Home prices won't stop rising

What more could you possibly want?

“From American public media, this is Marketplace.”

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizgal, it is Monday today, this one is the 27th of April

and good as it always is, everybody, to have you along.

We begin today with a slightly philosophical bent that ever-changing balance that we all do between needs and wants. And we're going to do it on the folkrum of a slice of pizza because it seems spending a night in and ordering delivery is becoming something of a luxury for a whole lot of Americans. Domino's reported slower than expected sales growth today.

Rumors got shy, starting in March, said the company, some Marketplace and Nova Saffo gets us going with needs, and wants, and that other thing that started a couple of months ago. Pizza delivery is a nice to have, not a need to have, and as consumers tightened their budgets in March, Domino's head to offer deals and discounts to keep orders flowing. CEO Russell Wiener in a call with analysts said the pizza giant will keep that going while

gas prices remain elevated.

Starting as soon as May, you're going to see things on the calendar or in media from Domino's that weren't on our calendar to start the year. Broadly speaking, fast food, excuse lower income. Sarah Senator is senior restaurants analyst at Bank of America. Lower income consumers feel the impacts of higher gas prices most acutely.

So Senator says it stands to reason that fast food restaurants are feeling a consumer pullback first.

“We're just going to see a lot of value competition, and I think that will be true for”

the traditional QSRs. That's quick service restaurants, but we also are seeing it that emphasis all the way up to casual diners.

That's your chillies or all of garden.

So it's happening up and down the price spectrum. It could go further up as the impact of higher tax refunds tapers off says Matt Schultz, Chief Consumer Finance Analyst at Lending Tree. We're at that point now, and gas prices aren't rising to the degree that they were a few weeks ago, but they're still really, really high, and it's a big deal for folks.

There's no question about it. In a recent Lending Tree survey, 62% of respondents were worried about higher gas prices. Schultz expects changes in summer travel plans, as well as a decline in savings rates.

“And while Domino's plans to offer discounts to counter that worry, analyst Brian Harber”

at Morgan Stanley says, not all restaurant chains will be able to do the same, because higher gas prices mean higher costs. And obviously, that's something they could flow through to the consumer. It would stand to reason that higher oil prices do flow through to a lot of other commodities. The modities as in the raw ingredients that go into and onto your pizza.

If chains are squeezed on costs and demand, more could go out of business. In fact, Domino's executives predicted more store closures, among their competition. I'm Nova Saffo, former marketplace. Wall Street to start the week, a couple of indices hit new record highs, both oil benchmarks went up, bond yields, mostly status quo.

We will have the details when we do the numbers. . I play a game from time to time with our Friday regulars. It's called what is J. Powell thinking in five words or less. Turns out there is an actual game along those lines.

It's called the Federal Reserve Simulator. It's on Steam and the other day I played it with the guys who made it. So my name is John Dobson. Uh, yeah, I mentioned Dobson and John's twin brother. They've both got backgrounds and finance and economics.

Got e-count degrees together at the University of California. Davis, John is a data scientist by trade. I got a masters of science and economics from Cal Poly. I got you in 2017 after that, I got a job with Walmart and Andrew. I was just trading stocks for like the past few years.

I've during the pandemic, like I was watching my niece. I did really well with Nvidia in 2024. Yeah, but the brothers have been making video games together since they were in middle school. They released this one back in February.

Educational for people to actually learn what the Fed does because I have a master's in economics. And we didn't really talk about the Federal Reserve and any of my classes.

“So I think this is an important thing for people to learn.”

Yeah, absolutely no argument there. The game is fun, but it's a little complicated video games as you can imagine or tough to do on the radio. So we're going to spare you the play by play of the half hour that it took me to play this thing.

But the first thing you got to know is that you get to pick the fed chair you want to play as.

Going all the way back to Paul Volker. I went with the guy in charge now. I'm going to choose the power. So I'm clicking a historic starting here. Yep.

Yeah, click, click, click, click, click the impell. We started when pal did in 2018 and played through eight years of this economy, crises and all. Entering the 2020s, the pandemic era, what lies ahead? We all know what lies ahead, you guys. We want people to have an easy experience so that we give them a little bit of help.

Well, that's fair, that's fair. A little help by way of clues about what's to come, supply chain problems and recession risks.

And you get to do, you know, fed stuff.

Am I raising right here? I think I'm raising right. Okay.

“There is another piece of this game that's important though, something we have talked about a lot.”

There is a fed credibility index in the game where if you do raise things too much. Yeah, it's up to, it's to the right, it's up to the down and down. So if you do act erratically, then okay, the fed things get worse. The raise interest rates too fast is the unemployment rate to high. All of that factors into the fed's credibility.

