Chapter 1: What recent rulings affect tariff refunds for businesses?
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Be one of 500 gifts needed by Friday to unlock $25,000 in extra funding. Donate now at marketplace.org or click the link in the show notes. Thanks. On this Friday, some jobs, a dash of tariffs, aviation, and we'll play some Mahjong. From American Public Media, this is Market Class. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Friday today, May the 8th, good as always, to have you along, everybody.
Chapter 2: How are businesses navigating tariff refund applications?
All right, seven minutes, this whole economy, and what the heck is going on? Let's see if we can do it. Heather Long is at Navy Federal Credit Union. Greg Ip is at The Wall Street Journal. Hey, you two.
Hey, Kai.
All right, Heather, you get the first bite at the apple here. 115,000 new jobs in this economy in the month of April. The rate stayed steady at 4.3%. Discuss, please.
Chapter 3: What impact do tech layoffs have on the job market?
Look, I thought it was a good report. You know, 115,000 is double what was expected. As you noted, the unemployment rate stayed steady. And what really got me excited is we finally saw some hiring in an industry other than healthcare. You know, we saw a big jump in... Transportation and warehouse jobs, retail was up, a little bit of hospitality, construction and social assistance.
This wasn't a one-trick pony thing anymore. I'm not saying everything was perfect. It's still hard to get a job in the tech industry or finance. There was a pretty big jump in people who could only find part-time work instead of full-time.
Chapter 4: How does inflation affect wage growth and job stability?
And of course, the big Achilles heel of the economy is finance. Wage growth of 3.6% in the past year is getting wiped out by inflation and these surging gas prices. But if you look where we were in 2025, when basically no jobs were getting added, to where we are in 2026, where we've had 76,000 jobs a month on average so far, things are looking better.
Heather Long, you have been on this radio program for 10-ish years. I know you in real life, and you are a reasonably steady state person. This is the most excited I've ever heard you on a Friday afternoon.
Well, thanks, I guess.
No, I mean, it's a compliment. It's a tell on how you really feel about this jobs report.
Steady is a good word.
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Chapter 5: What does the jobs report reveal about the economy?
You know, you've got to stabilize the patient before they can recover.
All right. All right. Fair enough. Greg Ip, you're going to take the flip side of this coin, I gather.
That's right. I will try to sound a little less irrationally exuberant than Heather on this. But truth be told, I'm not going to take a negative view on this report because I agree with Heather. that it is on balance pretty good. But I want to step back from April alone and take a look at the bigger picture.
Chapter 6: How is AI influencing job trends and layoffs in tech?
Now, the numbers have been bouncing up and down. Like a few months ago, we had a big negative number. But year to date, we're actually averaging about 76,000 new jobs per month. And that's not a lot. But last year, we only averaged 10,000 jobs per month.
In fact, last year, job growth is so slow that we went through, I think, an eight-month period where it was negative for four of those eight months. And I think there was genuine fear that we were dropping to stall speed, maybe even flirting with recession. So I'd say that stepping back here, the most encouraging thing about this report is
is that despite all the headwinds from tariffs and oil in Iran and so on, is that we seem to have now established a moderate but stable pace of job growth.
All right.
Chapter 7: What economic implications arise from airline shutdowns?
Well, we'll take moderate and stable. And that's kind of what Heather said. I do wonder, though, Heather, if I could delve very briefly, very briefly into the world of the Federal Reserve. I wonder if that big sigh we heard this morning was coming from Kevin Warsh, who is going to get squeezed right when he takes that job.
But now, at least based on this report, he only has to worry about inflation. He doesn't have to worry about the stagflation part of this thing.
Well, I think you're right. And I mean, I don't envy him because the reality, I keep calling it a split screen economy. I know Greg has written about this as well. You know, we've got this AI boom going on.
Chapter 8: How is Mahjong gaining popularity in urban settings?
A lot of the economists and Wall Street indicators look pretty good. But on Main Street, a lot of Americans are really feeling squeezed right now. You know, it's not just the vibes aren't good anymore. Wage growth is not keeping up with inflation now. And people are feeling financially pinched. And that's a hard problem for him to solve.
He's going to just hold rates steady probably for most, if not all of the year. But it's hard to watch people in a rough time.
Yeah. And incoming from the White House as soon as he takes that job in like three, two, one, you know. Greg, I want to talk about AI. Heather mentioned it very briefly. You wrote yesterday, maybe two days ago in the journal. Maybe letting a little air out of AI right now wouldn't be such a bad thing. Talk about that. Would you?
Yeah, I know it's probably an unpopular view, certainly in Wall Street. But I mean, hey, like Heather said, there's basically two economies right now, the AI economy and everything else. If you look at the GDP numbers, for example, they look pretty solid, around 2%. But if you take out all the spending on data centers and all that stuff, you're somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%.
And by the way, a lot of that AI spending isn't even on stuff we make here in the United States. We import it from Taiwan and South Korea. You look at the stock market, right? Almost all that run up towards records in the last few weeks is led by the so-called Magnificent Seven or the other semiconductor stocks that are sharing in this AI glow.
So the aggregate numbers are being held up by this AI boom or bubble, if you want to call it. But everything else underneath the surface looks kind of like flat-ish. And so, yeah, that leads me to this probably somewhat unpopular or out of consensus view that if the AI boom went bust, which I am not predicting, it wouldn't be that terrible. I mean, the economy would still be growing.
And honestly, all that wealth that's been created by AI, it mostly went to a small number of people. The average person cares much more about their wages than their wealth, and their wages would probably not be affected.
So let's talk then, Heather, and you get 30 seconds and then Greg get 30 seconds on what we can extrapolate from today's jobs report and cranky consumers, but the market's doing well. You know, lay that crystal ball in the next six months for me.
I think it's more of the same of the split screen economy that we've both been talking about. But here's my but. I think there's going to be more belt tightening as we move throughout the year. It's just an economic reality that, say, the middle class right now still has some money left from those larger tax refunds, but about half of it's been eaten up now by the
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