Marketplace - Why American solar manufacturers are divided on tariffs

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Solar panels are key in the transition to cleaner energy. But despite oodles of federal investment, there are still obstacles in the way of the U.S. manufacturing industry. Also in this episode: Home price increases slow, “The Diplomat” showrunner aims for authenticity, and the Fed’s next move.

On the program today we've got data, of course, some renewable energy and opera from American public media. This is Market Class. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal, Tuesday, October 29th. Today good as always to have you along everybody. All right, I say home prices, you say what? Really high? Going up?

Out of control? Yes, to all of that. But even the longest journey begins with a single step, right? July, as you might remember, saw all-time highs in housing prices in this economy, but new numbers out this morning from the S&P CoreLogic Case-Schiller Home Price Index, more colloquially and easily known as Case-Schiller, showed a slight dip July to August. Now, home prices are still up year over year, 4.2%. But even that? Here's the thing, the rate of price growth is slowing. Marketplace's Kelly Wells

is on the housing beat for us today. Slowing price increases might seem novel, but it's not surprising. Mark Epley, director of the real estate program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there are three main reasons price hikes are cooling. One is the housing stock. For the first time, we've really seen them sustainably growing, which means there'll be a little pushdown in sale prices. Second, mortgage rates have gone up, which tends to bring sale prices down.

And third, he says both presidential candidates are promising help for home buyers. If you're a home buyer, why not wait for that? prices down. And third, he says both presidential candidates are promising help for home buyers. If you're a home buyer, why not wait for that? The people who already own homes might not be excited about today's news on home prices. But... The slowing of house price appreciation is actually a good thing. Timothy Savage teaches finance in NYU's real estate program. He says the price of housing is a major slice of the inflation pie.

The cooling of housing prices means the Fed's attempt to curb inflation just might be working. Plus, This may help to address the issue of individuals getting into housing in the first place. That would be welcome news in Chicago, which saw the second highest increase of housing prices of major U.S. cities. Erika Villegas is president of the Chicago Association of Realtors. We don't have enough homes for sale and we have a good amount of buyers looking to buy

in Chicago. You know, we don't have the amount of listings that we would love to have to be able to meet the demand. Villegas says she's hopeful that lowering interest rates will help more buyers in her market find homes soon. Already, she said she's seen more sales in the past couple of months. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. Wall Street today, tech stocks were the name of the game.

That and oil and Bitcoin and the bond market, it's all going on. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. The economic data gods and the political calendar gods must have gotten together to arrange this next week or so in our collective experience. Voting ends next Tuesday, of course. The Fed meets on interest rates next Wednesday and Thursday. But between here and there, it's kind of a data palooza. Kayleigh Wells just told us about Kay Schiller. We also got September job openings today, fell to a three and a half year low.

Consumer confidence, which this month is the highest it's been since the beginning of the year. And there is more. Tomorrow we get gross domestic product. The next read on inflation comes Thursday via the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index. And then Friday, the October jobs report. Marketplace's Kristin Schwab sets the table

for what the Fed is gonna be thinking about with all that. Nothing is ever certain when it comes to the economy, but Carole Binder, an economist at UT Austin, is pretty certain the Fed will cut interest rates by 25 basis points next week because that is what the Fed signaled. They want it to be as predictable as possible. Predictable because the Fed is meeting right after the election and doesn't want to appear partisan. Predictable because markets have already priced in the cut. Drone Powell's Fed, its pattern is to set expectations

and follow through, which means this week of economic data, it's not so much going to inform November's Fed meeting. The more important thing is gonna be what it signals about that future path. So what it signals about what it might do in December and even farther into the future. For insight on that, Randy Krosner, a former Fed governor, will mostly focus on jobs. The key wild card, I think, will be the employment report. We've had it down, we've had it up,

and so where are things going? A super strong jobs report, and the Fed might signal keeping rates steady in December. This far in the game, though, economists have to squint at the subtext to get a read on the economy, like the job-quits rate and auto-loan delinquencies because Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth, says the Fed's goal... Andrew Levin They're trying to find the Goldilocks level of interest rates. Gigi Blanchard Which requires a bit of patience and... Andrew Levin It's not to overreact, you know, to just a few data points coming in.

