Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What's the future of household solar power without federal tax incentives? For Marketplace, I'm Novosafo, in for David Brancaccio. First, the Trump administration is pledging $2 billion in humanitarian aid for the United Nations, but the money comes with a warning that the U.N. needs reform. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer reports. The official State Department announcement of the U.N.
donation says it reaffirms the United States' ironclad commitment to supporting critical life-saving humanitarian action around the world. But the last paragraph warns the U.N. it has to reduce bureaucratic overhead and, quote, individual U.N. agencies will need to adapt, shrink, or die.
Chapter 2: What is the Trump administration's pledge for humanitarian aid?
The Trump administration is skeptical of foreign aid. It shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development earlier this year. The U.S. was the U.N. 's biggest donor in 2025. The Trump administration's $2 billion pledge will probably keep the U.S. in that position, although it's smaller than last year's donation. The money will go into a U.N.
umbrella fund and will be doled out to 17 priority countries, including Sudan, Ukraine, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. 2025 was a good year for initial public offerings. That's when companies go public on stock exchanges. Bloomberg says IPOs raised a total of $46 billion, the most since 2021. Marketplace's Henry Epp has more.
Companies thinking about going public pay close attention to how the stock market is doing. They want to enter it when investors are feeling bullish. Jay Ritter is director of the IPO initiative at the University of Florida. When the market goes down, IPO volume collapses. When the market goes up, IPO volume jumps. That partly explains why more companies have gone public this year.
The stock market's been doing really well. But the market did well the last couple years, too, when IPOs were not all that popular.
Chapter 3: What reforms are being requested from the U.N. by the U.S.?
And even though IPO volume rose in 2025, it's still lower than it was pre-pandemic. One reason, there's a lot of private money flowing to startup companies. So they've been able to raise large amounts of money without tapping public capital markets.
But for companies that want to significantly grow, especially in tech, private capital has its limits, says Santosh Rao at Manhattan Venture Partners. You need to at some point go public and raise public capital. Rao says more companies reached that point this year. And after a rocky start to 2025, more of them felt comfortable going public in the second half of the year.
They were waiting for the dust to settle, for the coast to clear, for some visibility down the road. I think they have visibility on the tariffs. They have visibility on the rates. And if that visibility continues, some big IPOs could be coming in 2026. Both OpenAI and SpaceX have started laying the groundwork to go public. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace. you
Residential solar tax credits from the federal government expire at the end of this year. Some state and local governments have offered solar incentives too, but the industry is now facing an uncertain future. Zachary Turner reports from WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. Solar installers from NC Solar Now drill into the roof of this home in Concord, North Carolina.
On the ground, roof lead Jay Reed puts on his safety harness. He says recent federal changes have installers on edge. Everyone's a little nervous about the beginning of this next year because everything kind of changed with the incentives that everyone was getting to get solar. The federal residential clean energy tax credits covered 30% the cost of rooftop solar.
Since July, homeowners have been rushing to take advantage of low-cost solar. Reed's company, like many others, was booked through the end of the year, and has been since August, according to Jesse Solomon, NC Solar Now's Director of Sales. Fortunately, we're already selling into 2026 pretty heavily with no tax credit.
That's partly because of local incentives, like those that allowed Charlotte resident Hope Lifsey to put panels on her home. She bought her solar and battery system through Solarize, a group purchase program. How it works? It's a public-private partnership where the more folks enroll, the less each individual pays. Lifsey enrolled because she experienced frequent power outages.
It's just ridiculous, you know, like one day it was out for seven hours and it was like 98 degrees outside. The second local incentive Lifsy got allows her to keep the power on during an outage. Her local utility gave her several thousand dollars to install a home battery. Similar programs exist in other states, such as California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
Some states, like Colorado, offer an energy storage tax credit. Local incentives, combined with the federal tax credit, made it affordable for Lifsy to invest in solar. Do you have like a payback, like how long it takes you to get back the amount that you paid on the system? Eight years? Yeah. One challenge. Local programs are often temporary. Solarize wrapped up in November.
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Chapter 4: How did the IPO market perform in 2025?
There will be less work, and eventually that's going to lead to people having less jobs, you know. In September, the state's largest electric utility proposed creating a battery incentive program for businesses. Utilities in other states are exploring similar options. In Charlotte, North Carolina, I'm Zachary Turner for Marketplace.
Our producers are Tamar Fagan, Ashley Rodriguez, Ariana Rosas, and Erica Soderstrom. Our senior producer is Alex Schroeder. Our supervising senior producer is Meredith Gerritsen-Morby. And I'm Novosafo with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM American Public Media.