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Chapter 1: What were the latest job numbers and unemployment rates?
You got your rock, you got your hard place, you got this economy pretty much stuck right in the middle. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Friday today. This one is the 6th of March. Good as always to have you along, everybody.
Just to be completely clear here, the rock is inflation higher than we want and most assuredly going higher in no small part because war is inflationary. The hard place is the labor market, which we learned today, well, is a bit more challenged than we all had probably thought. The economy is Well, that's us. And it's where we're going to start today. Sudeep Reddy is at MSNOW.
Courtney Brown is at Axios. Hey, you two.
Hi, Kai.
Courtney, you get to go first. Jobs, we lost 92,000 of them. Unemployment rate ticked up. I would like you to discuss for me in the next 45 seconds what you make of that given, oh, everything. Wait, like we learned earlier in the week from ADP. and other private sector data that maybe the labor market was on better footing.
I wrote a story that said that momentum was the story of February, and then 8.30 this morning hits, and it's like, oh, never mind. Maybe the strong job gains that the government reported in January was a little bit of a head fake, and maybe the story really has been intact the whole time. That
This labor market has a very soft underbelly, and that's a concern for everyday Americans, for economists, and for the Fed. I love how you started with, wait, and you're like offended at what the data said. I'm upset. Sudeep Reddy. No, look, I hear you, man. I hear you.
Sudeep, if I use the word stagflation now, because economic growth is happening still, but look, there's a war on and oil prices are up and who knows what's going to happen. And inflation is still too high. Is stagflation, am I bringing that one out of the barn too early? It's something we should worry about. The overall growth rate in the economy has actually been fine.
It's just the job market has been extremely weak. Inflation has been a touch too high. Neither one of these is at disastrous levels or basically at... stall speed with the job market. If you look at the trend, we've had, I think, probably half of the last nine months have had negative payroll numbers. So that's not a good place to be. That rarely happens when things are just fine.
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Chapter 2: What factors contributed to the recent job losses in the healthcare sector?
I saw it somewhere on the socials, and I would credit it if I remembered. But Katharine Pell, our sometimes colleague here on Fridays, now at the Bulwark and MSNOW, She wrote the other day and said, look, if the president wanted prices to go up, what would he be doing differently?
And I wonder, I mean, look, you're an economics reporter and not a political scientist, but it does seem that that's exactly the result of all of these policies, that these prices are going up because of what the president's doing. Right. And so there's the war, but there's also, you know, in the backdrop, the trade war is and tariffs that might be going higher.
The president has made it very clear that what the Supreme Court scrapped, he wants to replace in full. So you have those two forces and many other forces kind of coming together and making the environment look more expensive for consumers who are already very upset about how expensive things are. They don't really care about inflation, right?
They care about price level and prices are high and they just don't want to see prices go even higher. Right. So, Sadiq, that gets me to the next point I think I want to talk about, which is I've said over the past couple of days, when will the markets hit the president's pain point? And let me flip that on its head and ask you when you think we get to the consumer pain point, right?
Because both oil benchmarks are now above 91-ish something dollars. Gas is up, as you said, you know, like 30, 40 cents in the last four days. There's a consumer pain point here. And let's remember, consumers have been incredibly resilient. When does that start getting beaten down? Historically, consumer pain builds in the background. It happens first to lower income consumers.
We're seeing some of that. We're seeing it in delinquency rates for certain types of loans. You start to see it. But it's just that in modern times, we have never seen a series of geopolitical shocks to our economy like this. We've never seen tariffs like this. We've never seen immigration to the United States being cut off this way, certainly not so suddenly.
We've never seen the Strait of Hormuz being effectively shut down. oil having its fastest increase in 40 years. We haven't seen all of those individually. We certainly haven't seen them collectively. And so it's really hard to tell what happens when you put all those things together and light a match right there. Something bad usually would be expected to happen.
It's just it probably will come in a way that we can't quite see right now. Well, let's crystal ball this. Courtney, what what are you looking for? What are you what's your indicator here of choice as as we develop, you know, war and inflation and jobs and all of that?
I'm looking at consumer sentiment and I was at a conference recently and, you know, Chicago Fed President Austin Goldbee was kind of poo pooing. consumer sentiment data, saying it's not a good predictor of what consumers actually do. Okay, I get that. It's true. But I do think I'm so curious that the pain point, if you will, for consumers, if you look at the sentiment data, has been inflation.
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Chapter 3: How are inflation and geopolitical issues affecting the economy?
Is January the blip, the strong jobs report? Or is February the blip, the weak jobs report? So I just I need more data like Fed officials. I need more data.
Yeah.
