Marketplace - Uncertainty, thy name is tariff

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

The U.S. economy grew at a 2.4% annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2024, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported today. That number tells us where the economy was headed coming into this year. But with uncertainty surrounding tariffs, that story has taken a turn. Plus, how sinking credit scores caused by student loan delinquencies could hurt the overall economy, and the dramatic rise in modern-day train heists.

Data. That's it. That's how we're going to start. From American public media, this is Market Plans. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdall. It is Thursday today. This one's the 27th of March. Good as always. Davi Long, everybody. The big question about this economy right now isn't will he or won't he on the tariffs? The right answer could honestly be both because it almost doesn't matter. The threats, the flip-flopping on some of them, the prospect of more, we're just sitting here waiting for the real economic fallout to start.

Have I mentioned, oh, by the way, that the stock market is not the economy? No, the big question about this economy right now is how big the hit is going to be. That's the setup for the big picture economic data point of the day, an updated reading on how fast this economy is growing. An annualized rate of 2.4% in the last quarter of last year, we learned this morning, which is solid. Not spectacular, but solid. But consider this. That's where the economy was heading into this year.

And that ain't the story anymore, as Marketplace's Sabri Benishaw explains. 2024 was kind of the end of the post-pandemic party. Not a hangover, just, you know, the party kind of died. No more pent-up demand, government stimulus mostly done. Jonathan Pingle is chief U.S. economist for UBS. And that massive wave of growth that sort of peaked in 2023 with over 3% GDP growth,

had kind of slowed to about 2.5% in 2024. So at the beginning of this year, it looked like 2025 was also going to be all about a gradual slowdown. But now the slowdown is looking a little less gradual. Pingel took his estimate of growth this year down from two percent to closer to one and a half percent. You are reaching a point where the tariff actions are becoming less of an inflation concern and more of a longer term growth risk concern. reaching a point where the tariff actions are becoming less of an inflation concern and more of a longer term growth risk concern.

Brett Ryan is senior U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. The uncertainty alone is going to drag on growth. Businesses hold off on decisions when they don't know what's happening. Consumers spend less when they're anxious. When economic growth slows down to about 1 percent, the economy reaches a tipping point, says UBS's Pingal. If you get down below, say, 1 percent GDP growth, you start to put yourself in a position

of job gains turning negative, and then all of a sudden the labor market is actually contracting. But Pingal does not think we will get there this year. Neither does Gad Levinon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute. It's very hard to make the U.S. consumer stop spending. There are a lot of consumer consumption categories that are kind of very stable, especially more on the services part. Uncertainty and tariffs may slow the economy, but he says they don't look like there'll be enough to stop it. In New York, I'm Sabri Benishor for Marketplace. Elsewhere in economic data today was an early look at the balance of trade. Imports in February more or less flat after a bump in January.

Exports, meanwhile, were up. And all in all, the trade deficit, as a result, shrank just a bit month to month. But that gap overall between what we buy from overseas and what we sell abroad is just about the widest it's ever been. We point out from time to time that the trade gap is the president's favorite economic indicator. And by favorite here, I mean he hates it.

He thinks having a trade gap is a weakness. And to hear him tell it, tariffs are going to boost American exports and thus narrow the trade gap is a weakness. And to hear him tell it, tariffs are going to boost American exports and thus narrow the trade gap. Thing is, as Marketplace Adjust-and-Ho reports, that negative trade balance has an upside, too. Think about the U.S. as a big household, one that really loves going out and buying imported goods. To pay for those goods, the U.S. household has a couple options. One option is you can export to pay for your imports.. One option is you can export to pay for your imports. The other option is you can borrow to pay for your imports.

That's Robert Johnson, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He says the U.S. simply can't export enough products to pay for all of those imports. We just don't make enough stuff that the rest of the world is buying. But we do have financial assets that foreign investors want to buy. Think stocks, mortgage-backed securities, treasury securities, as in government debt. As a result, foreigners want to pour money into the United States and save assets in the United States. And that has made it very easy for us to borrow from abroad.

It's not like the same foreign manufacturers that are selling us goods are turning around and buying U.S. treasuries. But George Perks, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group, says at the national level, foreign demand for U.S. government debt and other financial assets allows us to import more than we export.

There is no other way to make that work. If you're gonna spend more than you earn, then you have to, have to, have to either be increasing debt or decreasing assets. What this means is that the trade deficit and foreign investment in the US are two sides of the same coin. Let's say the US could magically figure out how to eliminate the trade deficit by making exports catch up with imports.

