Don't move a muscle!

There is a certain vocabulary element to the program today. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Thursday. Today, this one is the 8th of October. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. From the Labor Department, this morning came its regular weekly report on first-time claims for unemployment benefits. And on its face, it was good. And historically low, 197,000 people lost their jobs last week. Those first-time claims have now come in below 200,000 for four weeks running. That's the longest stretch since 1969. We do know, though, from Friday's jobs report, the job creation in this economy is just kind of. Meh, honestly. And more than one in four unemployed Americans have been looking for work for six months or longer. You think you know where I'm going, right? It's a low-hire, low-fire economy, yada, yada, yada. Aha! Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has been forbidden to use that oh-so-overworked phrase. If not a blank-hire, blank-fire job market, then what? A steady, quite stable job market. That's Jay Hatfield. at Infrastructure Capital Advisors, who says the economy's in a precarious balancing act, contracting in some sectors, expanding in others. We have what would normally create a recession, which is a hawkish Fed, high interest rates, and declining investment in housing. Balanced by red-hot investment in AI and data centers, creating new jobs in tech and construction. Kyle Moore at the Century Foundation offered this alternative catchphrase for the laborers. Stagnation situation. He says employers are stuck in the mud of policy uncertainty. When you have erratic tariff policy, for example, it makes it difficult to make consistent hiring decisions for how it's going to expand going forward. This low-churn, stagnant labor market is especially hard for the long-term unemployed and new entrants to the workforce, because people who do have jobs aren't making room for them. Vicky Salemi at CareerSiteMonster says lately, job seekers have turned more cautious about pursuing different roles. They're nervous and anxious about leaving the security that they currently have. Many are even willing to go without a raise rather than quit to find a better job. Then the employer that they're with doesn't have an opening to replace them, and so other job seekers, there is no opening for them to pursue. What's Salemi's alternative metaphor for this job market? It reminds me of a frozen pond. Workers, they're not necessarily falling through the ice because they're not getting, they're skating on thin ice, sticking it out right now. Trying not to fall through. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. Thin ice economy, I'd go with that one. Wall Street today, tech led the way down. Everybody else was along for the ride. We will have the details when we do the numbers. We'll be right back. Four years. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino put her ear to the ground at a gathering in San Francisco. An event listing for a picnic beckoned people in the AI scene to spend a Sunday afternoon talking about recent calls to slow down the technology. Did anyone bring either water or sunblock? It's one of those postcard perfect days at this five acre park on the San Francisco Bay overlooking a Giants-Dodgers game at the ballpark. Organizer Donnie Christie chose this spot because it's between the offices of Anthropic and OpenAI. Why can't people at the labs just like meet at a park in between them and like work out a deal? Christie is a community organizer in the AI safety scene. I have been concerned about existential risks for a long time. Just like, what do I do to save the world? He says he's starting small, hashing out ideas to prevent. the collapse of civilization over chips and cookies. It's like a microcosm of the sort of cooperation that I want to see. A couple dozen people gather over the afternoon from AI startups, big tech, research non-profits and activist organizations. I joined a group sitting in a circle on a big blanket like summer camp. One thing I agree with is that like safety is like an engineering problem. I pretty strongly disagree with that. Really? Okay. I want to hear this. That's Skye Gunasekaran, who has a more optimistic view than Elliot Callender. Gunasekaran researches AI agent collaboration at a productivity software company and thinks improving cybersecurity systems would go a long way. But she supports international cooperation to slow the race. I think there's lots of reasons without even like talking about the end of the world and all of these different kind of things. If you just want to think about, okay, like what are we seeing right now? She points to rogue hacking incidents and anthropic reports that nefarious actors have attempted to use AI for cyber espionage or to build weapons. We just need to spend some time to understand it. The more pessimistic Elliot Callender is a protest organizer who spent more than a month demonstrating in front of