Well, you are true to your beat. Yeah. What what is the blip is a really good thing. I will say that Rafael Bostic, who used to be at the Atlanta Fed until like a week ago, said the same thing to me about consumers when I talked to him before he stepped down. He basically said, you know, consumers, whatever they keep spending. And you're like, all right, sir.
But still, Sadiq, same question to you. Be brief, because I got one more thing I need to ask both of you. But what are you looking at? I look at jobless claims. It's this indicator of whether we go from the slow or no hiring economy to the firing economy. And that will be the tell that it's all falling apart if we do see jobless claims go up. And we have not, thankfully, for quite a while. Yeah.
Yeah. OK, so a brand new game. It's an oldie but a goodie. Just a change in the title. What is Kevin Warsh thinking in five words or less? Because if he gets confirmed in May, this is his very big headache. Courtney, you get to go first. Five words or less. Hmm. How am I going to wrangle this committee? Because, you know, I think I think that's six. But that was good.
I mean, as you said, the jobs market is huge. Doesn't look great. And, you know, Warsh has has supported the idea of rate cuts based on AI driven productivity gains. But the job market doesn't look great, but neither do inflation numbers. That's not an environment that you can necessarily cut rates into. You just can't. Right. Sadiq, five words. Kevin Warsh's inner dialogue. Not good.
Duck and cover. He's got a jobs problem. He's got an inflation problem and he's got the president coming at him the moment he is confirmed. And that is not going to be a comfortable place to be if you want to be an effective Fed chairman in an environment like this. 99 problems at least. Sidi Bredi at MSNOW and Washington Courtney Brown at Axios. Thanks, you two. Thanks, Kai. Have a nice weekend.
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Chapter 4: What is Eli Lilly's new initiative regarding GLP-1 drugs?
Wall Street today. I mean, do I really have to tell you? Details, numbers when we get there. The labor market headlines we were just talking about so deep in Courtney and I, but this morning's jobs report is worth another couple of minutes because the big shift this month was in health care, usually a slice of this economy that grows pretty reliably month on month.
Last month, though, down 28,000 jobs. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells explains what's going on there. We're going to break this down into short, medium, and long-term trends. Let's start with the biggest and most immediate factor here, the Kaiser Permanente strikes.
The estimates are that about 31,000 workers were involved with those strikes. And so that does show up in the jobs report.
Daniel Zhao is chief economist at Glassdoor. He says that dip is temporary. So we should see a lot of those jobs bounce back in March when those folks come back to work.
But all of that being said, health care jobs growth was still slow, even if you do account for those striking workers.
Because remember, we went from adding 77,000 health care jobs in January to losing 28,000 in February. 30,000 striking people is a blip and doesn't explain the whole gap. Which brings us to the medium term trend. Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
If you look at a hospital, you look at doctor's offices, whatever, they're getting much their compensation is coming from government programs.
Medicaid, Medicare, that kind of thing. The government cuts mean less health care funding, even for the private sector jobs.
When those are cut, that means they have to tighten their belts. And part of that means fewer jobs.
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Chapter 5: Why are employers hesitant to cover weight loss drugs?
Eli Lilly is also partnering with telehealth providers to help companies administer the drugs.
And then the employer can choose, do they want telehealth services? Do they want a wraparound obesity management lifestyle program and point solution? And so we're really trying to provide choice for the employers.
In order to get more of them to conclude that paying for the drugs is cheaper in the long run than the costs associated with obesity. I'm Novosafo for Marketplace.
Coming up... You know, we've had our sewer back up before. That trivia money came in really, really handy.
Honestly, I don't even know what to do with that. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials down 453, about 1%, 47,501. The Nasdaq off 361, that is 1.6%, 22,387. S&P 500 down 90 points, 1.3%, 6740. The wah-wahs indeed. However, comma... For the week, the five days gone by, the Dow gave up 3%, the Nasdaq down 1%, and a quarter percent S&P 500 slipped 2%.
Clothing retailers shared the pain today. Winter quarter at the Gap wasn't so great. That includes their brands Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. The Gap tanked 14.4% today. Rival Abercrombie & Fitch declined 3.8%. Novo was just talking about Eli Lilly. Both Lilly and its rival Norvo Nordisk have been cutting prices of their GLP-1 drugs for customers who pay out of pocket.
Indiana-based Eli Lilly inched up 7 tenths percent. The Danish Norvo Nordisk contracted 1.25 percent. Bond prices, should you be curious, and you should be, they fell. The yield on the 10-year T-note rose to 4.14 percent. Do I really have to explain why you should be curious? I feel like we do that story all the time. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl.
As everybody back east is pretty much aware, this has been the coldest, snowiest winter they've had in years. Record-breaking. In point of fact, increasingly, it seems people are getting their forecasts and their storm coverage from independent meteorologists on social media and YouTube versus plain old TV.
