What happens if the Fed goes mum

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyrie Rizdoll, it is Tuesday today, 19 May, good as always.

“I think I said this yesterday that this is an especially light week on the economic”

data front. Today, in fact, Bupgis statistics wise. But you do know what we do have over the next couple of days in surplus, actually. Fed officials offering their thoughts. Fed Governor Christ for a while or today, Philadelphia, Fed President on a Palson as well.

A couple more through Friday, Friday as it happens is when Kevin Warsh is going to get sworn into the Board of Governors and a four-year term as chair of their off. We have mentioned a couple of times, I think, since Warsh became the nominee, that things are going to be different with him in charge. Most noticeably, in the way this central bank communicates, Warsh has suggested he might

stop holding press conferences after every meeting. He has criticized the Fed's forward guidance, that thing, Fed officials do where they say

“where they think interest rates are headed, and he has suggested members of the Board of”

Governors and regional Fed presidents might be giving too many speeches like, oh, say, the ones this week. So Marketplace is just now, it gets us going with why we pay attention to those speeches anyway and what might happen if there were fewer of them. Keeping track of Fed speeches is a big part of Preston Moise job.

I try to keep a with every bit of Fed's peak I can get my hands on in a speeches, prepared remarks, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, tweets, anything like that. Moise and economists with the economic advocacy group employee America, and he says he keeps track of all this to help him figure out the Fed's thinking. We want to know how they're thinking about economic developments, how they see the risks

where they see inflation going, where they see the labor market going, and that informs the policy advocacy that we're going to engage with. Moise says all this Fed's peak can be a lot to keep track of. Probably on an average week, I'm looking at six or seven members that are speaking.

It wasn't always this way.

Central banks like the Fed used to try not to communicate as much or as clearly with the public. That's Carol Abinder, an economics professor at UT Austin. She says back in the 70s and 80s, the Fed used to be intentionally opaque because it thought surprising market was a good idea if you say you want to boost the economy, you

create a bit of unanticipated inflation, and that allows kind of boost to the really economy in the short run. But Binder says that strategy drew a lot of complaints about accountability, so the Fed started to become more transparent. Meanwhile, the Fed, like other central banks, set a specific inflation target and felt

the need to explain to people how to get there. And if inflation is not at its target, explaining why not in a way that reassures people that that's still the target and that they're going to get there soon enough. There is a point where too many Fed's speeches can start to become noise, says Courtney Schubert, an economist with a research firm macro policy perspective.

“I think if you're hearing too many conflicting signals or if you're not hearing a consistent”

narrative or framework, then it can become confusing. But Schubert says more communication in general is better, especially in times when the economy is uncertain, because you end up having more smooth market functioning and fewer surprises if you're regularly hearing from officials. And in today's economy, we don't exactly need any more surprises.

I'm Justin Howe from Marketplace. I do wonder what Alan Greensman's thinking right about now. Wall Street today. I'm going to spoil tomorrow's show a little bit by telling you we're going to be doing

a bond story because today, the 30 year treasury hit almost 5.2 percent.

You want to know why and what it means through tomorrow, but here's a partial answer. Mortgage news daily reported today. The average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage sits at 6.75 percent. The highest it has been in almost a year. Elsewhere in American Market Capitalism equity traders weren't all that happy either.

We will have the details when we do the numbers. Depot reported quarterly profits this morning. Basic just is that its customers are still spending, but more carefully and perhaps put

Kristen Schwab gave us the consumer side of those corporate earnings yesterday.

“How they're responding to the energy price shock that's rippling through this economy.”

Today, the retailers side of things because they're dealing with higher transportation and energy costs, too, you know, Marketplace and Nova Soffo has that one. The increase in energy costs is hitting retailers on multiple fronts as Zach Stambore of E-Marketer. But their operating costs are going up in the purchasing power for consumers is going

down. wholesale inflation rose one and a half percent between March and April alone and Stambore says those higher costs will likely hit consumers within months. But retailers pricing power is not uniform. Jason Miller is at Michigan State University's business school.

A good example where it will be challenging to raise prices for things like, you know, major durable appliances, where prices are already up because of tariffs and consumers have been pulling back. retailers risk losing customers, Miller says if they raise those prices further. But for items we have to buy groceries, for example, prices are already rising.

“Are you shipping from California all the way to the East Coast?”

You're paying thousands of dollars to have those strawberries transported by truck and importantly, several thousand dollars additional to what you were budgeting the share. Had the energy disruptions from the Iran war been short-lived, Miller says, we might not have seen long-term price increases, but the straight-of-hormous has been blocked for more than two months.

We're in the opening endings of how this energy cost shock is going to filter over into consumer goods. This is a particularly vulnerable time for smaller retailers. This is Vanky Shankar, marketing professor at Southern Methodist University. Those who fan capable of handling shocks better typically tend to be large-scale, they've

also strong pricing power and more diversified revenue streams.

“If smaller retailers and regional ones raise prices more than big box stores because they”

have to, they could end up losing market share, so as you marketer, Sextambore. The Walmart and Amazon's of the world are in a strong position here. These consumers increasingly focus on value and how to get the best bang for their buck. The bigger retailers, Sextambore says, are likely to lean into loyalty programs, private label products, and bulk offerings to keep customers spending.

