Chapter 1: What is the current state of global trade and U.S. influence?
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Oh, you were looking for macroeconomic stability, were you? Huh. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Tuesday today, the 20th of January. Good as always to have you along, everybody. One does not have to be a trained observer of the international order to know that something is up. You can kind of feel things changing under your feet, right?
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and this is a quote, we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. The old order he went on is not coming back. Canada, in fact, made a big trade deal with China the other day.
The European Union and the South American trading bloc Mercosur finally signed a free trade agreement that has been years in the making. And as President Trump threatens tariffs and more to take Greenland, traditional American allies are having an economic moment. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has more on how the tectonic plates of geoeconomics are shifting.
Today, the U.S. is paying the political price after decades of globalization. This didn't happen out of a vacuum, says Rice University's David Gantz.
A lot of people have been left behind and governments have not done a very good job of dealing with the people left behind from the shift in manufacturing elsewhere.
But as Bill Reinsch with the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, President Trump's protectionism isn't stopping globalism.
Trade is increasing, but it's rearranging or realigning. And what's happening is basically countries are moving on without the United States.
Look at the EU and South America, China and Canada, the UK and India.
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Chapter 2: How is the U.S. perceived as a trade partner by other nations?
Exactly. They are just allegations. And, you know, ProPublica, their reporting has indicated that many people in the Trump administration have done exactly what, you know, Trump accused Lisa Cook of doing, which is listing some house she purchased as a primary residence when in fact it wasn't going to be. But anyways, I don't think they're going to want to say that the president is lying.
Instead, I think if they end up ruling for Lisa Cook, and I'm not sure they will, they will probably do so by saying the president didn't follow the statutorily or constitutionally required process for removing a governor of the Federal Reserve. Because that would allow them to limit his power and prevent this particular removal without having to call BS on his claims.
It does give him another bite at the apple, though, right? Because he can come back now and say, oh, I'm doing what you told me to do.
It does. And you would hope that they would have learned their lesson from saying, oh, the Fed is different. You can fire everyone except for the Fed. So what does he do? He goes and fires a governor of the Federal Reserve. You would think that they would internalize the timeless tale of if you give a mouse a cookie, what is the mouse going to do? But it's not clear they will do so. And I think...
Some of the things that they limited him from doing during the first Trump administration, for example, attempting to end the DACA rescission, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. There they told him he didn't use the right process and he didn't actually end up trying to do it again. Now, that was Trump 1.0. This is Trump 2.0.
But it's a little bit hard to say that he would definitely try to do the same thing if they went this narrower route.
Different topic, but since I have you on the phone, the tariff ruling did not come down today. We in the business and economic press are waiting for it like nobody's business. What's taking them so long?
You know, it's hard to know. The usual rule is big cases and the tariff case is a big case. Usually those cases end up being decided at the end of the Supreme Court term, which would be in June. Now, we all think this case could be decided more quickly and
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of President Trump's protectionist policies?
in part because as these tariffs continue, you know, the government is accumulating additional debts. It may have to pay back. But I think the reality is the normal course would be for this case to take longer because the justices are probably disagreeing. And this isn't a question they have decided before and on which there is a ton of precedent.
But I certainly wish they would hurry up and get this one out, especially as, you know, he just threatened additional tariffs related to Greenland. So please, please weigh in.
Leah Lippman is a professor of law at the University of Michigan School of Law. She's also a podcaster. It's called Strict Scrutiny. You should listen to it. And she's an author, too. Her book is called Lawless. Leah, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time.
Thanks for having me.
There was some data out today from Redfin, the real estate brokerage, that shows that nationally, December was a buyer's market. More sellers out there than people looking to buy. 47% more across the country, says Redfin. When you get down to brass tacks, though, the housing market is very, very regional. Marketplace's Carla Javier has more.
It's almost as if sellers and buyers are living on different planets, says Chen Zhao at Redfin. They're finding it hard to find common ground on price. Sellers want to make money, and buyers, nervous about the economy and facing high mortgage rates, are hesitating to pay that much. Zhao says if that continues, there won't be a lot of activity.
And it also does mean that there is some downward pressure on home prices. Redfin says this imbalance is particularly strong in the Sun Belt. Matthew Teufke owns brokerage, property management, and investment companies in Austin, Texas. He says before, houses were going in hours.
It's just coming from like craziness in the market for a while. You know, you were bidding $100, $200, $300 over. There's 50 offers and that just wasn't normal or sustainable.
Now, he says, homes take around three or so months to sell. Vika O'Grady, who analyzes the housing data for Unlock MLS and the Austin Board of Realtors, calls these conditions a return to normalcy and says sellers will have to be patient. Most of them will still probably make money. but they may not be making those sort of record-breaking figures that were out there a few years back.
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Chapter 4: How does the housing market reflect the current economic climate?
As a result, they're going to double and triple down and do bad things. So I believe white Americans of goodwill, we're seeing it in Minnesota, see we do not live in a post-racial society, right? Learning the history of what happened to black Americans after slavery ended is what we need to be talking about now.
You have a messaging issue here, right? You're going to have to convince people. You're going to have to do a little marketing, if you will, on this idea. It interested me to read that you hired or went to a strategic communications consultant to figure out how to do this.
Yes, I have a plan for that, right? So we were able to move people just like myself who started as skeptics or even opponents of reparations to support when two things happened. When we showed them the four prior examples where the federal government paid reparations... One, white enslavers got money from the federal government for freed slaves in the District of Columbia.
Again, the Italy reparations case. We paid compensation to tribal nations for land theft and economic exploitation. And finally, we paid compensation to Americans of Japanese descent who were mass incarcerated during World War II. So when people hear that, things that happen to Black Americans, but Black Americans never receive payment for, they go, wait a minute, that's not fair.
And then when they learn the history of race in America, that the 13th Amendment didn't fix much. Combine that with our history of paying reparations convinced skeptical people to become supporters. So the messaging really bore out the arguments I was making in the book.
One of the biggest sticking points, and you talk about this, is deciding what reparations look like, how to distribute them, where the money goes, to whom the money goes. How do you sort that?
Those questions are so important and so fraught. So my solution is to have a commission to study it. So you're like a commissioner where good ideas go to die, Dorothy. Well, not my commission.
We had one of those here in California, ma'am. I mean, you know.
Right. And There are commissions, there are recommendations. Some of those recommendations have become law, some have not. My argument is the next Democrat who's elected president on day one creates the commission by executive order. Because here's what I know. We have no idea how much this is going to cost. And that's not a negative.
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