But wait for a pattern to emerge before it makes its next move, or really signal the move it might make months ahead. I'm Kristin Schwab for Marketplace. One of last year's big streaming hits, The Diplomat, on Netflix, comes back Thursday for season two. Carrie Russell is the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the UK. Rufus Sewell, her former ambassador husband. International crises, of course, ensue. Full disclosure, I'm a fan. Anyway, season three is already in production, so we were lucky to get creator and showrunner

Deborah Kahn on the phone. It's great to have you on. Hey, thanks. Very exciting to be here. So you have been in television for a while. West Wing, Homeland, a bunch of stuff. But this is your first gig as the boss. And I want to know what it's like to be

the boss on a high profile show. So a lot of people create their first show when they're a little bit earlier in their career. I waited a long time, partially because I used to be based in LA and then I moved to New York. And at that time, the idea of working long distance, if you weren't in LA, you couldn't be in the business. So I sort of put my showrunner ambitions aside

for about a decade, but watched really carefully what these amazing people that I was working with were doing and knew going into it all of the pitfalls and how to kind of avoid the mistakes and then made every single mistake. I was so convinced that I had taught myself how to avoid. The buck very much stops with you, right? I mean, you get to decide all the decisions.

It does, yeah. It's fun. I have to say it's a good job. Not terrifying. I enjoy it. It is terrifying, but there's a certain point at which I remember that I actually know more about this show than most people do.

I always actually panic going into interviews because I'm like, what if I don't have anything to say about the show? And then I realized I am in fact the world's expert on the diplomat television program. So you know, eventually it works out. We were talking about this interview and, you know, how it works out. We were talking about this interview and how we could make it a marketplace interview, right? We always try to find a marketplace. Yes.

I was wondering that myself. Well, so here's what we came up with. I'm glad you asked. We've decided that this is actually a workplace drama. And we're a show about, among many other things, the workplace. So as you sat down to sort of, well, actually, you probably didn't sit down and come up with this thing out of whole cloth.

What was the process by which you came to the Nutgraph, the idea for this show? There were a bunch of contributing features. When I left the West Wing, I was like, well, I want to do this, but with the whole world. And then when I was working on Homeland, this ambassador came in to speak to us. We interviewed a lot of experts from a lot of different fields and she came in to talk about the work that she had done in Pakistan. And two minutes into the conversation, I wrote, I still have it in my notepad, I wrote, she is a series. The stories that she told as I talked to more people in that field were not all that unusual. And I thought, how the f*** is it that nobody knows about what these people do?

Can we talk about Keri Russell for a minute? Oh yeah. Let's do that. I like her. Did you write? Did you? So look, I said this before we started Rolling Tape. I'm a huge fan of this show.

I really enjoy it. Carrie's great and Rufus Sewell and David Yassie and the whole cast. And I want to get to the chemistry of it in a second. But did you write this with Carrie in mind? No. No, I did not. Interesting. And then someone suggested Carrie when we were beginning to talk about casting.

And I said she's an amazing actress. I love her work, but she is so powerful and statuesque. She is Elizabeth on the American, so in control. I'm writing a sort of an itchy, twitchy, erotic. And I just, I didn't see it. And the executive that I was working with said, just have a conversation, see how it goes. We get on Zoom. Within 30 seconds, I was like, oh my God, she is Kate.

She is just, she's so down to earth and relaxed in her own body and laughing at herself in every second and relatable. And I was like, oh, God, she's Kate. Hmm. And then as you got to casting the rest of this team, one of the reasons this show works for me anyway, and I think probably for a lot of people, and probably for a lot of shows, actually,

is that the chemistry between the actors and the characters is so good. One of the reasons this show works for me anyway, and I think probably for a lot of people, and probably for a lot of shows actually, is that the chemistry between the actors and the characters is so good. How do you do that? Is it just serendipitous casting? Should I be interviewing the casting director instead of you? Probably. Julie Schubert, unbelievable casting director.

Some of it is just luck. Carrie and Rufus liked each other right off. And the thing that we were casting for was team players, honestly. I'm very much cognizant of the fact that whatever happens on the show, it should be a pleasant place to work for everybody. And certain, okay, so if we're talking about workplaces, certain ecosystems evolve that are built around a single CEO or creator or lead, where there's a lot of dysfunction

that revolves around supporting that one person's process. And I think the work that you get out of a group is a lot better if everybody realizes that everybody there is a human being with creativity to contribute and a family at home and that we're lucky to do this. That energy, I think, creates a certain lightness and playfulness and ease in the interaction of the whole cast. I was in the Navy. I was in flight school, actually, when Top Gun came out. And of course, the whole vibe when Top Gun comes out is, oh, Naval Aviation, it's the coolest thing ever. I was in the Foreign Service,

as you may or may not be aware, many years ago. I didn't know that. Yeah. What did you do? I was overseas at the embassies in Ottawa and Beijing. Ottawa, lovely place, not very foreign. Beijing, obviously quite foreign. And what was your role? Oh, I was stamping visas and doing mundane stuff. I was a brand new junior officer. Nothing exciting, quite foreign. And what was your role? Oh, I was stamping visas and doing mundane stuff.