There's a relationship between your credibility and the impact your policy has running economy. There is something else that can make that credibility index drop. John and Andrew put threats to the feds independence in the game too. The OJ investigation of the fed share, you've got real life in here, man.

Yep. Look at this, credibility takes a hit. Yeah, credibility is down to 77%. That DOJ investigation was dropped last week, kind of. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether the president can fire fed governor Lisa

Cook. There is a committee vote on chair Powell's replacement set for Wednesday the same day as it happened that the central bank wraps up its interest rate meeting. And in the meanwhile inflation is still not under control and the labor market is kind of stuck.

There's a war and an energy shock. Oh, and by the way, at the end of the game, you get a grade.

“Oh, you gave, you got to be, would you give me a B, what is this?”

Tell you what, that whole central banking thing is harder than it looks. We're all familiar, I think, with perhaps varying degrees of fluency with the supply demand curve, right, and have the disparity between the two helps determine price. As a quick aside, by the way, I once called it the Law of Supply and Demand and got a very stern email from a very annoyed economist pointing out that it is not a law.

That's applying to man thing, but rather a mechanism of the market. That aside becomes relevant when you consider the American housing market, circa early 2026. We are going to get a sense of the real estate supply demand price equation tomorrow when we get the case Schiller home price index for February, best guesses are that home prices

rose that month slightly year over year, even though the housing market is actually pretty tepid right now. That has been the case for a while, actually. Price is trending up, even though demand is sluggish, which is, I think, in back to where we started this introduction, unusual.

Marketplaces demand the field to explain. In a typical year, this is when the housing market should be taking off. You would see a lot of listing activity, get going in February, an entirely March, and

the buyers would be coming in, you know, second half of March, and into April.

Lisa Sturgeon at Bright MLS says that's a typical year, which we really haven't had in a while to be quite frank with you. Instead, not much is going on right now. More sellers have been listing, but it's still not clear that the buyers are out there yet.

Some of that is the affordability issue. We've had since the pandemic, mortgage rates and home prices are both still high. They're all fair, whether at Redfin says some of it is also because of political and economic uncertainty. They're on war, tariffs, and fears around what AI could do to the job market or holding

perspective buyers back. We have about 600,000 more sellers than buyers nationwide, and normally, when you have that gap between the number of sellers, the number of buyers prices come down to get those

But that's not happening.

Home prices have continued to rise in much of the country.

“In order for prices to come down, you need to have sellers who are pretty much desperate”

to sell. That's what we saw during the foreclosure crisis. But this time around, homeowners are in a very secure position. They have lots of equity in their homes. Which means they don't have to sell if they don't want to.

They can hold out for more money. That, along with the fact that there's just not enough building going on in many markets, has helped keep prices rising. But Chris Herbert, at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, says they are rising much more slowly these days than they were a couple of years ago.

Right now, we're seeing house prices are growing, low single digits, basically less than

inflation. So, while we say that house prices haven't fallen, they are falling in real terms after we account for inflation.

“And if that trend continues, and mortgage rates come down, he says in the next few years”

will eventually get back to a place where home prices are more affordable. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. I had a conversation last week with Lori Stewart. She runs sound community bank up in Seattle, and we were talking about some of the things that smaller banks like Sound are keeping an eye on, one of which is stable coins, a digital

currency that's designed to keep its value, unlike Bitcoin, just for instance. There is, of course, lots of tooling and throwing in Washington right now about how stable coins are actually going to work, how they might be regulated, and what they might do to the traditional banking system. Marketplace is just in ho, as today's explainer.

The reason why stable coins are supposed to hold their value is because the companies issuing them back their coins with safe financial assets. In this case, mostly US treasury securities and a few other types of related very short-term assets. That's Todd Baker with Columbia Business School.

He says when someone buys a hundred dollars worth of stable coins, the company issuing them will use the money to buy a hundred dollars worth of US treasuries, for instance. And if you want that money back, you go back to the stable coin, and the stable coin issuer sells some of those very safe assets that gives you cash. Right now, the companies that issue stable coins are mostly tech companies, and Baker says

most people use stable coins to buy Bitcoin, another crypto currency, since stable coins can make those transactions easier, but they can also be used to make payments, instantly. If the person you're paying is willing to accept a stable coin, that's an alternative to a bank transfer or a credit card or another obstruction for making payments. In other words, stable coins are kind of like traditional bank accounts.

You can use them to make payments, or you can let the money sit there.

“That's why many banks are concerned about what will happen if stable coins become more popular.”