Emily Blanchard, a professor at Dartmouth, says the trade-off would be less foreign investment. That means we lose a critical source of lending. And Blanchard says boosting exports would require an increase in capital investment. And those resources couldn't go to other parts of the economy. Building bridges, educating kids, coming up with innovation. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, the major indices closed off their lows. I think that's the way the business television would put it, right? We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

To say there's a lot happening in and to this economy does not quite do the moment justice. And just as we're all having a hard time keeping up, so too is the economic data. What then is one to do, economist or regular person, if they want to understand what's going on? Martha Gimble is the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale and she's got some thoughts on this. Martha, thanks for coming on the program. Good to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Let's do a level set here for a minute and have you tell me what you were looking at to gauge this

economy say three months ago. LESLIE KENDRICK So three months ago, it was looking at the very standard set of economic data, right? So the monthly jobs report, what we were seeing on the GDP side, throw in some inflation measurements there. But it was a lot of the standard data that you get a news alert about on your phone. And now I read in this paper that you did with some colleagues that's in the Harvard Business Review and also your social media feeds, you say this, to be honest, it feels increasingly like early COVID, not because the economy is going to shut down,

but given the pace of events, we need to look at data we don't normally rely on to understand this economy. What are you gonna look at now? So some of it is data that comes out from the government, but it just comes out more frequently. So weekly unemployment insurance claims, that gives us a quicker sense of how things are pivoting. But this is also a time where we need to think a little bit

about alternative data sets, like data from private sector companies. So for instance, indeed, where I need to think a little bit about alternative data sets, like data from private sector companies. So for instance, Indeed, where I used to work, just put out data on how federal employees are responding to Doge. I want to emphasize that private sector data is not a substitute for public sector data, but it does move faster. And so at a time where you're trying to figure out if the economy is at a turning point, it can be useful to look at some of these alternative data sets that just move more quickly. We should say here though that there is government data that is disappearing from government

websites. There are not unfounded questions about the future reliability of government data as it serves the political needs of the administration. Where are you on the trusting, maybe have some doubt scale right now? So, I'm trusting government data until I don't. There's currently no sign that the data that's been coming out about the economy from the government has been futzed with in any way. And frankly, if it were, I think we would know both because of the way that it comes out, it would be easy for economists on the outside to tell and also because frankly, the career staff would throw a fit and we would

find out from them. That being said, years ago, I've spent a lot of time yelling at people whenever anyone tried to question government statistics and saying, you know, this is paranoia, this is a conspiracy theory. And now it's a real question. And just to take a step back, I don't think people in the United States realize how strong our national statistics apparatus is. The economists in France, Germany, Australia, those countries would kill for the data infrastructure that we have here. That helps us better understand our country and our economy and design better policy off of that.

So, let's talk about some of the things you are watching and I assume we'll continue to watch as they serve your needs. And there's a list of them in this paper that you all wrote. Here's one, daily treasury statement, non-interest government spending. So should I stop doing the numbers every day and instead do a, we should figure out the music for whatever it would be for the daily treasury statement, non-interest government spending segment, right?

I mean. Well, I mean, for now the music would just be kind of toddling along is. Um, but you know, that's one that looks at the amount of spending the government is doing. But I think that's particularly important given the conversations around Doge and the questions around is a pullback in government spending going to slow down the economy. And what you've seen right now is there really isn't any sign in the aggregate that the government

is stopping spending in any kind of substantive way. Take off your economist hat for a second and put on your regular person hat. If I'm just trying to get by in my life and I'm watching all the chaos in the news and you know price levels are still elevated and I'm a little worried about uncertainty, what should the lay person be looking at to have some sense of what this economy's all about? I don't think anyone's ever accused me of being good at talking to normal people.

But I think this is a moment where it's really important not to confuse emotions for facts, right? Emotions are running really, really high and it is easy to feel like the economy is going to crash because things feel so uncertain. But if you look at the data, that is just not yet what it is showing. And so it is very important to distinguish the vibes from the facts on the ground. Martha Gimble, she's the executive director at the Budget Lab at Yale.

Martha, thanks so much, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So here's an alternative data point, just to keep going in the spirit of that interview with Martha Gimble. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said this week that it figures almost 10 million

people have become past due on their student loans since the pandemic payment pause and an additional grace period ended last September. And that that's going to hit those borrowers' credit scores real soon. As Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes reports, that is bad for those borrowers, and it is bad for the economy. Dustin Gibson has gotten letters from his student loan servicer over the past year, but he hasn't really looked at them too hard.

