Chapter 1: What are the latest trends in food price inflation?
When it comes to inflation, there are things we can give up when prices get too high. But food is non-negotiable. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. From Colorado Public Radio in Denver, I'm Amy Scott, in for Kai Risdahl. It's Tuesday, January 13th. Good to have you with us. The overall inflation news today from the Consumer Price Index wasn't too bad.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said headline prices increased 0.3% in December from the month before. 2.7 percent on an annual basis, same rate as in November. One stubborn outlier, though, was food. The cost of food consumed at home, a.k.a. groceries, was up 7 tenths percent for the month. And if you go back five years, it's up about 25 percent.
Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes takes a look at how people are getting by. At Patterson Food Market, a small corner store in Baltimore, Courtney Johnson is shopping for a snack.
Let me get some hot sausages, bro. Two of them. What kind? Any kind, boss. Any kind. I mean, you know what kind.
These are jerky, dried sausages. Johnson also gets a 16-ounce soda. Another customer, Eric Smith, buys a soda, too. It's $2. And outside the store, Smith says that's too much.
I mean, a year ago, the same soda that I just paid for was $1.50 in the same store.
How does it make you feel? Robbed. Smith says he doesn't blame the store owner, but it makes him think there's something wrong with the overall system. Cornell agricultural economist Chris Barrett says rising food prices make shoppers feel powerless. Most of us bristle a little bit when we feel our agency is really limited and there's nothing we can do about it.
Food prices are rising for lots of reasons, including climate change, a weaker dollar, and tariffs. And Barrett points out the increases hit low-income people hardest because food takes up a bigger chunk of their household budgets.
Food prices really don't affect the behaviors of the well-off. Food prices affect the behavior of people who are struggling to make ends meet.
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Chapter 2: How are rising food prices affecting low-income Americans?
But credit card debt could come down in the new year. The Fed's interest rates have been elevated in recent years. That's meant... Consumers have higher interest on their credit card. But he says if the Fed remains worried about the job market, there could be further rate cuts to come. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. On Wall Street, traders seemed a little worried.
We'll have the details when we do the numbers. Back in September, I took a road trip across Kansas, learning what farmers are up against amidst a changing climate and changing policies. With Congress expected to take up work on a new farm bill this year after years of delays, we thought we'd check back in with Vance and Louise Emke of Emke Seed in Healy, Kansas. Good to talk with you again.
Great to be here.
Glad to be here, Amy.
When we met, it was, I guess, early fall, maybe late summer. How did the year turn out for you?
Well, actually, pretty good. We had some great apprehension about things because of the very low grain prices that we got out here. Break-even price cover, all costs on dry land, western Kansas wheat is $7.20 a bushel, and right now we're sitting at $4.30 a bushel. However, we had career high yields of wheat, corn, and milo. And that basically saved our bacon because we had very high yields.
That combined with low price, it mitigated the low price. And so we came out looking pretty good.
And we had such a great, great crop locally. I mean, within our region and our county, there's no place to store some of that. So it's sitting on a ground in a million bushel piles. China usually buys... Most of it or all of it. And it's just sitting here and China has not shown up. Yeah. And that's because of the trade war that's been going on.
When we last talked, China basically wasn't buying soybeans, milo or grain sorghum. But I thought they had resumed those purchases. Has that not shown up yet in your market?
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Chapter 3: What is the current state of credit card debt in America?
They want to fly business class or they want to fly first class flights.
Delta reported strong revenue today, much of it from premium. But Henry Hardevelt at Atmosphere Research Group says plenty of people are still looking for cheap tickets.
I think the one thing about Sun Country and Allegiant combining is that because these two airlines do not compete directly on almost all of their routes, this could actually be a great way to expand the reach of much-needed low-fare competition.
If the two merge and grow, he says it could give travelers more options. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.
Coming up... 99% of the time they are Chinese counterfeits.
Counterfeit stamps, that is. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 398 points, 0.8% to close at 49,191. The Nasdaq lost 24 points, 0.1% to finish at 23,709. And the S&P 500 dipped 13 points, 0.2% to end at 69,63%. Sam Fields was just talking about airlines. Atlanta-based Delta Airlines fell off by 2.4%. Allegiant Travel, parent company of Allegiant Air, slid 3.3%.
Sun Country declined 2.2%. You're listening to Marketplace.
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Chapter 4: How do stagnant wages impact consumer debt?