open AI and is now planning actions at the U.S. Capitol, calling for a complete stop to advanced AI development. When we get to the point where it's actually superhuman and everything, and it'll break out once, and then it's over, game over at that point. So, like, just decided that was what I'm going to do the rest of my life, is to make it not kill everyone. Matthew Coriatti sits somewhere in between, both on the blanket and philosophically. We can treat them like people who are managing dangerous animals. He says AI companies should be heavily regulated and held liable for harms. Coriatti recently turned down a software engineering job at Amazon with a nearly $1 billion. It's a nearly $200,000 annual salary to take a fellowship with an AI safety nonprofit for a third of the pay. The world is at risk, and I want to do things to reduce that risk. Everyone I spoke with at this AI picnic expressed that sense of urgency, rearranging and accelerating life plans against the drumbeat of AI doom. Gunasekaran says she's questioning plans to get a PhD. Callender says. I walk across a crosswalk when the cars are still coming at me because it's like, if I can save, like, 10 seconds by taking, like, you know, a 1 in 100 million chance of getting hit by a car, then it's actually worth it for me. Whereas it wouldn't be if I had, like, a lot more time left. It's that kind of thing that sometimes gets this crowd labeled as doomers. And it's usually not a compliment, but organizer Donnie Christie takes it in stride. I feel like I have a role. It's like a night watchman. I want to help calibrate what is, like, as, like, a Buddhist might say, like, a skillful fear, like, skillful action in the face of danger. Well, we are here touching grass, though, so I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice, man. Even doomers enjoy a nice picnic, at least with sunscreen. In San Francisco, I'm Megan McCurdy Carino for Marketplace. I'm Megan McCurdy Carino for Marketplace. And I was a director. at the Cato Institute, but now I'm just a senior fellow there and not a particularly active one. Okay, fair. But moving on, the Fed's balance sheet. Is far larger than it was historically. And so it's an important question to what extent this is something we should want to reverse. Traditionally, it was just treasury bills and treasury notes. It was very boring stuff. In 2008, though, all that boring stuff the Fed was holding got a whole lot less boring thanks to subprime mortgages and the ensuing financial crisis. There was a notion that markets for housing were distressed. And so the Fed started to buy various kinds of mortgage-backed securities. They started buying longer-term bonds. And so this was a period when the Fed's balance sheet became much more interesting. The Fed was trying to stimulate the economy when interest rates couldn't have gone much lower. We talked about that at the time. We were at what was called the zero lower bound. So since negative interest rates weren't something that then-Chair Ben Bernanke was interested in, the Fed did something called quantitative easing. By buying all those assets that Emmy Nakamura was just talking about, it injected trillions of dollars into the economy to help banks lend and businesses to grow. And over the next decade, the assets on the Fed's balance sheet grew from $800 billion to $3.7 trillion. Janet Yellen, when she was chair, did try to shrink it back down. The markets didn't care much for that, which, to be honest, is yet another whole explainer. But anyway, the pandemic happened, the economy came to a screeching halt, and the Federal Reserve was once again the lender of last resort. And that really was a response to the fact that during these periods of time, companies and banks, they massively increased their demand for money, and the Fed was sort of satisfying that increase in demand. In 2022, the balance sheet topped out at nearly $9 trillion. It has been unwinding since then, to today's $6.7 trillion. Not small enough for Chairman Walsh, as he says all the time. How big, though, should it be? I don't want to say a number, but it wouldn't be trillions. Not much I can safely say. And so we wait for those task forces to report back. Yes, it's been 100 degrees here in Southern California this week, but winter is coming in some parts of the country. Parts of Montana are even expecting snow. So it is time to at least start thinking about turning the heat on. There's a new forecast from the Energy Information Administration along those lines, some of which is bad news, but some of which is actually good news. Marketplace's Caitlin Tan has the details. So what's it going to cost to heat our homes this winter? Well, it depends. Most Americans are not going to experience the same winter economy. CoBank's Terry Vishvanoth says it depends on where you live and how you heat your home. Let's start with the good news. If you use natural gas and live close to the supply, say in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, you're