It has become so common, actually, that the American Meteorological Society has started offering something called a digital meteorologist certification to help people suss out which accounts they can trust. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more on that. Almost all day Sunday and Monday during that recent East Coast snowstorm, Ryan Hall was live on YouTube. The blizzard of 2026 is well underway.
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Chapter 6: How are independent meteorologists gaining popularity on social media?
And we helped a lot of people that night. It was after that, in 2021, that Ryan Hall y'all exploded, and he started doing it full-time. These days, he says, the channel generates millions of dollars a year through ads, sponsorships, and merch, and employs about 30 people, both full-time and contract.
I say I took a non-traditional path into meteorology, and I think it's opened up a door where this is a real career path now for people who want to get into, you know, doing the weather, not on TV. Hall is an outlier, though. Most people running their own online weather accounts are not making that kind of money. But increasingly, many are making a name and a living doing forecasting online.
I always say we're at the golden age of meteorology because so much data is at your fingertips and so much opportunities are at your fingertips. Stephen DiMartino is a meteorologist who started his own account focused on New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania weather back in 2007. When like YouTube was like cat videos and Twitter had like five people on it.
He's always had other jobs too, but today he has tens of thousands of followers on social media and says he could do this full time now. It's kind of like a 20-year overnight success type thing. I always tell young meteorologists, look, build this, but also have other income to supplement. It takes time because what you're doing is you have to build trust.
Trust is key in a world where anyone can post a forecast online. Social media is like kind of a choose-your-own-adventure during weather events. Matt Lanza is one of the meteorologists behind the popular Space City weather account in Houston. He's also still a full-time forecaster for the energy industry.
He says you can tell if a weather account is legit if the person running it has a degree in meteorology or a certification. And if they don't, look at their track record. If every weather event to them ends up being the biggest, the worst, the most extreme, all the writing is in all caps with lots of exclamation points, they're probably just trying to hook you.
and get you to engage so they can monetize their account. At Space City Weather, Lanza says they do the opposite. Most of the time we want to be kind of boring, but when the stuff gets a little crazy, you're going to notice us really ramp things up. So that people really pay attention when it matters, like during Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston in 2017.
After that storm, many wrote in to Space City Weather to thank them. One in particular struck me was someone saying like, you know, I trust you guys. I read you guys every day. When you started writing the way you did ahead of the storm, I took stuff that they had on the ground floor of their house and moved it up to the second floor.
The first floor of their house flooded, but they'd been able to save things that mattered. That's the goal, right? The goal is not, it is to get that engagement. It is to get ways to monetize it, but that's not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal, Lanza says, is to get people good information so they can protect their stuff and themselves from extreme weather.
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Chapter 7: What role do multiple job holders play in the current economy?
When I started this job with trivia, I initially envisioned it as a very much a part time sort of side hustle. And now I really do think of it much more as a second job. We make $100 a week. My wife and I do this together. It's really nice to have that sort of income together. And the money that we've gotten has really helped with a lot of the little expenses that you don't expect.
Car stuff, stuff with the house. We've had our sewer back up before. That trivia money came in really, really handy. It's great to have a little source of income that sort of takes the pressure off of the little everyday things. I think what's kept us going with this is that it's a lot of fun.
It's also really nice because I get to continue to be a teacher, but I got an engaged classroom at a bar, which is kind of ridiculous.
It kind of is ridiculous, but it's great, right? Andrew Anderson, hosting Bar Trivia in Columbus, Ohio. Whatever your tiebreaker question is, tell us how your economy is doing. Marketplace.org is where you can do that. This final note on the way out today, in which I will note the date one more time, March the 6th, 2026, 100 years ago today, Herbert and Rose Greenspan.
Welcome to bouncing baby boy into the world. They named him Alan. And today, his four times removed successor as the chairman of the Federal Reserve sent along his best wishes.
We here at the Fed are rationally exuberant to celebrate your 100th birthday with you.
Rationally exuberant. Get it? Powell made it funny. Little known fact, by the way, Greenspan didn't get his Ph.D. until he was 52 years old. Our theme music was composed by B.J. Liederman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargali. Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer. Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody. We will see you back here on Monday, all right? This is APM. You can turn to Marketplace to hear from powerful leaders and everyday people about the economy and their roles in it. And now we hope we can turn to you. Marketplace is facing real threats and challenges as we plan for the future.
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Chapter 8: How does hosting trivia reflect the gig economy?
So here's one action you can take right now that's going to have a long-lasting impact. Start a monthly donation to support our work. Five bucks a month is a great place to start. Head to marketplace.org slash donate and thanks.