Small banks, community banks, are right to be afraid. That's Hillary Allen, a law professor in American University. She says the fears that stable coins will draw depositors cash away from banks, especially if stable coins pay competitive interest rates. Right now, stable coin issuers are not allowed to pay interest, but Allen says there are

loopholes. They're affiliated exchanges or partners with other crypto industry infrastructure. They can pay yield, which is effectively interest. Allen says the concern isn't only about bank competition. It's also about where that money will end up, because the companies issuing them store

that money in treasuries and other safe assets. They're not making loans to people for mortgages. They're not making loans to small businesses to get up and running. That said, some banks themselves have been getting into stable coin since David ship with FTI consulting.

The larger banks, particularly those that have a global footprint and are working with very large commercial clients that have cross-border operations are absolutely starting to experiment. Ship says that's because those banks big commercial clients are interested in the instant payment services that stable coin technology can provide. It really is about helping to grease the skids of the payment system and make it easier

for those institutions. But ship says smaller banks have been more reluctant in large part because offering stable coins would tie up money that they would otherwise lend. Plus, banks don't necessarily have the resources to offer stable coins, even if they wanted to.

Dominic Miarton, the CEO of American Pride Bank, in making Georgia.

I can just set aside a few billion dollars of my earnings or my capital to go and build

the infrastructure of the cybersecurity and compliance and all the other components of the launching such a product. Miarton says he is worried about what will happen if stable coins become more widespread. We banks from large interest companies and they are definitely talking about how they could possibly benefit from accessing some of these new exchanges or new ways to store and move money.

We're going to find ways to support our customers with faster services, with safer services

“and we're going to continue to pay very strong returns on their deposit accounts.”

Miarton says if his bank can keep doing that, he'll at least have a shot at hanging onto his customer's deposits. If stable coins start lowering them away, I'm just in help for Marketplace. . Coming up.

So I was able to find a used chainsaw of Craigslist for 300. Wait. What? All right.

First, let's do the numbers.

Now industrial's down 62 points today, one tenth and one percent 49,167. And then as that went the other way of 50 points, two tenths percent, 24,887, the S&P 500 added eight points about a tenth percent, 71 and 73. Domino's. No more talking about them, which is by and by the world's biggest pizza chain forecasting

weaker sales for the rest of the year, it fell eight and eight tenths of one percent. Papa John's. Edgeed up nine tenth percent, pizza hut owner, young brands also owns KFC, by the way, in Taco Bell, dipped three and two tenths of one percent. New home, price data coming tomorrow, Sam Fields was talking about that.

The nation's biggest homebuilder, DR, Horton, slipped three tenths of one percent, Florida based La Nare, fell eight tenths percent, elsewhere in real estate, the real brokerage. That's an AI powered firm that foregoes traditional brick and mortar offices, what could possibly go wrong. It announced the deal.

Not a long time real estate brand remax for a reported $880 million remax, up more than

twenty four percent on the news, the real brokerage on the other hand, fell more than twenty four percent. The straight or her moves is at a stance still, we'll traffic there in any way. Exxon mobile down about a half percent Chevron, lost to quarter percent, refiner Valero, gain one percent, you're listening to Marketplace.

This is Marketplace, I'm Kai Rizdom. I did a season of our climate podcast, how we survive a couple of years ago, it was all about what the military is doing to and what it can do about climate change. And one of the episodes, I flew a simulator of an electric air taxi made by Joe B. Aviation. Let's have you jump into the pilot scene and we're having a scoot forward and I'm going

“to ride along behind you, possibly go wrong, Kai, what could possibly go wrong?”

Technically speaking, I crashed the thing, but if you listen to the episode, you will hear it wasn't entirely my fault. Anyway, two-ish years later, Joe B. is getting into the air taxi business for reals, starting today, it's flying demonstration flights in New York City, electric air taxis, between Manhattan and JFK airport, part of a federal pilot program meant to help air taxis become

a regular site in U.S. skies. Marketplace is Stephanie Hughes, has more. If a small plane and a helicopter had a baby, that's kind of what these air taxis look like. Eric Allison is chief product officer at Joe B. Aviation, as a wing, but it has six propellers

that can tilt and they can tilt from point to up to take off vertically to pointing forward to fly like an airplane. Allison says that vertical lift lets the vehicles move nimble around cities, and they're also much quieter than helicopters.

It's basically, yeah, in honourable, as it flies overhead.