And she said there were trade-offs, but I was intrigued by this idea of how she could raise a family in such a small space and feel like this was the best idea she's ever had. I live in one, too, and so maybe this is a bit selfish. Well, what did you learn about whether bigger houses lead to happier lives? It's not the house.
And that might not be a surprise, but it's kind of the opposite of the American dream, which is the assumption that if we had a bigger house, we would just be happier. We'd have more freedom. And in fact, for most people, it's the opposite. What there is, however, is something called the inverted U hypothesis. So the number of people in your house, the peak happiness is four to six.
Too few, just by yourself, or too many can be stressful. Around the world, the data was pretty consistent. However, the size of the house itself was not. There really wasn't much effect at all, much relationship at all between the size of the house and one's happiness. So if you look at how the American house has evolved over time, what, it's like doubled in size since the 1970s?
And yet households have gotten smaller. So why are we doing this? That's right. We've gone from about, I think, around 1,600 square feet in the 70s to almost 2,500 today. You know, there's a lot of reasons that drive this. There's certainly zoning that has favored larger houses. Builders make more money in larger houses.
And there's sort of this idea that we need bigger homes, even when our families are smaller. And it's interesting you talk about how it kind of depends on how we use the space. I was really struck by a figure about up to 60 percent of homes sit largely unused, which is really no surprise when you drive by these big houses and you wonder who lives there and what are they doing with all those rooms?
That's right. In fact, just three rooms that get almost all the attention, which is the dining room, the kitchen and the family room. And you can have a 1,200 square foot home. And if it's really designed around those places where you gather and you make social connections, that's going to mean a lot more for your happiness than having a game room or another garage or something like that.
And the real problem is not that a big house makes you unhappy, although that can happen. It's really what we give up in pursuit of it. So when you're overstressed, when you're commuting long distances and and you have to spend more money to maintain this, you actually undermine the things that do make you happy, which is how do I relate to my kids? How much time do I have?
Do I know my neighbors? Can I walk places? And ultimately, there are big homes that in many cases actually reduce our happiness overall. Yeah. So I want to explore what's happening now because for many decades, home size was increasing. But in recent years, it's actually started to shrink again. And is that all about affordability?
It's easy to assume that based on what's happening with prices and mortgage rates. It's a great question. I don't know if we fully understand all the factors there, but you're absolutely right. Affordability is has become a major issue. And the old sort of ladder where people could buy a starter home for cheap and then move their way up has really, if not disappeared, become extremely difficult.
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Chapter 5: What challenges are Kansas farmers facing in the current market?
Youngblood says there's been an explosion in recent years in websites selling counterfeit stamps, mostly produced in China and India. The counterfeiters even copy the special new designs the Postal Service puts out each year. And fast.
flag stamps, commemorative stamps, you name it, has been counterfeited. It takes them about six weeks to turn around from the time a stamp is issued until it's available in the United States as a counterfeit.
Why not just shut them down? For one thing, counterfeit stamps are not easy to detect, even for the Postal Service. It's very difficult to tell unless we're analyzing these stamps side by side in our lab with very technical equipment. Marjan Berrigan-Husted is an agent with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. That's the law enforcement wing of the postal system.
Cracking down on the sellers of fake stamps has become a game of whack-a-mole, she says. We are doing our best to shut these websites down, but there are millions of them that just keep popping up. The agency tries to catch counterfeits as they come into the country. Agents seized more than 4.4 million fake stamps in the first quarter of this fiscal year, according to Barragan Houston.
But that may be just a drop in the bucket. The stamp journalist Youngblood estimates the Postal Service is losing more than a billion dollars annually on counterfeit stamps. which is part of the reason the price of stamps keeps going up. Berrigan-Husted wouldn't confirm that estimate, but she acknowledged it's hitting USPS hard.
We still have to make up that revenue, so it's because of the problem that the cost has risen. It was time to lay this all out for my dad, the online stamp buyer, and also the most upstanding guy I know. I didn't want to get him in trouble, especially on a national radio program.
It turns out the Postal Inspection Service is mostly focused on punishing the suppliers of counterfeit stamps, not unwitting consumers. So, Dad, what if I told you those stamps are probably counterfeit?
Uh, nothing has been returned.
You do risk having your mail confiscated and opened if you use fake stamps, but it's unclear how often that actually happens. Yeah.
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