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Episode Date: March 17, 2025

About 8.9 million. That’s how many U.S. workers worked more than one job in February — an all-time high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We spoke with some workers holding multiple job about why this economy necessitates a second (or third) gig. Plus, economist Mohamed El-Erian on DOGE and recession odds, and we break down why the U.S. energy mix probably won’t change much under President Donald Trump.

Clearly, this economy is on some kind of journey. The question is, where is it going to wind up? From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Monday. Today, this one is the 17th of March. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We're going to come out the other end of this week with a better idea of what the people

whose job it is to keep this economy on the straight and narrow, that would of course be the Federal Reserve, what they think about everything that is going on. The central bank meets tomorrow and Wednesday on interest rates and Sheriff Powell and the gang will also give us their sense of what our economic future might be, their projections for unemployment and inflation and interest rates. In the meanwhile though, we were thinking a bit of a scene setter might be in order just to make sure everybody is up to speed. So we have called Mohammed Al-Aryan. He's the president of Queens College Cambridge. Dr. Al-Aryan. He's the president of Queens College, Cambridge.

Dr. Al-Aryan, good to have you back on the program, sir. Thank you for having me. What is your sense of what's being done to the American economy right now? So what's being done is an attempt to reorganize it both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we're seeing major efforts going on with the government, of course. The hope is to streamline it, make it more efficient. And it would have been promised a number of measures to deregulate the private sector. In terms of international, we're seeing attempts at a fairer trading system. This

is a really tricky thing to do both domestically and internationally. It will involve what President Trump called little disturbances in the short term, what others see as a very bumpy journey. What is completely uncertain is what the destination looks like. Reorganize seems charitable, but let's talk about two things, the short term and the long term. In the short term, you yourself have now come out and said your estimates on the chances of recession this year are now 30-ish percent instead of the 10-ish percent they were a couple of weeks ago. Do you recall a time when a president of the United States, through his policies, has sent

the United States into a recession? I don't. This sort of thing you see in developing countries, you've seen it recently in Argentina, where the notion is you dismantle an existing system in order to put another one up. Think a little bit about you being on a plane and suddenly the decision is to dismantle the engine and put a new one on. It's actually very difficult to maintain altitude when you're trying to do that.

What's the worst case then? So the worst case is that the US economy slows to what's called stall speed. So let's give it some numbers. Coming into the year, the IMF thought that we would grow at about 2.7%. I suspect if the IMF were to update its projection today, that number will be 2% or below. Why does that matter? Because stall speed for the US economy is about 1%. Then the probability of a recession suddenly goes up significantly.

If we then fall into recession, you're going to see a couple of things happening. You're going to see the labor market getting hit, and income is the only thing keeping people going at the low income stages after they've run down all their savings and incurred a lot of debt and Businesses are gonna go from a wait-and-see to postponing investment programs for a long time and In this environment and with inflation where it is the Fed will not be able to get us out with interest rate cuts

So that that is the negative scenarios that people are worried about I want to go over that again the idea of the Federal Reserve and what happens, because as you and others point out, the Fed is going to be challenged with rising inflation dynamics, right, because of the tariffs and price levels probably going up, with a softening labor market, and that is a very bad place for the Fed to be. Yeah, that's the so-called whiff of stagflation, where the two mandates of the Fed compete with each other in a negative sense. Look, if the Fed was really serious about its 2% inflation target, we would not be talking

about when will the Fed cut rates and by how much. We'd be talking about when is the Fed going to hike rates. So I think when push comes to shove, the Fed will tolerate higher inflation for now in an attempt to protect the real economy. But there's only so much the Fed can do if the disturbances are coming from elsewhere. Aaron Powell Elsewhere meaning? Dr. K Boulanger Meaning, for example, what's happening with Doge. One, it increases the income insecurity of federal employees and when your income insecurity

goes up, you spend less. Two, it is disrupting a lot of committed payments that had other commitments on their side. So we're seeing a lot of federal contractors having to lay off people. So there's a lot of disturbances going on the Doge side. And then on the tariff side, when you're not sure what the level of tariff is going to be, then you will postpone lots and lots of decisions that contribute to both current and future growth. We have had so far colloquially vibes about what might be happening to the economy now. We don't have yet hard data, and that seems to me to be a challenge