I'm an invoiter by nature. Gibson's a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins. He'd been dutifully making payments towards his $185,000 in student loan debt. Then he stopped during the pandemic era pause, and he hasn't started making payments again. I mean, we're 43 and we finally felt like we could breathe. The car's being repaid off in three months. We can finally begin to tackle some of the credit card debt. Gibson also says it's unclear to him what's happening at the federal level with the public

service loan forgiveness program he's enrolled in. And he doesn't mind if his credit gets dinged. But Constantinianilis, a professor of financial economics at the University of Cambridge, is concerned about all the delinquent borrowers. This could lead to lifetime consequences, right? Because if people have damaged credit scores, it'll be harder to do things like buy a home. Yanela says this could affect how much wealth they accumulate in the long term. So they may have less money in retirement, and we could be seeing the echoes of this problem for decades to come.

Which would hurt not just them, but the overall economy. Even people who make payments on their student loans are having to sacrifice elsewhere, like DJ Anthony Gaffield. He was helping his family after they lost their home in the Altadena wildfires. But Gaffield has institutional student loans too. Then I was like, oh shoot, I can't pay my family anymore

just because you gotta pay this monthly or pay this quarterly until it's absolved. He's also had to ask his landlord to let him delay paying rent. I'm Stephanie Hughes from Marketplace. Coming up... In a hundred years, hopefully there will still be beautiful cars in museums and just not on the streets. And in LA, no less. But first, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is down 155 today, four tenths percent, 42,299 for the blue chips.

The Nasdaq dipped 94 points, about a half percent, 17,804. S&P 500 down 18, about a third percent, 5693. Petco up almost 32 percent today. Pet Food and Products retailer posted better than expected adjusted earnings. Rival pet supplies firm Chewy down 1.7 percent Those tariffs White House announced yesterday all cars and car parts not made in the United States for down 3.9% Stellantis down four and a quarter percent GM dropped seven point four percent bonds down as well Yield on the ten year T-note rose rose, 4.36%, you're listening to Marketplace.

["Ten Year T-Note Rose"] This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal. We cover a lot of things on this program, but as we sit here in 2025, I didn't really imagine I'd be doing an interview on train heists. According to the Association of American Railroads, last year there were more than 65,000 train robberies in this country, quite a figure in and of itself, doubly so when you consider that that number was up 40% from 2023. Somewhere between 15 and 35 billion dollars in annual losses, says the Department of Homeland Security.

So what's going on with that? Malia Wallin is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine. Malia, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me. You think train heist and you think guys in masks and six shooters and horses and all of that. That is not this. That is not this. Modern day train thieves are a whole different thing.

There's no guns. There are bolt cutters and mechanized saws and deserts. How does it work? Yeah. So there are a couple different ways it works. The sort of most extreme version is thieves actually go out into more remote parts of California and Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and they cut the air compression brake hoses that run between train cars, which forces an emergency stop.

And then they cut the locks off the containers, they unload what they want, and trucks come pick it up and they drive away. But oftentimes a conductor or an engineer doesn't even know a heist is happening. I mean, some of these occur when a train is stopped to let another train pass. And basically it's happening three miles back.

They have no idea until maybe another train passes and calls the train police dispatcher and says, you know, there's theft underway. You know, we've all seen freight trains and they look to the lay person's eye, basically indistinguishable. But you talk about this guy in this piece who like spent time figuring out what the

symbology means and how to decode what's inside and figuring out like what cars he ought to hit and to maximize his take. Yeah, that's right. I mean, people can do a lot of research online. And there's also a lot of cases where there is insider information either from warehouses or from the port or from train yards. I heard stories of very specifically targeted crews. There are crews who only go for tires.

Apparently, there's a good resale market. There are crews that only hit train cars that carry new cars and they go inside and they take all the catalytic converters out of new cars and then they leave. Yeah, they're specialized labor. I mean that's what they're doing. Exactly. Cargo is insured as you point out and security is not something that these companies are interested in investing in. Yeah, you know it's complicated. I think shipping is very cheap and people all along the supply chain are reticent to make it expensive. And just the sheer volume of stuff going on the rails, you know, at a certain level, people are, I think, willing to take some level of risk.

But that said, there are a lot of different types of law enforcement working on this issue including, you know companies like Nike have their own Loss prevention and asset recovery teams that go out and do detective work to try and get the stuff back The catch of course is that you've got the railroads. You've got The companies who own or are shipping the cargo You've got Police bureaucracies involved. So it's a little bit tragedy in the comments, right? It's this thing that's happening that there's no one person who's like responsible. Yeah, that's true to some degree. A fair amount of this work falls to local law enforcement, like rural sheriff departments.