I was a brand new junior officer. Right on. Front line. Nothing exciting. Nothing exciting. Oh, it's exciting in the consular section. I know that. The life was cool.

Yeah. What has the reaction been from the State Department for you? They have been really happy. They were, I think, terrified when they first heard about us, as they should be. We wanted to be as loyal as we could to the substance of the work that they do and the intention behind it. Somebody recently put it as not realistic, but authentic. I think that's the right way to describe the goal. We you know, we've had people come up to us and say,

wow, my family now, like my parents understand what I do now. And that's what we want. The show is called The Diplomat. It's on Netflix. Debra Kahn is the showrunner, the creator. You should check it out because it's great. Debra, thank you so much for your time.

Great talking to you. Thank you so much for your time. Great talking to you. Thank you so much. Coming up. As a freelancer, you bounce from city to city. You really don't have connection to the community that you're living in. Now try doing that while you're singing at the Metropolitan Opera. First though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is off 154 today, 4 tenths percent, 42,233. The Nasdaq gained 145 points, about 8 tenths percent, finished at 18,712. The S&P 500

picked up 9 points, 2 tenths percent, ended things at 5832. McDonald's dropped 6 tenths percent today after reporting mixed third quarter earnings. Those results do not include a drop in sales after the chain's recent E. Coli outbreak Boeing elevated one and a half percent today that after announcing a 21 billion dollar sale of stock to raise capital and What a credit downgrade Bitcoin which I mentioned up three and a half percent today. I haven't checked this in a while $72,000 for one Bitcoin oil was pretty much even on the day West Texas intermediate $67.50 a barrel bond prices up even on the day. West Texas Intermediate, $67.50 a barrel. Bond prices up, yield on the 10-year T-note down 4.26%. You're listening to Marketplace. This podcast is supported by Fundrise. Buy low, sell high. It's easy to say, hard to

do. For example, high interest rates are crushing the real estate market right now. Demand is dropping and prices are falling, even for many of the best assets. It's no wonder the Fundrise flagship fund plans to go on a buying spree, expanding its billion-dollar real estate portfolio over the next few months. You can add the Fundrise flagship fund to your portfolio in just minutes and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com slash smart. That's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash smart. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing.

This and other information can be found in the funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal. I'm paraphrasing here, but you know how on Apple products, phones, iPads, earbuds, what have you, somewhere on the thing, it used to say something like, designed in the United States, assembled in China? Well, that, but for solar panels.

The technology that takes sunlight and turns it into electricity was invented here, but the industry that makes solar panels nearly died out in this country thanks to Chinese computation. Solar making here is making a comeback, but it's no sure thing quite yet, as Marketplace's Sabri Benishaw reports. At a plant in Dalton, Georgia, ribbons of copper are being soldered onto slices of silicon crystal just twice the thickness of a human hair. Supervisor Robert Howey watches as these crystals are arranged in groups called strings.

This individual string will become part of a family of 12 strings that will make up the beginning part of our solar panel. This plant, owned by South Korea-based Qcells, opened in 2019. Lisa Nash is the general manager. We started out, we were going to be around 300 people, and now we're two buildings and 2,000 people. We make about 60,000 panels a day here in Dalton. This plant exists because of trade policy.

It was the tariffs at the time that really drove that decision. Tariffs. Marta Stoepker is with Qcells, the firm that owns this plant. In 2018, the Trump administration slapped tariffs of up to 30% on solar equipment made in China. We were like, instead of being tariffed to import our product, let's just make our product in the United States. A few years later, the U.S. solar industry got another shot in the arm when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA showered clean energy manufacturing with tax credits and incentives. The very next year, QCells announced it was investing $2.5 billion more

into manufacturing in the U.S. These investments, especially downstream on the supply chain, would not have been possible without the IRA, for sure. More than a dozen plants have popped up with help from the IRA. U.S. production capacity for solar panels has quintupled in two years, according to S&P Global. But that's mostly assembling finished solar panels.

Everything leading up to that, the parts, the hair-thin wafers of silicon crystal, the little square cells you see when you look at a solar panel, that is where the U.S. supply chain has gaping holes. Michelle Davis is head of solar research at data analytics from Wood Mackenzie. There have been a lot of cell manufacturing facilities and wafer manufacturing facilities that have either been canceled entirely or put on hold. The reason, she says, is that global prices for these parts have crashed and the investment math just doesn't make as much sense as it does for finished panels.