because the hard data is going to be kind of not very good. So the soft data, which is survey data, turns first. And the survey data has turned in a very significant manner. It has involved people's confidence about future prospects, about employment, and about income coming down, and people's expectation of inflation going up. Normally, it takes about three to six months for the soft data to be reflected in the hard

data. So we are calling it in month two of the soft data really weakening right now. Let's get back to where we started on the way out here. And that is the idea that what President Trump is doing to this economy is also being done to the global economy. The global order is being disassembled at lightning speed. And I guess I wonder, as you talk to people around the world as you do

in very significant positions of influence, what is their sense of, first of all, what we're doing, and second of all, what it might mean? I think people are hesitant. They're worried. There's this whole notion of you cannot replace something with nothing. So they'd like to have greater clarity on where are we going after all this. What does this notion of a fair trade trading system look like?

So they have uncertainties both about the journey and the destination. Mohammed El-Arian, he's at Queens College, Cambridge. He's at Allianz, used to be a PIMCO. Dr. El-Arian, thanks for your time. Sorry, I appreciate it. Thank you. On Wall Street today, traders were clearly of the, yeah, it's all going to be fine. Plan or no plan.

We'll have the details when we do the numbers. In theory, the whole point of President Trump's tariffs is to give American manufacturing a boost. And to that end, we got from the New York Federal Reserve today the Empire State Manufacturing Index, a survey of manufacturers in New York State about demand and input costs, employment, general business activities. In March, that index fell to its lowest level in more than a year. Marketplace's Justin Ho draws the macroeconomic conclusions. Demand is lower.

Inventories are piling up on manufacturers' shelves. And employment levels are cooling off, according to the Empire State Manufacturing Index. And prices on both inputs and finished products are up. Both of those measures rose to their highest level in a couple of years. Tim Quinlan, a senior economist with Wells Fargo, he says this is the latest indication that tariffs are already causing friction.

You saw it with last week's consumer sentiment measures. You saw it with retail sales numbers. And you're certainly seeing some softness in this gauge from the New York Fed. New York's manufacturing sector includes a lot of industries that are vulnerable to tariffs. Russell Weaver is research director with Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. There are firms that, for example, are producing parts for wind energy, for solar energy. We've seen growth in a lot of that, but there are also a lot of staples. So we do still have auto and steel industries present in New York State. One factor in particular might have weighed on the index.

Earlier in the month, when the New York Fed conducted the survey, Canada had threatened to slap a surcharge on energy exports to New York and two other states in response to the Trump administration's tariffs. Richard Vogel is dean of the School of Business at Farmingdale State College. He says even though Canada ultimately held off, Just the possibility of it coming in starts to weigh in on people's thought processes and their planning. The Empire State Manufacturing Index also tends to be volatile month to month.

But Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, says the index can give us an early glimpse of what's happening to manufacturing across the country. I went back just the last 10 years to see what's the correlation. And it does suggest that when we see some changes happening in the New York area, that tends to be reflective also at the national level. And Bas Jancic says right now, the Empire State Manufacturing Index is pointing to a slowdown. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. We got the report on February retail sales this morning up just two tenths percent from a month earlier. Well shy of expectations and given all the economic angina of late among consumers and business owners alike, we figured we should hear from our retail regulars today.

So here's the first one. Ashley Morkins, the owner of Unglued in Fargo, North Dakota. We had our best February we've ever had. We were up seven percent than last February, but we were down in January and March is shaping up to be slower on the retail side. However, our events in March are going better. Our biggest challenge right now is finances more than anything else because 2024 didn't end as strong as we wanted it to and we definitely didn't meet our goals on the retail side of things. We ended at

a loss last year. This is something that happens sometimes so it's not scary for me because we know ways that we can come back with it. We have not had to raise our prices overall yet. Our makers with our consignment typically do set all their retail prices. I kind of am just preparing for that though. So many of the supplies that makers make their product with are definitely coming from overseas. And so I do anticipate that their supply costs are going to go up for their handmade work.

