Kai Rizdal

We'll do wages and prices. We'll do companies you probably didn't know are actually companies anymore. And why would you cut up a perfectly good house and truck it all the way across town? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal. It is Monday today. This one is the 8th of June. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. We're going to start today right at the intersection of where consumers are feeling the pain in this economy right now. We'll get an inflation update on Wednesday morning. It will be the Consumer Price Index for May. The CPI, as you well know, has been trending up since the president started his war with Iran. It was 3.8% in April. That is year-on-year data.

And the May update is going to come with some important context. Last Friday in the May unemployment report, average hourly earnings, that's labor economists speak for how much we're all making, it rose 3.4% year on year. And that difference is going to be a problem for workers and for policymakers at the Federal Reserve.

Marketplaces Henriette gets us going. If the prices we pay for groceries and gas and rent rise faster than our wages, we're losing purchasing power. Christina Sargent is an associate professor of economics at Middlebury College. A 3.4% raise sounds great until you notice that what you buy is increasing at 4%. So that's not a pay bump, that's a pay cut. And no one likes a pay cut, or at least most people. But then there are economists, says Catherine Ann Edwards, who is an economist.

And that buys the Federal Reserve some time to figure out whether the Iran war is going to keep driving prices up and whether it needs to raise interest rates. Michael Puglisi, a senior economist with Wells Fargo, says the question Fed members are asking... Is this going to be a temporary phenomenon as, you know, over the next several months maybe the conflict winds down, supply chains normalize, energy prices, you know, they're not going to drop immediately, but they start drifting lower.

Or will it be a longer lasting conflict that keeps prices rising for months? And will the recent gains in the labor market keep going? Puglisi expects policymakers will reassess all that in the fall before they make any big interest rate moves. Workers, though, don't really have the luxury of waiting around. I expect that these price shocks will ripple through the economy in coming months. Pavlina Cherneva is an economist at Bard College. She also does not expect wages to improve much.

Workers are going to be squeezed on both sides, stagnating wages and increasing cost of living. Which could make for some tough decisions in households, arguably harder choices than the ones Fed officials need to make. I'm Henry App for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, that drubbing the tech stocks took on Friday, you know what that became today? A buying opportunity, that's what. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

The Campbell's Company, it of soups of course, but also home to Prego sauces, Pepperidge Farm cookies, Goldfish and Snyder's pretzels. It reported quarterly profits today. Net sales down 4% from the same time a year ago. But the company did note one thing in its favor. More people are cooking from scratch these days, or as the company puts it, semi-scratch. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has that one.

This tracks with consumer behavior at large, says Dave Chalk, head of insights and analytics at Campbell's. When things get tight, and we're not talking just food, we're talking right broadly, consumers, the first thing we do to seek to offset that is we move meals from out of home in home, right? That's benefited certain Campbell's products, such as broth, tomato sauce, and some condensed soups. Another draw to cooking at home? Social media bragging rights.

We've been keeping tabs on some small businesses in Altadena for the past year and a half or so, as they try to rebuild or find new leases and figure out a way forward after the Eaton fire that destroyed more than 9,000 homes and structures last January. Last week, though, I got a look at a different way to rebuild on the residential side of things. Morning. Good morning.

How are you? I'm Kai. Good, how are you? I'm Morgan. Nice to see you, Morgan. How are you? I'm on a wide tree-lined street in Altadena with lots of construction trucks and workers putting up new builds on fire damage lots. There's a huge park, still locked up by the way, with a sign that says it's temporarily closed because of the fire. Right next to the park is a two-story craftsman that, from the outside anyway, looks just about move-in ready.

Kertoisitko minulle, kuka olet ja missä olemme? Tietysti. Olen Morgan Sykes-Jaybush ja olen luotettavuusjohtaja Almgivning Architectsissa. Olemme nyt täällä Alta Dinaan ensimmäisessä asemassa, jossa olemme uudistaneet. Olemme uudistaneet sen Hollywoodista. Olet kuitenkin ottanut hyvin hyvän asemansa, katsoit sen, laitit sen auton tai jonkinlaisen auton ja siirrät sen täältä. Se on juuri se.

Me haluaisimme jättää asia, jossa se oli, mutta joku haluaisi pysyä sen pois. Oli kolme isoa tehtäviä asiaa koko ajan, ja joku osti kaikki kolme asiaa, jotta voisi rakentaa 150-luvun ympäristön. Ja he pysyivät ensimmäisen asian pois, ja jotkut jäsenet katsoivat sen Instagramissa, ja sanoivat jotain kuin...

Mitä voidaan tehdä? Pidäkää tämä asu, joka on poistunut. Katsokaa, kuka teki sen. Olin tietojenkonsultantti. Seuraavan päivänä minulla oli omistaja. Hän sanoi, että voidaan tehdä sen. Siinä se alkoi. Se ei aina toimi niin hyvin. Me voimme tehdä sitä sinulle. Sinulla on asu, jota olet muuttanut?

You heard that right. The new homeowner in Altadena bought the house for a dollar because the people who used to own it were going to tear it down to develop that apartment building that Morgan was talking about.

Here's the math. The total estimated cost of this house for the family that's moving in is not a dollar. It's closer to $900,000 total after you tally the cost of chopping it up and trucking it in pieces across LA and then putting all those pieces back together here in Altadena and fixing up the inside. Not nothing, but cheaper than a new build.

This is very circumstance important here because we're not the Dina. Residential reconstruction is starting, but it's slow. And this is kind of a way to address that problem, right? You're taking a ready-made house and you're plopping it down on a lot.

Se käsittelee polttoaineen ongelmaa. Se käsittelee myös kaupungin demoliittisuuden ongelmaa. Olemme varmaan tietäneet, että viime vuosina tuli uusia valtionmuutoksia, jotka mahdollistavat enemmän lämpötilaa, mikä on hyvä yksi asia. Mutta yhdistelmä on se, että moni yksityishuoltajien asioita on käsitellyt. Tämä on myös tapa pitää karaktereita kaupungimme sisällä, jotta asiat voidaan pysyä lämpötilassa.

Once you get inside and you make your way past all the tools and materials, it's easy to tell that this is a house originally built in 1911.

Siellä on vanha rauhassa, rakennettava kylmä, ja iso rauhallinen kylmä yläpuolella. Voidaanko puhua tätä asiaa? Sinä olet arkkitehti, sinä olet partneri, jolla olet johtaja ja suunnittelija, oikein? Kyllä. Tämä ei ole se, mitä me yleensä teemme. Puhutaanko minulle siitä, että tämä on vähän kuin yksityiskysymys, mutta ehkä yksityiskysymys, joka toimii?