in luck. Yeah, you know what? Your heating bill might be lower this year, and I think that's good news. It all comes down to our huge natural gas supply, says Tom Tsang with Texas Christian University. We can't export any more than we currently can. So we do have a surplus of natural gas right now. Which also keeps prices down for the propane market. It's a derivative of natural gas and oil. We could kind of say we have an abundance, an abundance of natural gas, and we're producing record amounts of oil. So we also have an abundance of propane. So that's all great. But say you live in New England, where a lot of homes use heating oil, which is basically diesel. It's going to be a much more expensive winter. It potentially could be, you know, they could have record high heating oil bills. The federal forecast estimates a 34 percent price jump from last year. Mark Wolf with the National Energy Assistance Directors Association thinks, it could be more if the wars in Ukraine and Middle East continue. Because right now prices are really high, and we really don't know what will happen to them. Wolf is also tracking the cost of heating homes with electricity, which will also be spendier this winter. Utilities have been rebuilding their distribution system, the wires and the generation capacity, and that's expensive. There's one other factor that could change all of these prices. Weather. This winter is supposed to be warmer, especially in the north. Thanks to this year's huge El Niño. I'm Caitlin Tan for Marketplace. Coming up. We are doing all the things that the retirees are, you know, doing. Is it just me, or does that sound a whole lot like a job? First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials added 51 points today, about a tenth percent, 51,231. The Nasdaq down 345, that's one and a quarter percent, 27,193. The S&P 500 down 36 points, about a half percent, 7,765. A new report from the Water Accountability Nonprofit Food and Water Watch says U.S. House of Representatives is working on a new report saying U.S. households are paying 62 percent more for drinking water than they did a decade ago. That increase outpaces inflation, grocery prices, and household incomes. Worries about oil supply in the Middle East following new attacks in the Strait of Hormuz pushed the price of Brent Crude up as much as 5 percent. Today peaked at $105 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate also ticked up nearly 4.75 percent to $92 a barrel, eased slightly at the close. Bonds up, yield on the 10-year T-note down 5.22 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdahl. The personal saving rate in this economy, it is saving, by the way, not savings. It's defined as how much we all save divided by our total disposable income. It bottomed out in August, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, 4.1 percent, the lowest it's been in almost four years. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes dug into what's going on. Saving has always been automatic for Stacey Burnett. That New England practicality was imbued in me since I was, like, hatched. Burnett, who lives in southwestern Connecticut, says she used to max out her retirement contribution and put aside an additional 15 to 20 percent of her income every month. Then, earlier this year, she bought a nearly century-old house. It needed a lot of love. And when Burnett made her budget for repairs this spring, she planned to spend $120,000. She says that already felt like an insane amount of money. And then? Between April and when the work began in August, the prices of everything just went crazy. For example, she says cabinets for her kitchen doubled in price. Shipping costs went up. Burnett went from saving a big chunk of her income to spending all of it, and then some. I have one credit card that's maxed out, and I'm trying to pay that down because that interest on, on it is insane, and it's very uncomfortable. Rising prices have hit a lot of people's ability to save. Vicki Bogan studies household finance as an economics professor at Duke. Inflation and the price levels are rising at significant rates, at rates that people historically haven't been used to. And they're rising at a faster pace than wages. When you dip into savings to cover current expenses, that's known as dissaving, and it leaves households feeling financially fragile. It's a psychological tax. To be in a situation where you can't pay your bills until you get that paycheck. People at the very top of the income spectrum are saving less, too. But for a different reason, the stock market has been going gangbusters for the past few years, and they see their investments shooting up. As their stock market wealth rises, the less and less they seem to feel they need to save out of their income. Jonathan Pingel is the chief U.S. economist at UBS. Basically, every time Marketplace plays, we're in the money when we do the numbers, people with money in the stock market get a little dopamine hit. And so, don't