I am definitely suspicious and have some anxiety about what it's going to look like as things keep getting people more worried about their money with a threat of tariffs. And so I'm super curious if that means that people are going to be holding their money more and trying to save it, looking ahead to the future and what will that mean for our retail store? What indeed Ashley Morkin there. Unglued is her shop. Fargo, North Morkin there. Unglued is her shop. Fargo, North Dakota is her city. Retailer number two in a couple of minutes. Coming up.

We're doing our best to avoid over promising to our customers. Under promise and over deliver. That's the way, right? First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is up 353 today. That's nine tenths percent, 41,841. Then as that climbed 54 points, 3 tenths percent, 17,808. S&P 500 added 36 points, about 6 tenths percent, 56.75.

On this St. Patrick's Day, let's check in with some stocks with connections to the Emerald Isles. Shall we? Medtronic, which has its legal headquarters in Galway, Ireland since acquiring Covidian in 2015, added three-tenths percent. Dublin-based Accenture, which specializes in IT services and management consulting, enlarged two-and-two-tenths percent. Today, Smurfit Westrock, that's an Irish-American company that makes cardboard and paper packaging, printed up 2.2 percent. Today, according to the U.S. Census, should you be curious, there are 31.5 million people of Irish descent in the United States, 9.5%

of the entire population. Bond prices went up. Yield on the 10-year two note fell to 4.30%. You economy, the Marketplace newsletter is just what you need. Every Friday you'll get explainers and analysis that make sense of everything from the moving markets to grocery prices. No jargon, no hype, just smart takes delivered to your inbox. Sign up today at marketplace.org slash subscribe. This at Marketplace.org slash subscribe. This is Marketplace, I'm Kai Rizdal. Muhammad El-Aryan was talking up at the top of the program

today about soft data versus hard data, vibes versus verifiable statistics. It's important to understand that virtually all the hard data we get about this economy are what are called lagging indicators. They tell us what happened, not what's gonna happen. So, as Dr. Eulerian said, it's gonna be a couple of months before that hard data tells us what's been going on in this economy. But in the February jobs report that we got a couple of weeks ago, hard data, remember, there was a line item that seems to be a bit of foreshadowing.

The number of people working more than one job at an all-time high in February, almost 9 million people, and about 60% of them are doing the traditional moonlighting thing, working full-time with a part-time gig in their off hours. Others are stringing together multiple part-time jobs, trying to get by. Marketplace's Matt Levin is on the side hustle beat for us today. Annika Seidman Gaddy started picking up shifts last spring for a pop-up restaurant in New York City.

By day, she's the therapist for students at a New York college. She's used to working multiple jobs, did it for most of her 20s, but after a recent weekend working as a server from Thursday through Saturday with shifts that sometimes ended after midnight. Now I'm in my mid 30s, so it feels a little different. The body's very tired, definitely not getting up off the couch on Sunday after a weekend

like that. Simon Gaddy is 36 and makes about 100 grand at her counseling job, which is full-time, five days a week. The $1,100 she made from one weekend at that restaurant last month came in handy. Between her $2,000 rent and some long-standing credit card debt and recently-resumed student loan payments, money is tight. When it comes to looking at, at the end of the month, how much money I have, when that number is smaller than it used to be, then it definitely feels better to know that there's

a little bit of extra money coming in. Soterios Johnson According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 5.4% of all US workers in February had a second job. But because the government only asked if someone had multiple jobs in the past week, it's actually missing a lot of Moonlighters. This five and a half percent is just the tip of the iceberg. Lonnie Golden is an economist at Penn State. According to his research in 2023, Over 20 percent of workers are working additional jobs, at least in the last six months.

Golden says it used to be that it took a recession to spike the number of people holding multiple jobs. But over the last 15 years or so, with Uber and TaskRabbit and the digital gigification of the economy, side hustles are now just common. With platform technology, it's easier for people to take on additional jobs, particularly professionals, but non-professionals as well. Economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic

and Policy Research says it's too early to say whether a weakening labor market is causing more people to work multiple jobs. But given the economic uncertainty of the past few months, it makes sense some are exploring backup options. People are reasonably being cautious if they aren't sure that their main job's gonna be there. A backup plan is a big reason Stephanie Crows started moonlighting as a realtor.

