Chapter 1: What are the current 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 factors contribute to the increase in food prices?
And it's a very uncomfortable situation that we're in.
Well, as you know, the Congress is quite a few years behind now on reauthorizing the farm bill. It's just been getting, you know, annual extensions. Do you expect federal policy to make any progress this year? Good question. We'd like to know. I don't know. It's pretty iffy.
I wouldn't expect any change at all in terms of farm policy. We're just at a stalemate here, and there's a lot of people who are really suffering because of it.
What's life like on the farm this time of year? Pretty slow in January? Well, for us, go ahead.
Yeah, we wake up every morning about 5 o'clock and start worrying.
You know, yeah. Worrying can be a full-time job. January is kind of a relief because you're trying to get through year-end and make a balance sheet that looks, you know, healthy. But we're doing a lot of planning. We have lots of H-2A workers in the neighboring county, and we're looking at it, too, because we just don't have enough labor in the spring season.
So that's, you know, we're working on that as a winter issue.
Yeah, on a more fundamental basis, we do have a winter storm that's supposed to be coming in. I need to get Louise out there on the south porch and chop up a whole bunch more wood so we can keep warm during the snowstorm.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. All right. Vance and Louise Emke grow wheat and sell grain seeds to other farmers out in Healy, Kansas. Thank you so much for your time. Sure. Thank you. Two of the country's lower-cost airlines are planning to merge. Las Vegas-based Allegiant Travel has offered to buy Sun Country Airlines, headquartered in the Twin Cities, for about $1.5 billion.
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Chapter 4: How is credit card debt impacting American households?
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 5: What challenges are Kansas farmers facing in the current economy?
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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