feel obliged to save as much of their income. I mean, in some ways, it's a really remarkable feature of some of the inequality that we're seeing across income groups. You could think of the saving rate as being hit at both ends of the K-shaped economy. Well, the economy depends on strong consumer spending. Lack of saving is also a problem. For example, it hurts the house. Coming up with a down payment, actually, is a challenge for many households. And on a longer-term basis, it also increases things like our reliance on Social Security, limits reform. Pingel doesn't think the recent Fed rate hike will significantly change people's saving behavior. A quarter percentage point boost doesn't mean they're rushing to the bank to open CDs. And for the lower-income households, you know, it means higher credit card interest rates, higher home equity lines of credit. You know, it's not really clear. that this is going to be the boost that frees up more of their income to be able to save. People still have to buy things. If they're borrowing to buy those things, that's getting even more expensive. So the number under saving in their budget spreadsheets stays at zero. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace. The median retirement age in the United States, the Employee Benefit Research Institute tells us, is 62. That can obviously move up or down depending on how you save. And if you do get the chance to clock out early, though, you might finally have the time to do all those things you have been putting off. That brings us to today's installment of our series, Clocked Out. My name is Kirti Desai. My name is Vijay. I'm 56 years old. We are both retired from IT careers. We live in Alpharetta, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta. We were lucky that we could retire at 55. We've led a very busy life, just like most Americans do, you know, taking care of kids, parents. And so this was a planned retirement for both of us. We are doing all the things that the retirement age has allowed us to do. Retirees are supposed to do, you know, going for long walks in the morning with the dog and traveling. We are trying to hit all the national parks and, you know, all the states and all the major league ballparks, all that kind of stuff. But we are also super busy with all the activities that we really had been putting on the back burner that we no longer have an excuse. I'm trying to create a digital presence for my father, who was a very well-known sculptor, back in India. She was being very polite about her dad's work, but I think somebody who has created like an equivalent of Statue of Liberty for Indians, right? So there's a statue of a Hindu philosopher down at the tip of the Indian peninsula. Pretty much every Indian, so we're talking about a billion people who know this, and there's like 2 million visitors every year. Unfortunately, he passed away 25 years ago. And then while touring India, a few years ago, my kids mentioned that where can we find more information on grandpa? And that's when it struck me that there is nothing, you know, on the internet. So I wanted to create something for my future generation and, you know, for the rest of the world to know. So I've been working and working with Vijay to create a Wikipedia page for my dad. And the people that he worked with are also now passed on. And I think that's really, really important. And I think that's really, really on. So that kind of gave a sense of urgency to our retirement. We've traveled to India to go see a lot of his artwork. That's been a very humbling process for me. So it's been good. It's been good to work and collaborate with Vijay. He keeps me together. I can say that. I think she's been very kind. I'm not sure I'm helping that much. I'm in the background. So travel has been a major portion of this first year. For me, it's been a bit much, but looking forward to staying home during the holidays, for sure. Kirti and Vijay Desai from Alpharetta, Georgia. Kirti's father, by the way, was Narayan Sundvandikar. You can find his work online if you go looking. If you have left the workforce recently and you have a story you want to tell, hit us up, would you? Marketplace.org slash clocked out. This final note on the way out today in which the Congressional Budget Office weighs in indirectly, to be sure, on those rising bond yields we've been banging on about. The CBO gave its first guess at the bottom line for government's fiscal 2026. Today, the ink is thoroughly red. We spent $2 trillion more last fiscal than we took in. All that government debt is both a cause of higher bond yields. We've talked about how all that debt is making investors nervous. It's also a victim of them because we are spending more every year to service all the money that we owe. Andy Corbin, Mika Ellison, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio are the Marketplace production team. Will Story is the supervising senior producer. I'm Kai Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.