Those investments are being undermined largely by Chinese owned and Chinese controlled companies who are shipping here at dumped and subsidized prices and crushing the market. and subsidize prices and crushing the market. Tim Breitville is lead counsel for the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, a group of solar manufacturers in the US. He says China has gotten around existing tariffs on it by exporting through other countries. It's a whack-a-mole problem where we address China, we win a case, we achieve tariffs,

and the Chinese-owned companies move to other countries like Vietnam, like Cambodia, and Thailand. The manufacturers he represents say they need more tariffs targeting these new countries. The Department of Commerce agrees. This month it announced tariffs of up to nearly 300 percent, and that is just the beginning. But these tariffs, like those before them, are paid by U.S. importers, and that has highlighted a rift in the American solar industry. Prices have certainly increased as the tariffs have been put into place. So we're paying well over double what other regions outside the United States

are paying for panels. Scott Weider is CEO of Standard Solar, which builds and operates large solar energy farms for businesses and governments. So at the end of the day, it's really the end customer that's getting penalized the most? Weider says there just isn't enough production of solar panel components in the U.S. to meet demand, and there won't be for years. The result is different parts of the U.S. solar industry have been competing for different trade policies. One group asks for more protections, another for exceptions. And the rebirth of American solar manufacturing

sits at a precarious moment. In New York, I'm Sabri Ben-Ashur for Marketplace. We got new Joltz data this morning. Say it with me now, the job openings and labor turnover survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To quote the BLS, things were little changed in September from a month earlier. But even if the big picture is pretty stable, people are still making career moves all the time, you know, whether that's finding a new job or maybe just finding a new direction. That gets us to today's installment of our series, My Economy. I'm Cariann O'Taniel, former opera singer, eternal opera hype girl, and current vice president of Opera Delaware in Wilmington, Delaware.

I knew that I liked singing and performing, but opera was nowhere on my radar when I was a kid. I was 14 when I met this little 77-year-old former opera singer who said, I hear something in you. I think you should learn about opera. And she kind of took me under her wing. And it changed my perspective on everything. Opera just wasn't something that I even knew that people like me could do. But to the credit of this woman that I met,

she brought me to the Met. She brought me to see a production of Carmen. And it was this buxom, big-haired, beautiful brown woman who was singing Carmen and really it was the exposure, it was seeing things like that, seeing myself and seeing the potential spaces that I could occupy that opened up opera for me. that opened up opera for me. I was singing at the Metropolitan Opera, which was like the epitome of the dream of my life. It was where I wanted to be since I was 14. But that came at the end of a long road of a lot of big and amazing gigs

where I was really isolated. As a freelancer, you bounce from city to city. You really don't have connection to the community that you're living in, and you're performing at a really, really high level. If you can't sing the high C that you need to sing that night, if you have to call out, you don't get paid. That led to a really dark period where I couldn't sing without crying. It spiraled and got worse and worse progressively. And I was supposed to be starting a new gig, singing out in California.

And I said to them, I can't sing without crying. I don't know what's going on. Something's broken in me. I thought I'm gonna have to give up on this thing that has been so important to me and given me my life for the last 15 years. And fortunately for me, the general director of the company at the time asked,

if you leave here, do you have health insurance? And I said, no. And he said, well, then we're not going to have you leave in a crisis. This is unheard of an opera. I didn't know that we could take care of each other like this. And when I tell you that changed everything in my life, because I realized the power that we all have to change the things that we don't agree with. That is what led me to move into administration

for a career, and my goal here is to build a sustainable life for artists. Do I get FOMO from not being on stage, performing anymore? I think a lot of people, when they think about moving into administration or moving into producing, they worry that they're going to still have that itch and they're going to miss that. For me, I really feel like this is my purpose.

I will say though, now when I sing, it comes from a place of incredible joy. Like when I was a kid, that I sing with joy, I sing to build community, I sing to connect with people. And it's a different feeling for sure. Kariyanna Otagno, once an opera singer now the VP of engagement at Opera Delaware. Whether you found your passion early or you're making a late pivot, tell us about it would you? marketplace.org slash my economy This final note on the way out today. You remember like a year, year and a half ago when then Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

rolled out those new olive oil drinks, Oliatto they were called? Well, two things. Number one, I tried one once, exactly as gross as you would imagine. And number two, it seems new Starbucks CEO, Brian Nicol agrees, the company said today, all the autos are soon to be no more. I mean, sure, they couched it in a whole, we're simplifying the menu and getting back to coffee basics

so we can be more profitable thing, but honestly, just so gross. Oh man. Our digital and on-demand team includes Carrie Barber, Jordan Mangy, Dylan Mietinen, Janet Nguyen, Oga Oxman, Ellen Rolfes, Virginia K. Smith, and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital and on-demand.

And I'm Kyle Rizdal. We will see you tomorrow everybody. But this is a PM. What do they say? More money, more problems and way more questions from your kids. Right. But not to worry. Million bazillion a podcast from marketplace has you covered. I'm Bridget Bodner. And with my cohosthost 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.