Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's finally happening from Marketplace. I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. How many jobs did the U.S. economy gain or lose last month? We are going to find out in a little less than two hours. The numbers are about a week late. The folks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics needed a minute to catch up after the government shutdown.
The shutdown is also the reason why we will never get a full October jobs report.
Chapter 2: What were the November job gains or losses reported?
Instead, we'll get just a piece of it. Economists have an idea of what the November numbers are going to look like. 40,000 to 50,000 jobs added with an unemployment rate of about 4.4%. But this report is just a first pass. It'll get revised a few times as time goes on. And as Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman reports, the actual final numbers... might be a little more dismal.
While BLS delayed its monthly jobs reports, some private economic outfits were filling the data gap. Revelio Labs estimated employers caught 9,000 jobs in November, says chief economist Lisa Simon. So not a huge decline, basically hovering around that, you know, zero growth mark. And the sector's shedding jobs? Not promising for the holiday shopping and eating out season.
Leisure and hospitality, retail trade, transportation, warehousing and manufacturing. So all of these blue-collar sectors. Small business HR firm Homebase saw retrenchment in November as well, with worries mounting about prices and tariffs, says CEO John Waldman.
Chapter 3: How does the government shutdown affect job report timing?
We saw a lot of conservatism from small businesses pulling back on both team sizes and hours. Also, labor market pressures are now mounting on consumers, says Chapman University economist Jim Doty. Low growth in real wages and extreme weakness on the labor front. Job growth is much less than what's being reported.
Fed Chair Powell warned of this in his press conference last week, saying it's likely BLS has been overestimating job gains recently to the tune of about 60,000 a month. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
Chapter 4: What are the economists' expectations for job growth?
Thank you. In New York, several big banks have been accused of systematic fraud, depriving people who have lost their homes to foreclosure of millions of dollars and saddling them with extra debt. It's a complex story, but it boils down to the way in which lenders are charging interest on mortgages while everyone is waiting for the foreclosure to be completed.
The central question, are homeowners getting a smaller slice of the home sale because banks are overcharging on interest? For more on this, let's welcome David Brand, who's investigating this at WNYC and Gothamist. Good morning, David. Good morning. So let's get specific about these allegations. This all has to do with a disputed method for calculating interest. It's a little complicated.
Can you explain how it works? Sure. So before a home can be foreclosed on and sold at an auction, a judge has to actually approve that. Prior to that, the financial institution and the loan servicer handling the mortgage hire attorneys who calculate the debts and they submit a proposed judgment amount. And then when the judge approves that amount, the foreclosure sale can move forward.
But what we found is that the time period between that motion and the judge actually issuing a ruling can be many months or even many years. And so during that time period, the financial institution, the lender can legally charge interest because interest is accruing.
So the question is, should that interest accumulate on that judgment amount or should it accumulate on the unpaid principal balance? This has hit some New Yorkers pretty hard. Can you share some examples of what you found? Sure. So we focused on one homeowner in particular. She had a three-family home in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her father was living in the building and taking care of things.
They had a tenant renting two units. Her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. His capacities were slipping. She said she didn't realize that the tenant wasn't paying rent. Ultimately, she lost the home to foreclosure at an auction sale.
She did receive some money from the sale, but her attorney says because of the method of interest calculation, she should have received about $24,000 more than she did get. So we saw that and we started looking at thousands of other cases to see how these disputed interest calculations, how often they were being used. And we found 7,400 instances where
Is this ultimately a story about big institutions kind of squashing the little guy? Or is the picture more murky than that? Well, what we found is that many more times often than not, the calculation method that favors the big institution is the one that's being used. So we're not prosecutors. We're not saying whether that's illegal or not. That's up to judge. That's up to the state.
But what we do see is these two contradictory methods happening at the same time, often in the same courthouse, maybe on the same day. One that favors the financial institution, one that favors the former homeowner. And the state court system is allowing this to proceed despite evidence that one of the ways might be wrong. There has been a government response to your reporting.
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Chapter 5: Which sectors are shedding jobs ahead of the holiday season?
What do you think of that? You know, in our reporting, we heard that that would go a long way to just kind of standardize this process throughout the state. The other portion of the bill is to actually standardize what amount they're calculating interest on.
And he says that he thinks it's illegal to calculate interest on a judgment amount prior to judgment and that they should be calculating interest on the unpaid principal balance. And he says that's what he hopes his legislation will accomplish. David Brand is a reporter at Gothamist and WNYC. Thank you so much. Thank you. And you can learn more by listening to WNYC's podcast. It's called NYC Now.
Our producers are Emma Condon, Tamar Fagan, Ashley Rodriguez, Ariana Rosas, and Erica Soderstrom. Our senior producer is Alex Shorter. Our supervising senior producer is Meredith Gerritsen-Morby. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM, American Public Media.