She works full-time as an office and facilities manager for a Sacramento law firm. I've seen a lot of people who don't have a parachute, you know, and it's just kind of like, wait a second, do I have that? Am I okay? Both Crowe and her husband work multiple jobs and collectively make 140 grand or so a year. They have two teenage children in the house. When her husband had a heart attack in 2020, Crowe started taking real estate classes. The realtor job makes her feel more secure and the extra income's nice.

She figures she's made about 50 grand over the last couple years. It helps a lot. You know, just being able to go buy groceries without a calculator, I mean, that's a huge blessing. Matt Levin Kro says eventually she'd like to help buy and sell houses full-time. Sometimes your side hustle can turn into your regular job.

I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. While we didn't actually plan to be so vibe heavy on the program today. Changing vibes are absolutely what are at play in energy and environment here in the second Trump administration. Gone are the Paris climate accords. In is drill, baby, drill. But this is one of those, sure, you can fight the market if you want stories, because the fact of the matter is that with global energy demand on the rise, humanity is going to need energy from everywhere. Marketplace Elizabeth Troval has that one. Price stability is a big reason to rely on a variety of energy sources, says Greg Upton with LSU.

Even if natural gas right now is the least cost, kind of new generation source, the cost to doing that, if you go all in on any source, and this includes natural gas, is that of course the price of that commodity can fluctuate. So if natural gas prices spike, This could lead to really large increases in electricity prices. But the US can turn to other energy sources if that happens,

like solar, wind, coal, nuclear, and geothermal. And prices are actually more likely than a president to bring certain energy sources off or online. Daniel Ramey is with the nonprofit Resources for the Future. Coal production and consumption has declined dramatically in the United States, and that's primarily because we're producing natural gas at a very low cost. Which is why he believes coal will continue to decline under the Trump administration.

Because of the competition from natural gas and renewables. Renewables are almost certainly to keep growing. Will those technologies shift dramatically from today to four years from now in the overall energy picture? It's a big shift, likely not too much. Morgan Bazillion is with the Colorado School of Mines. He says it's not just the energy mix that is likely to stay the course. So will some emissions mitigation and monitoring. If they're going to sell their product to a global company that then ships it to LNG,

that company wants to ensure that their supply chain is as low emissions and efficient as possible. As the U.S. pushes more of its LNG, or liquefied natural gas, abroad, the companies that do the exporting will continue to be held to international standards. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Retailer number two now, Colina Bruce, owner of Noirlux Candle Bar up in Seattle, Washington. So this is typically what we consider to be our slow season, but honestly, we're still seeing a really good amount of activity. Overall, our sales are up about 10% this month compared to this time last year. So that's super exciting for us.

Our inventory situation is a bit challenging right now. Many of our suppliers are back stocked, which has been super frustrating. But we're doing our best to avoid overpromising to our customers. And that can kind of be tough when our suppliers oversell something to us and we end up having to wait for it to arrive. We know that people are being much more intentional with the spending these days, so we're just focusing on creating more value through our experiences and trying to offer unique products. We recently got a bid to do a wellness box for a women's summit, which we had we've done wellness boxes before.

But in this particular instance, we had to curate the box from all of the items, and it was a large order. And so that kind of got our wills going about things like, you know, offering more wellness sets or even thinking about subscription boxes. I think it's important to strike a balance between like being proactive and planful and then just staying agile and being ready to adapt to things and being and being willing to be innovative and trying new things. Kalina Bruce, the owner of Noir Lux Candle Bar, she's in Seattle. Seattle. This final note on the way out today in which once again, the bond market can tell you a

whole lot about what's going on. Saw this on Bloomberg that municipal bond sales by colleges and universities are up more than 40% so far this year compared to the same period in 2024. Colleges, as you have probably seen elsewhere in your news feeds, are being targeted by the Trump administration and so are looking to secure financing ahead of possible changes in tax policy or funding cancellations. Ten billion dollars in those bond sales so far this year, topping the mark set in 2017, also as it happens

the beginning of a Trump presidency. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillaume, Maria Hollenhorst, Iru Ekponobi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry and Sophia Terenzio. I'm Kai Rizdal. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. on it on your schedule. Big tech dominating our headlines. Another win for Donald Trump. A key inflation report. These are short audio reports, five minutes or less, that bring you the latest headlines with context 24 hours a day.

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