtney Brown at Axios and Neila Richardson at ADP. Thanks you two. Thanks, Kai. Thanks, Kai. Wall Street to begin the 11th month of the year. Tech turned things around from yesterday. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. One industry that popped out to us in the jobs report that came out this morning, perhaps because it did actually the opposite of POP, is temp work. Temporary help services, which is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls it, employment

there fell by 49,000 jobs October from September, down nearly 200,000 jobs in the past year. These are the people who were employed by staffing agencies to fill in temporarily, obviously, forklift drivers, office administrators, IT professionals, you name it. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has more on that slice of the American labor market. Let's travel back in time to spring 2022. The labor market is red hot. People are thinking about quiet quitting. They're going to see the Batman on the sly.

And businesses are turning to temps to keep everything going. The temp staffing industry grew to record sizes. Timothy Landis is VP of Research at Staffing Industry Analysts. Now he says the temp industry has come down to earth. One big reason is demand for workers in warehousing and manufacturing. Two big employers of temps has come down. Also he says that new app or website a company might bring a temp IT worker on to complete not happening right now.

Businesses have been sort of bracing for a recession the last couple of years, a recession that hasn't happened. But because that was anticipated, a lot of projects have been delayed or put on hold. Meanwhile, companies are holding tight to permanent workers, and permanent workers are hugging their jobs back. Jason Leverant is one of the leaders of the At Work Group, a commercial staffing firm. There's issues in the past with ghosting, where people would start a job and then disappear with ghost. That has kind of been tempered, I think, because of this uncertainty, like, you know what,

I can't just leave and go get another job. Temps fill the gaps left when permanent workers leave, and right now, there are just fewer gaps. I'm Stephanie Hughes from Marketplace. The Department of Justice has about three weeks to decide what it wants to do about Google. Antitrust is the cause at issue here, whether the DOJ wants to try to break up

one of the world's richest and most powerful companies. A federal judge ruled this past summer that Google had indeed maintained an illegal monopoly over searching on the internet. Google does plan to appeal, we should say. The Justice Department has hinted in filings that they are entertaining the idea of splitting Google up. The thing is, the DOJ has actually tried this before, trying to break up a tech giant

that accused of monopolistic behavior, a little company you might have heard of by the name of Microsoft. Marketplace's Matt Levin reports on the lessons learned from the tech breakup that wasn't. For a hot minute there on June 7th, 2000, it really did seem like Microsoft could be broken up, which was really big news back when the news didn't come from your phone. A federal judge orders Microsoft split into two. The shoe dropped today, the federal judge presiding

at the government's antitrust case against Microsoft has ruled that Microsoft should be broken up. It's the most important business court ruling of the electronic information age. Just like Google, Microsoft had been found guilty of acting like a monopolist, mostly by coercing PC makers to pre-install one and only one internet browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Daniel Rubenfeld was an economist in the Clinton administration's Department of Justice at the time.

The belief was that if we broke Microsoft into an apps company and an operating system company, that those two separate companies would compete very aggressively. DOJ wanted a clean break, partly because the alternative, ongoing monitoring to make sure Microsoft was playing by the rules, was going to be tough to enforce. But Rubenfeld also hoped the split would prevent Microsoft from extending its tentacles into this newfangled technology called the World Wide Web. That was one time which we didn't know for sure exactly how the Internet was going to develop other than it was going to be very important.

We wanted to see innovation that would be significant as the Internet developed. Ultimately, the breakup never happened. Microsoft successfully appealed, some hanging chads in Florida meant a more business-friendly Bush administration took over, and a settlement was reached. It banned Microsoft from requiring PC makers to exclusively use Microsoft software, and also appointed an on-site monitoring committee to basically police them. Economist Fiona Scott-Morton at the Yale School of Management says at least by one metric, the settlement and public scrutiny mostly worked.

The Microsoft case stopped the software maker from controlling the internet. And now we have the Google case, and we hope that that's stopping the party that controls the internet from dominating the next thing that's coming. Maybe that's AI. But with the Department of Justice recommending a similar breakup of Google, a counterfactual looms large. If Microsoft had been carved up, would we have gotten a better internet or better technology generally? Would we have phones that could do yet more stuff? Would we have an internet that enabled us to be even better? Would AI have appeared 10 years earlier? I mean, we just can't know.