So they don't necessarily have the resources to put a lot into this. And also the train companies, the rail industry has changed a lot in the last decade or so. They've cut 30% of employees and they've made longer and longer trains. So there are also fewer people looking after longer and longer trains. So, yeah.

And then, not to bring it all home to the consumer, but we're the ones paying the high prices or higher prices, because all these,ikes, for instance, are getting stolen. Yeah, that's right. And in the case of rail, you know, shippers don't have a ton of options. It's essentially a duopoly on the West Coast. There's just BNSF and Union Pacific. So it's not as though, you know, you hear one rail companies having issues with theft, you have a bunch of options of where you can go. There's just two companies.

And, and we should point out here, uh, shipping by rail is so much cheaper than shipping by truck, right? It's cheaper and it's also fewer emissions. So there are definitely reasons to want to ship by rail, but to be clear, like, this is definitely happening in the trucking industry as well. So cargo theft writ large has increased quite dramatically. Malia Wallin, contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. Malia, thanks a lot.

Appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having me. Over the next couple of years, Los Angeles is set to host the FIFA World Cup in 2026, Super Bowl 61 in 2027, and the Summer Olympic Games in 2028. Those competitions are going to draw not only the eyes of the world of Los Angeles, but also millions of visitors. And in the buildup, the city's embarked on a mission to revamp its underwhelming transit system, adding rail lines and more buses and improving walkability, and in the course of all that, perhaps reinventing its well-earned car-centric reputation.

But there are Angelinos who've already put car culture in the rear view mirror. That brings us to today's installment of our series, My Economy. I'm Eric Brightwell, I'm a car-free Angelino and an explorer and adventurer. I work at a grocery store doing delivery. Yeah, which it's funny because one of my neighbors kind of scolds me and is like,

well, how are you car free if you drive for work? But I feel like, yeah, if you were a mail carrier and you didn't have a car, people wouldn't be like, yeah, but you deliver mail in a mail truck. Like, it's not a purity test. I'm just saying, I don't own a car. And that fact remains true. AAA says that it costs people on average $13,000 a year, which is a figure I try it out all the time

to own a car in Los Angeles, because you've got gas and just routine maintenance, but also repairs, parking tickets, but the thing that people really forget about is paying to park. Like parking is what really sucks. So, I was working at Amoeba and actually, about a third of the employees, the initial employees, were people that came down from Berkeley and San Francisco.

And they were much less likely to own cars than the Angelino employees. And then so I remember I kind of experimented with not having a car for a bit. I went like seven months without driving while I had a car. And then it got towed, and then I had to get it out of impound. And it cost more than the car had cost me to get it out. And I remember a friend of mine was moving to New York and was like, do you want my old car? And I had to think about it. I was like, okay, there's a free car on offer.

And then I was like, I don't, you know what? I don't think I do. And then I was like, I don't, you know what? I don't think I do. I do go to the mountains a lot, which is, transit does not get you to the mountains, but I have a friend who has a car, so you know, again, for me it's not a purity test, like it's not a commitment to never touch a car or look at a car.

I just went to the Peterson Automotive Museum the other day because I was like, to see the low riders because I feel like in 100 years, hopefully there will still be beautiful cars in museums and just not on the streets. I actually made a map and I just shared it with a friend of all the places I can get to within a 10 minute walk, a 15 minute bike ride, or a one seat bus ride.

And there's like 400 places on the map. So I don't think I'll ever own another car because it gets less and less likely as transit gets better and better. Eric Brightwell there, a car free adventurer here in Los Los Angeles for the Transit Curious. He's got a podcast too. It's called Nobody Drives in LA, Car-Free Life in the City Made for Cars.

This final note on the way out today, which comes with the observation that tariffs hit different depending on where you are on the income spectrum. Regressive, by the way, is a tax policy nerd word for that. Ferrari announced today it's going to raise prices on certain models by 10% because tariffs. So for instance, should you be in the market for the Ferrari puro sangue? Suv sticker price four hundred and thirty thousand dollars it is now going to cost you forty three thousand dollars More and I am just gonna say if you can afford almost half a mil for a car tariffs What tariffs?

John Buckley John Gordon noya card I ain't the parker Amanda Peacher, and Stephanie Sieck are the Marketplace Editing staff. Amir Bibawe is the Managing Editor, and I'm Kyle Rizdal. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. I want to take a moment to thank everybody who contributed to our March fundraiser. It means so much to know that we have your support. It means that millions of listeners can keep turning to Marketplace for independent, unbiased journalism. It means Marketplace will remain one of the only paywall-free sources of financial and economic news.

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