Chapter 1: How might rolling back steel and aluminum tariffs affect consumers?
Holiday week or not, the economy doesn't stop, and neither does the flow of economic data. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kyra's doll. It's Monday, February 16th. Good to be here with you. It's just one of those weeks that can only be described as a data dump.
We're going to get the latest GDP figures on Friday and a bunch of numbers about housing, consumer spending and inflation along the way. Let's take it one day at a time, though. Tomorrow comes manufacturing data from the Federal Reserve and some of its regional banks. Early indications suggest manufacturing activity has been picking up so far in 2026.
Marketplace's Justin Ho looks into whether that could continue and whether that could translate into more manufacturing employment.
Last year wasn't exactly a stable one for the manufacturing sector, thanks to tariffs, high interest rates, and a shaky global economy. But this year, manufacturers have a few things working for them, says Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
The tax environment is favorable. If interest rates at least stabilize, there'll be some relief for consumers and for businesses.
Paul says lower interest rates might spur more demand for appliances, vehicles, and other manufactured goods. Plus, the big wave of AI investment will push up demand for the equipment that goes into data centers.
So I think there's a lot of potential areas for growth that could aid in the demand for manufacturing as well.
Manufacturers surveyed by the Institute for Supply Management last month said new orders picked up for the first time since August. But the same report found that employment shrank at the same time.
Even if new orders come back. It's going to be a bit before folks start being comfortable making permanent decisions like hiring people.
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Chapter 2: What are the current conditions in the manufacturing sector for 2026?
What's happening?
A rollback might not change the biggest bills, but Wheaton says if you're hoping to pay less for a new washing machine or a Ford F-150, it'd still be a welcome change. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.
Wall Street today was closed for the President's Day holiday. But since the stock market is not the economy, we'll have some other highlights for you when we do the numbers. Something like 12% of Americans are on GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, according to a recent poll by the health policy organization KFF.
And it would only make sense that a big shift in how people eat and how much they eat would worry restaurants. But it turns out households with at least one person on a GLP-1 actually spend more on eating out. Dina Shanker wrote about this in Bloomberg. Dina, welcome to the program.
Thanks. I'm a big fan, so psyched to be here.
So the title of your story is Ozempic Users Actually Spend More Dining Out. And to me, that logic doesn't really just follow, so make it make sense for us.
So number one is it's GLP-1 users' households that we're tracking, right? And what do GLP-1 users talk about when they say the impact on them? It's not just that they eat less. It's that they think about food less. The food noise drops out. So if you're the person in charge of feeding a household, you are usually the one you're going grocery shopping, you're meal planning.
Even like on a random time during the week, there's probably some list in your head at some point of the foods you need to buy and the foods you need to prepare and the meals coming up and what needs to happen for them. But you go on a GLP-1 and all of that disappears. So what happens? It's six o'clock. It's dinner time. Your family is hungry and expecting to eat and you haven't thought about it.
So what happens? You guys go out to a meal. And so just that alone, you can see pushing a lot of GLP-1 users as well as their families into restaurants more. So that's one explanation. The other is that restaurants are becoming increasingly user-friendly, I'd say. Menus are becoming like a design your own. Choose your own sides, choose your own protein, choose your own base, etc.
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Chapter 3: How do tariffs impact manufacturers' hiring decisions?
And so you know what I did? I bought that full-size salad. I ate the whole thing, and then I felt terrible.
Dina Shanker is a food reporter at Bloomberg. Dina, thanks for sharing your story.
Thank you so much.
Right now, we are stuck squarely between two Fed meetings. The last interest rate decision we got was at the end of January, when the Fed held rates after a run of cuts. And the next decision we'll get is in mid-March. In the meantime, the Fed is taking in lots of data during this data-filled week and in the weeks to come. In other words, the Fed, it's keeping busy.
Marketplace's Sarah Leeson looks at what that means.
When we talk about how the Federal Reserve works, we sometimes talk about it in terms of a toolkit, as in a rate change is the tool that the Federal Open Market Committee is using to guide monetary policy. But there's no actual tool, per se. Instead, there's a lot of work being done by Fed employees.
Basically, what the Federal Reserve does is instruct the desk, the New York Fed, to carry out the policy as stated.
Tim Dewey is chief U.S. economist for SGH Macro Advisors, and he's going to help us explain the open market portion of that federal open market committee.
The New York Fed is the agent for the Federal Reserve that buys and sells or purchases and sells treasury securities in order to follow the objectives of the FOMC as far as interest rate policy.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of potential tariff rollbacks on everyday products?
U.S. markets were closed for the President's Day holiday. The U.S. officially recognizes 11 federal holidays. The countries that have the most, according to the Pew Research Center, are Myanmar with 30 and Bangladesh with 29. The country with the fewest, Switzerland. has one federal holiday, Swiss National Day on August 1st. Tomorrow is Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday in New Orleans.
According to the Visitors Bureau, 90% of the rooms in the downtown French Quarter were reserved as of the end of last week. A Tulane University study estimates the economic impact of Mardi Gras on the city at $891 million. Fun fact, that's 3% of New Orleans' GDP. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab.
The Campbell's Company, the food giant that manufactures everything from Swanson chicken broth to goldfish crackers to V8 juice, it announced in January that it would be closing its Cape Cod chip factory in Hyannis, Massachusetts. The company acquired the chip brand in 2018, and the factory, it's been a big part of the community on the Cape.
WBUR's Solon Kelleher looks at the end of Cape Cod chips being manufactured in Cape Cod.
Few people have known the Cape Cod chip factory on Cape Cod better than the founder's daughter, Nicole Bernard Dawes. Now she's a thriving food and beverage entrepreneur in her own right. But in the early 1980s, she was a kid on Cape Cod with a mom who owned a health food store and a father who was building what would become one of New England's most well-known brands. Growing up,
I spent a lot of time at the factory. Like after school, I would very frequently go to the factory and do my homework there or occasionally would like help out like sorting the chips. I mean, I just was there all the time. Dawes returned to the factory as an adult. She served as director of marketing and played a big role at the company.
Have you ever seen the reduced fat Cape Cod chips on the shelf? That was her idea. Maybe she accompanied you on one of the factory's walkthrough tours. Here she is on a 1998 episode of the PBS show Arthur, in which she led a group of school children through the chip making process. This is where all of our chips are made. This truck right here is carrying 50,000 pounds of potatoes right now.
We did crazy PR things. When Seinfeld was going off the air, we came up with this idea that if someone sent us nothing, you know, because it was like a show about nothing, that we would send them a free bag of chips. We got so many things, thousands and thousands and thousands of nothing. It was like, you know, empty envelopes, empty cassette tapes, like big boxes of air.
Her father sold Cape Cod chips to snack company Lance in 1999. Dawes moved on to found successful organic snack brand Late July, and more recently, the sparkling beverage brand Nixie. Although it's been years since she worked for Cape Cod chips, the recent news of Campbell's decision to close the factory still feels like a loss.
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