10 years earlier. I mean, we just can't know. Underlying the government's pro breakup argument is the logic that multiple smaller companies mean more competition to develop the best new technology at the cheapest price. Joseph Coniglio doesn't buy that premise. He's the director of antitrust policy at the cheapest price. Joseph Caniglio doesn't buy that premise. He's the director of antitrust policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank we should say is partly funded by big tech. Large firms are the ones that have the resources

and they have the incentives to be able to make those big investments that it takes to create these new products. Caniglio says if Microsoft was broken up in the early 2000s, maybe it doesn't become a big innovator in cloud computing. He says especially for tech products, it's size and scale that often produces the next big thing. If you were to break up Google, how would that affect the company's ability to invest

in artificial intelligence and these next generation of technologies. The Department of Justice has floated slicing off the Android phone operating system and the Chrome browser from Google, arguing those products reinforce Google's search monopoly. Daniel Rubenfeld, the economist in the Clinton administration DOJ, says regardless of whether Google gets broken up, consumers should know the rate of technological progress isn't exclusively dictated by Silicon Valley. I think it's wrong to think that the path of innovation is predetermined and that it can't be influenced by actions taken by the trust agencies.

Although he still uses Windows for his operating system and Google for his search engine. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. Coming up. It was just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it was like the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Sometimes the classics really are the best, right? First though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is up 288 today.

710% closed at 42,052. The Nasdaq increased 144 points, about 0.8%, 18,239. The S&P 500 picked up 23 points, about 0.4%, 57.28. For the week, the Dow slid about 0.1%. The Nasdaq subtracted 0.5%. The S&P 500 down 0.1% and 0.4%. Intel posted earnings reporting a $16.6 billion net loss last quarter. Company pointed recent restructuring and lower than expected demand for its products. Intel nonetheless because capitalism spiked seven and eight tenths percent today. Bond prices fell. The yield on the ten-year T-Node rose to 4.38%. You're listening to Marketplace.

I'm Kyle Rizdal and on how we, we've embedded on the front lines of a fight between the U.S. military and climate change. But that fight's not happening on traditional battlefields. Instead, it's at places like the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Oh my God! It's a little windier out here. Just a little. On changing terrain. And sea level rises, storms like that will do more and more damage.

And in state of the art military facilities where I became a lab rat. We're going to drop it from 110 degrees Fahrenheit down to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. I can feel my muscles tensing, right? Discover how the U.S. military might shape our climate future. Listen to How We Survive, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. California was, as you may or may not be aware, the first state in the union to ban single-use plastic bags at grocery and liquor stores. Should you happen to move out here or even visit, you might be surprised then to see that in stores there are still lots of plastic bags. So clearly the bag ban didn't work the way it was supposed to. But California's

trying again. There is a new law that promises to solve the problem and end those plastic bags once and for all. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells reports on what went wrong with the first try and whether the second try is going to go any better. The first volunteers arrive at a bank of the L.A. River at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning to pick up trash. L.A. is huge and full of eco-conscious people, and its namesake river is awesome, but also notoriously gross sometimes. So thousands of people show up.

Dan Mott is an environmental educator with Friends of the LA River, which is the nonprofit that puts this cleanup event on every year. He says out of all the stuff they pull out of the river, the most common item is plastic bags. Because when California's first ban went into effect in 2016, the company's making plastic bags found a loophole. If you make them thicker and prove they can be reused a certain number of times, they don't count to single-use bags anymore. The loophole worked spectacularly and Mott saw the evidence in the river's trash. All of a sudden they just became very prominent again and they're the sometimes like the thicker ones with that ridiculous notion that we would be

reusing those. We for the most part do not reuse those. California's plastic grocery bag wastes actually increased after the first ban went into effect according to the state's Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery. Partly because even though some bags say they're recyclable, a lot of recyclers can't process them. And partly because even the kind of people who live in LA and show up at 8 a.m. to pick up trash don't reuse bags. Nothing I forget it in the trunk of my car. I mean I forget bags every once in a while right? So I'm like shoot. And I always ask for a paper bag and they never have paper

bags so I always have to get those plastics. Those were volunteers Todd Smith, Carly Mischke, and Alexis Brunco. This new law aims to close that loophole. It says shoppers can either bring in their own bag, buy a paper bag or walk out with no bag at all. Gosh, I hope we got it done. I mean, it's like third or fourth times the charm in terms of making this happen. Mark Murray is the executive director of an environmental group called Californians Against Waste.

