P.M. Edition for Mar. 11. New policies effectively closing the U.S.’s southern border are pushing some migrants to turn back around. WSJ Latin America bureau chief Juan Forero caught up with some of them on their long journey home. Plus, the U.S. resumes intelligence sharing and military support to Ukraine after Kyiv agrees to a 30-day cease-fire. And consumers’ spending—sometimes on credit cards—has kept the U.S. economy afloat. Telis Demos, Heard on the Street writer and co-host of the Take On the Week podcast, joins to discuss whether Americans may now be overstretched on debt. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the key headlines from March 11?
The U.S. restores military support to Ukraine after Kyiv agrees to a ceasefire. Plus, do Americans have too much debt to keep the economy afloat?
The risk is that we aren't really clued in on what's happening in consumer credit because the numbers are looking better, but under the hood, things are getting worse.
And a growing number of migrants are being turned away from the U.S. border. We follow them on their long journey back home. It's Tuesday, March 11th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the p.m. edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.
Chapter 2: How does the US-Ukraine ceasefire impact international relations?
The Trump administration has said it would immediately lift a pause on intelligence sharing and military support to Ukraine as Kiev agreed to implement a 30-day ceasefire. According to a U.S.-Ukraine joint statement, the ceasefire plan, which is contingent on Russian acceptance, envisions opening negotiations between Kiev and Moscow on halting the war.
The agreement is the result of the first high-level talks between the U.S. and Ukrainian officials since a combative Oval Office encounter in which President Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of being unwilling to negotiate a peace settlement with Moscow. President Trump said in an online post today that the U.S.
will increase its planned 25 percent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent. That's in response to Ottawa's retaliation to U.S. tariffs. The administration is still expected to move ahead with 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum from all other trading partners tomorrow. Trump's team has said repeatedly that there would be no exceptions or exemptions.
Chapter 3: Why are tariffs causing tension between the US and Canada?
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he's suspending the province's 25% surtax on U.S.-bound electricity, hours after President Trump threatened the additional tariffs. Canada's Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney had called Trump's move to raise tariffs a direct attack on the country's households and businesses.
Reports that Ontario was ready to roll back a surcharge on electricity delivered to the U.S. helped stocks recover from early session losses that began after President Trump said he would ramp up tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada to 50 percent. Major U.S. indexes still ended the day lower. The Nasdaq fell about 0.2 percent. The S&P 500 dipped about three quarters of a percent.
And the Dow dropped just over 1 percent. Speaking of markets, 25 years ago this week, the Nasdaq hit its dot-com era peak after soaring more than 500% in five years. The collapse that followed was quick and brutal. Today, some investors are worried that the same cycle might be playing out in artificial intelligence.
Chapter 4: Is there a parallel between the AI boom and the dot-com bubble?
WSJ reporter Rolf Winkler joined our tech news briefing podcast to talk about why people are comparing today's market to the dot-com collapse.
probably just because there's a huge amount of investment going into a technology where the return is not yet clear. People are really excited about AI. There's a lot of really promising opportunities there. And you can see a world 10 years from now, 15 years from now, where it changes everything, assuming that technology continues to progress.
But right now, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on basically GPUs, graphic processing units, NVIDIA chips, to fill out these cavernous data centers. to power AI models that are cool and advancing, but we're not really sure how we're gonna use them all just yet. Is there revenue behind all this investment that justifies the investment? Not yet.
To hear more from Rolf, listen to tomorrow's episode of Tech News Briefing. As you may have heard in our What's News in Earnings last week, retailers are anticipating the impact of consumer spending pullback. Today, department store chain Kohl's said it predicts a larger-than-expected sales decline for this fiscal year.
And Dick's Sporting Goods forecast earnings well below Wall Street's targets, citing economic uncertainty. In the past few years, American consumers have been able to spend through economic rough patches, putting purchases on their credit cards and keeping the economy afloat. But now, concerns about a recession are rekindling worries that Americans are too overloaded with debt.
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Chapter 5: Are American consumers overstretched on debt?
For more on this, I'm joined by Heard on the Street writer and co-host of WSJ's Take on the Week podcast, Telus Demos. Telus, consumer lending and credit card companies like Amex, Capital One, and Discover Financial were hit particularly hard in the stock market's recent plunge. So what exactly is investors' concern here?
The concern is that what's going on in the economy with tariffs, with potential slowdowns and growth, President Trump didn't rule out a recession. Those things are not great for consumer borrowers. And so the issue is whether or not consumer lenders will continue to see increasing spending. Part of the way they make money is when you spend money. They make money when you use your card.
The other way that they make money is by lending you money and you paying it back. And if you're not paying it back, that's not so great for them. So consumer lenders tend to be highly cyclical stocks. The risk is that we aren't really clued in on what's happening in consumer credit because the numbers are looking better, but under the hood, things are getting worse.
I'm curious where employment fits into this because there's new data out today from the Labor Department that shows that the U.S. had 7.74 million job openings in January, which is higher than in December and slightly above expectations. So what does that mean?
Employment is the lifeblood of consumer credit. Whatever's going on in the economy, if people are working, they're pretty good at paying back their debts. And so the risks that people see to employment are what will ultimately really drive if there's going to be like a significant sell-off of consumer lenders and consumer credit companies. assets.
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Chapter 6: What is the impact of employment on consumer credit?
And so the last jobs report was a little light versus expectations. So there's not necessarily any screaming red alarms right now. However, you spin forward some of the things happening with are we going to lay off huge numbers of government employees? They are consumers like anyone else. And so something that impacts them would be meaningful for consumer credit.
Here's what I focused on and maybe the kind of pivot point here. And that is what's going on with wealthier borrowers. Are they feeling the squeeze of concerns about their job future? They don't have endless budgets. And so that is the thing to key in on as the real variable here for the sort of the consumer borrower and consumer economy.
That was Heard on the Street writer and co-host of WSJ's Take on the Week podcast, Talis Demos. Thank you, Talis.
Thanks for having me.
And if you want to know what consumers are doing, especially in the face of tariffs, listen to tomorrow's Your Money Briefing podcast as our reporters visit grocery stores, Best Buy, and liquor stores to see what people are spending on. Coming up, the journey migrants take after they're turned away at the U.S. border. That's after the break. So
Migrants sometimes travel thousands of miles to reach the U.S. border. Increasingly, they're finding it effectively closed. There are new U.S. policies that make it nearly impossible for migrants to apply for asylum upon reaching the U.S. southern border. And for a growing number, that means having to turn around and travel back to where they came from.
South America Bureau Chief Juan Ferrero recently traveled to the border between Colombia and Panama to get a better understanding of this story.
first started out in Panama and then came back by boat. These are all people, by the way, who are taking the sea route, which is several hundred yards away from the coast and heading back into Colombia and then skipping from one town to another until they get to a bigger town where they can catch a bus to go anywhere else in South America.
One person you spoke to was a man named Hector Ferrer. He's 69 years old and used to be a vendor in Venezuela, but he left because, as he describes it, things had gotten pretty grim.
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