Allison says the company is working hard to get his aircraft FAA certified, and that the demonstration flights this week act as a kind of preview of what hailing a ride on one of these aircraft could look like. You get a car to wherever the nearest take off the landing spot is, or if you're ready across the street, you can walk and get pooled onto the, to the Joby aircraft with other

people, and then you can fly up to 200 miles an hour to your final destination.

“One key question is how much this ride to the airport, or wherever, will ultimately cost.”

Allison says the goal is to be on par with a premium car service. The air taxi business does face some real hurdles, according to Samuel Engel with a consulting firm ICF. He says one, there are only so many places you can land an aircraft in the city, even a small nimble one, and two, those aircraft are small.

Joby's fit for passengers, plus a pilot. You can assume that the demand is going to have peaks at, particularly popular times, and these small vehicles will have a hard time providing enough seats for all of the people who want to take them at those popular times. One way to make space says Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst George Ferguson is to try to make

these vehicles autonomous. That means they won't have to save room for a pilot. If you have a four-seater or a five-seater, you don't want to occupy 25 or 20% of the space

But Ferguson says it'll be a minute before we have a Thomas aircraft that's able and allowed

to navigate above crowded cities. I'm Stephanie Hughes, Mark. It is a sad truth of our changing climate that the Western United States no longer has a monopoly on more frequent and more intense wildfires. See also, southern Georgia, the past couple of weeks.

Wildfires cost this country hundreds of billions of dollars every year. A total not likely to fall on its own, so it's a good thing, then, that there are people and businesses trying to mitigate some of the risks before a fire even starts.

Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy.

My name is Jessica Davis and I have a former wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service. I currently own and operate fire break management, we're based out of those in Montana. We go in and do fuels reduction, which could be anything from living trees to cutting trees out to leaving big cloaks for wildlife habitat. The idea is if we can do something before the fire starts before the firefighters show up,

it really lessons their load both mentally and physically and gives them a chance to fight a fire for us. Getting fire breaks started was a work of love and a bootstrap like no other, so I was

doing wildland fire for many years and then I took a season, what I thought was maybe

a season off was maybe the end and work on an ambulance. I did not have a lot of money in the bank account, but I had this huge passion to do what I love to keep doing what I loved, so I was able to find a used chainsaw off Craigslist for 300 and then a couple weeks later I found another used chainsaw on Craigslist for 100.

We got to work and by job two or three, as they were to buy a nicer professional chainsaw

“and I think we started getting shirts that match.”

We currently have two chainsaw folks in the field and one full-time equipment operator. Hopefully you know within a year everyone's making a minimum of 30 an hour, we're trying to do we do have a high living wage here in Boseman, I respect that, paying people a little wage is part of why our rates are a little higher, I mean there's a reason this is the most dangerous industry in the US, they should be compensated for that.

I think fire break management's been able to grow so much over the years for a combination of stuff and the biggest one I think was right place right time. We're seeing a big shift across the United States but specifically in the Western United States on how we understand and live with and interact with wildland fire and I think I hit the private market at a pretty good time.

Seeing fire break in five years is so hard for me to quantify because the sky is the limit. I didn't see fire break being here five years ago, I hope we're running multiple crews, I hope we have a travel crew, I would also love to have again two or three crews in one doing government contracting all summer back to our roots in wildland fire fighting.

“I dream, I'm a dreamer, that's how fire breaks got where it's in, I'm a dreamer.”

Jessica Davis, fire break management is our company, it's in Boseman, Montana. We cannot do this series without you, whether your job takes you out in the field or keep you tied to your desk, I feel that. Let us know what's happening, what your marketplace dot org slash my economy. This final note on the way out today in which we peek into our patrolling in future straight

open or straight close for a while doesn't much seem to matter which when you're talking about oil prices, Goldman Sachs said over the weekend that by the end of this year, if person called patrolling exports normalize by July, let me say that again, if they normalize by July, Brent crude could average almost $120, a barrel that is there severely adverse scenario, but I would ask you to remember here, the head of the International Energy Agency

said the other day, it would take two years for the golf to get back to normal.

“I remember Bobby Katelynish, John Gordon O'ercar, Steve Mullis and Stephanie Seek are the”

marketplace editing staff, Kelly Sivara is the news director, and I'm Kai Rizdahl, we will see you tomorrow, everybody.

As the Trump administration ramps up its crackdown on immigration, more people are making

“the difficult decision to leave the United States.”

I'm Riemach Reyes and this week on my podcast, this is uncomfortable, we're asking what

does it really cost to leave the U.S. when you're undocumented, and what can life look like on the other side?

“I have to look around and remind myself that this is not a movie this is my life, I am”

able to cross borders that I had never allowed myself to dream of.

Be sure to listen to this is uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.