He's hopeful, but the new law isn't perfect. This legislation is regulating what happens at the check stand. Meaning the point of sale. No plastic at checkout or at the curb for pickup or from the delivery person. But this legislation does not regulate what can be sold in the aisles of the store. So theoretically, you could just stick those thick bags in an aisle a few steps away from the checkout lanes. We're hoping that grocery stores will abide by the spirit of the law because we don't

want to do this again two or four years from now. Other states have managed to actually ban plastic bags. Kayla Montani is an environmental program specialist with New York's Department of Environmental Conservation. We were able to kind of see what was going on in California. And so here in New York state, they were never allowed to qualify as a reusable bag. Just like California's, the New York law doesn't apply to everybody. The mom and pop-pop restaurant can still use plastic. So can the butcher in the grocery store.

But Montani says New York City still saw a massive decrease once the ban went into effect. Between 2017 and 2023, there was over a 50% decrease in the amount of plastic bags in the waste stream. California won't know whether its new law is successful for more than a year. Stores have until January of 2026 to comply. In Los Angeles, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. It's been a little more than a month since Hurricane Helene hit the southeast, devastating lives and livelihoods in its path. Western North Carolina, as you know, is especially hard hit.

In a press conference last week, Governor Roy Cooper said damage and recovery costs have come to an estimated $53 billion. That's infrastructure, people's homes, and businesses, small and large. Here's one business owner's story. My name is Hannah Bernisky, and I am the owner of Cold Mountain Art Collective located in Canton, North Carolina. So Cold Mountain Art Collective is a local art gallery where we host 40 local artists to sell their work, and we also have a community ceramic studio.

The day of the flood, Friday, September 27th, my family and I drove down to downtown Canton, which is just less than a mile from our house. And they had the roads closed, which was to be expected. This isn't the first time we've flooded. And so we kind of, we had an idea in our mind what it might look like. When I turned to the corner and saw my building and the water level up to the the top of my windows, it was just far more than I could have anticipated. I was not expecting it

to get that high. I just kind of collapsed in on myself, I guess, at the visual of it, knowing that all of my equipment in there, all of the things I'd been working on, was just gone. My contents, all my furniture, equipment, my materials, it sits right around $35,000. That includes my kilns and my wheels and then my building materials. So all of the work that I'm going to have to have done to replace plumbing, electrical, drywall, trim, flooring, all of that is going to be right at at 100,000. I have received a few small grants, $500, which isn't much, but it does help. And those have been sort of locally funded

through Asheville Arts Group. I've applied for a few other larger grants. I'm crossing my fingers for those, because my insurance, while I do have it, it doesn't cover enough of the contents. So I'm still very actively seeking any and every grant. It's inspiring to see this community continue to come out and support despite what's happened.

I will see one day I was working cleaning up the shop, just looking so grungy and somebody came up with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a little Kool-Aid pouch in this bag and they're like, it's not much, but you look like you could use some sustenance. And it was just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it was like the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich because it was homemade with love and somebody was just like, you should have this. It was just, it's so nice. Those moments have just been what keep you going, you know?

Hannah Bernisky, the owner of Cold Mountain Art Collective. She's in Canton, a financial and economic data point to go out on this Friday before Election Day. So far this cycle, 11,000 political groups have spent, come on, take a guess, what do you think? However much it is, think higher. $14.7 billion on federal races. Our theme music was composed by B.J. Liederman, Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargoli.

Donna Tam is the executive editor, Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager, and I'm Kyle Rizdahl. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody. We will see you again on Monday, all right? This is APF. What do they say? More money, more problems and way more questions

from your kids, right? But not to worry, Million Basilion, a podcast from Marketplace has you covered. I'm Bridget Bodner and with my cohost Ryan Perez, we take you and your young ones on grand adventures and comedic sing-alongs to answer all the questions your little ones have about money. Join us as we explain how banks work, why name brands are more expensive, and what happened to Black Friday sales.

Listen to Million Bazillion wherever you get your podcasts.