Chapter 1: What recent trends are impacting the job market in the U.S.?
dueling data on jobs, more on what's behind that GDP jump, and to be on theme for the holiday, toys. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Washington, D.C., I'm Kimberly Adams in for Kyra's doll. It's Wednesday, the 24th of December. Good to have you along, everybody. We got some relatively good news about the job market today.
The Labor Department reported initial claims for unemployment benefits fell by 10,000 nationwide last week. That's now down to the historically low level we saw before the pandemic.
Chapter 2: How do unemployment claims reflect the current job situation?
It's a very different story than what we saw in the delayed government jobs report, which showed that since September, the economy lost about 40,000 jobs, while unemployment spiked higher to 4.6%. Other than the pandemic, that's the worst unemployment rate we've seen since 2017. So one report says fewer people are filing for unemployment, while the other says there are more people unemployed.
How does that work? Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman is here to help it make sense.
Chapter 3: What factors contribute to the rising unemployment rate for specific demographics?
Let's start with the positive employment news. It's good to see that jobless claims are low. Ryan Young is chief economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. There came in about 10,000 people under estimates, which is 10,000 paychecks that are safe. Except that might not tell the whole story.
Michelle Evermore at the National Academy of Social Insurance is an expert on the unemployment system.
Chapter 4: How are businesses responding to hiring challenges in the current economy?
Initial claims, as I always say, only measure people who lose work and then apply for unemployment insurance. And right now, Evermore says the workers losing jobs are least likely to apply for unemployment insurance. So that's Black workers, people who are part-time for economic reasons, people who are marginally attached to the workforce. They may have exhausted their unemployment insurance.
Right now, the unemployment rate is not high by historic standards. But as it gradually rises, it becomes a bigger problem for the economy and for particular worker groups, says Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Chapter 5: What role does AI investment play in the economy despite tariffs?
Right now, it's at 4.6 percent. Go back a couple of years, we're at 3.4 percent. The unemployment rate for whites has not risen a lot, 3.9 percent now. But for black workers, it's at 8.3 percent. That's a high unemployment. I mean, if that were the overall unemployment rate, we'd say we're in a bad recession.
And there's not a lot of encouraging news heading into 2026, says Mike Frattantoni at the Mortgage Bankers Association, because job creation has basically stalled out. There really was no net employment growth from April through November. Businesses are just cautious about hiring. The hiring rate is really as low as it's been over much of the last couple of decades.
And you see employees very cautious as well. All this has knock-on effects for the rest of the economy, from consumer spending to housing. If people don't feel confident in their employment situation, it's unlikely they're going to move forward to buy a home. And surveys find Americans are ever more apprehensive that they're going to lose their jobs or see their pay cut in the coming year.
Chapter 6: How are social media influencers adapting to economic challenges?
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. A short trading day this Christmas Eve on Wall Street, but it was open long enough to hit a new high. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. I want to follow up on that surprisingly good and also delayed GDP report that came out yesterday, which showed the U.S.
economy grew at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter, the highest reading in two years. It was surprising to many economists because they expected ongoing uncertainty, particularly around President Trump's tariffs, would have some effect on the economy.
And though the growth was driven partly by rising consumer spending, as we reported yesterday, that spending has been concentrated among higher income households. But growth was also boosted by continued spending and investment in an industry that has gotten a pass on some of those tariffs. Two familiar letters, A.I. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has more.
Big tech companies have spent roughly $400 billion to build AI data centers in 2025. These giant facilities are sprouting up across the country to train and run AI models, and they require a lot of components, says Philip Luck at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. steel, aluminum, copper, all the cooling and electricity.
Many of those construction materials are imported and subject to tariffs. Then there's what's inside.
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Chapter 7: What is the history and significance of Legos in the toy industry?
You get this big building, but in reality, it's the little chips that are so expensive. Those alone are about 45% of the value of any data center. Those graphics processing units that have sent NVIDIA's valuation into the stratosphere are the single biggest line item for data centers.
Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts and author of Chip War, says though they're designed in the U.S., they're pretty much all fabricated abroad. Largely Taiwan and Korea, which manufactures most of the memory chips inside of data centers today. Those have been exempt from tariffs for now. A 25 percent tariff on ships from China has been delayed to 2027.
And the Commerce Department is investigating national security concerns around semiconductors that could still result in tariffs. It's clear the president wants to impose tariffs. He's repeatedly promised to do so. But the administration is trying to weigh the desire for tariffs with the cost that it would impose on some of America's biggest technology companies.
Tariffs have already cost big tech an estimated $5 billion this year, says Dan Ives, head of tech research at Wedbush Securities.
Chapter 8: How can Legos serve as a reliable gift option during the holidays?
Around the edges, it could hurt some spend, but the reality is we're going to have trillions being spent over the next few years. So he says even billions in tariffs likely won't stop those trillions in investments in AI data centers. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace. This time of year, the Internet is filled with influencers sharing ambitious holiday recipes.
But elsewhere online, people are sharing strategies for how to put any kind of food on the table. In 2023, 18 million families were food insecure, up a million from the year before, according to the USDA, which has stopped tracking those numbers under the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, grocery prices have shot up more than 25% in the past five years, which means there's a different kind of food influencer gaining traction on social media right now. The kind who will teach you how to cook something delicious on a budget. Marketplace's Alice Wilder has the story. Kiki Ruff's videos usually start the same way. If this is your first time being poor, I'm Kiki.
There's no telling what recipe will come next. It could be a batch of hot dog buns, roasted tomato soup, or caramel apples. But whatever she makes in her Indiana kitchen, you can be sure it will be cheap. Ruff has dubbed her creations recession recipes. She told me that she frequently fields requests from hungry followers who are adjusting to their new economic reality.
If they're going to a food bank for the first time and they're getting flour and lentils, they're like, well, I don't bake and what is a lentil? On Ruff's channel, flour turns into donuts and lentils become chili or burgers. She got the idea for recession recipes while scrolling LinkedIn.
There was someone who popped up on my feed who was talking about how he was in a transitionary period with his job and he couldn't buy granola bars or fruit snacks for his daughters anymore. They had to cut the expense and how stressful it was for his daughters. That LinkedIn post inspired her to put together her first recession recipe. She posted it to TikTok in February 2025.
And the next morning, she woke up to 90,000 new followers. Ruff has a full-time job in software technology, but she immediately decided to devote her free time to making more videos. Today, she has over half a million followers between TikTok and Instagram. If you want an idea of what her videos are like, imagine if your favorite babysitter taught you how to cook.
Now the next part, you get to get a little crafty. We're going to season these. Ruff is warm and goofy, but will also dole out some tough love if the moment calls for it. Oil your pan! Oil your pan! Oil it! She wears heart-shaped glasses and has the red hair of an off-duty Disney princess. I met Ruff in the parking lot of an Aldi in northwest Indiana, where she does most of her grocery shopping.
So what is our budget for this grocery shopping trip? I'm going to try to get this under $15. She grabbed a quarter to rent a cart, and we headed in, laser-focused on our grocery list. Oh, pizza dough. We'd be making pizza rolls. Think cinnamon rolls, but with a savory filling and tomato sauce for dipping. They only have jalapeno. I'm allergic to jalapeno. We're going to roll with it, though.
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