Okay, here's today's fact from history that is showing up in today's economy.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources says that when Europeans first showed up in what's

now the Buckeye state more than 200 years ago, maybe as much as 95% of that territory was covered by trees and forests. Today, it's very much not. So all over Ohio, towns and cities are trying to bring parts of their forests back, their hiring arborists and hosting tree planties and expanding the tree canopy.

It's not cheap, but the arbor day foundation says every dollar city's put into trees grows three dollars in return. Marketplaces, Kaley Wells, explains how that works. Ed and Donna Hoffman just pulled up to a neighborhood park 15 minutes west of Cleveland. They're here to pick up a sapling of an eastern red bud tree that their city, Lakewood,

is giving away for free. It was released on mine and you pick out which one you want and so we jump right on it. They check in with the volunteers sitting at one of those plastic fold out tables and pick out their red bud from a row of native witch hazel, service berry, oak and Buckeye trees. 200 and all, every single one reserved by residents within 24 hours.

We missed the last year, so we say to get this year.

This is Lakewood's third year doing this.

We really take our tree canopy very seriously, and it's something that we've been trying to increase for the last few years, so Fia Zellis is Lakewood's city planner. We've been planting as the city separate from this event, 350 to 400 trees every year. And that is a significant part of our budget, almost $150,000 per year, which comes out roughly 375 bucks a tree, worth it, because Lakewood estimates the average tree in city limits

is worth about $1,500. Part of that is pretty simple, trees make shade, in places like public parks and can defer from key islands where there's lots of asphalt.

Trees also make humans happy, expanding the canopy decreases crime according to the U.S.

Forest Service study.

“Trees make houses more valuable, and trees near business districts make people spend more”

such as regional planner Tyler Clifman with the southeast Michigan Council of Governments. People tend to spend a lot more time in the greener spaces that equates just spending more money in those places, maybe just by being willing to explore a little more to linger to be more comfortable. Then there's the savings on healthcare, a university of Illinois study found that even

when you control for all other demographics, people living near more green space spend nearly $400 less per year on healthcare.

If you wind all that up across a full population in entire city, then you start to see the

benefit of these tree planting programs. Kathleen Wolfe is a research social scientist at the University of Washington. She specializes in urban forestry and has no problem rattling off plenty of other reasons, trees save cities money.

“Air quality, water quality, storm water management, storm water management benefits can”

be substantial. Substantial because root structures and canopies make it easier for land to deal with rainfall. That means dollar saved on watering nearby plants and tax dollar saved on storm runoff infrastructure. Wolfe says all of that has led cities to invest more in planting trees. With the research about ecosystem services of urban trees, park, screen spaces, about health

benefits, while that has really searched in the last decade or two. And that surge is especially prevalent in Ohio. It has more tree cities designated by the Arbor Day Foundation than any other state. In the last century, tree cover has rebounded spectacularly, according to the State Department of Natural Resources, from a low of 10% more than a century ago, to more than 30% today.

In Lake Widow, Ohio, I'm Kaylee Wells from Marketplace. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, which means oil and gas are still high. That's a global reality, and a big part of the reason we're seeing a boom and electric vehicle sales in some parts of the world. Sales are especially strong in Europe, EV purchases are up 26% this year over the same period

last year. That's according to benchmark mineral intelligence. So far, though, the EV frenzy has not spread this way across the Atlantic, even though gas is, sorry, just checking my notes here. Yes, an average nationally of $4.53 a gallon Marketplace is Henry App, explains why

higher gas prices have been kind of a mixed bag for the American EV market. A year ago, there were still a bunch of government policies in the U.S. pushing car makers to build more EVs and enticing consumers to buy them, but those policies have been stripped away by the Trump administration and Congress. No more EV tax credits, no more fines for companies violating fuel efficiency rules,

so the auto industry reconsidered its American EV plans, says Guilt Hall at UC Davis. Car companies were quick to react and installed production. Ford, GM, Stellantis, and VW have all since scaled back, and that's partly why U.S. EV sales have lagged behind Europe lately, Tile says. We're just not making as many of them, and they're expensive to import too.

If you're a Korean car company, for example, or European one, bringing the car to the U.S., you will pay high tariffs. Plus, there's a strong market for EVs in Korea and Europe. Europeans, for decades, have preferred smaller vehicles, more efficient vehicles, simply

because they pay more for their fuel in the first place.

Sam Fierani is with auto forecast solutions. Americans mean while still buy lots of big pickup trucks. And they tend to change their buying habits over time rather than on a quick rise in gas. But there are signs some Americans do want more fuel efficient cars, says Stephanie Valdez Streetie at Cox Automotive.

“I think the hybrid is the story we're going to start to see in the next couple months,”

and we're already seeing it. Sales of hybrids rose 36% in March and April compared to the same period last year. She says, and used EVs are selling better too. ancy lore has seen that firsthand. He runs the used EV company Green Wave electric vehicles in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

The year started off slow, but in March, sales took off. We've gone from concern about what adoption is going to be like to how can we get as many

Because more drivers are coming in, he says, "Fed up with paying for gas to power their commutes." I'm Henry App, the Marketplace. Coming up.

“I've also painted a, like, a, is it a pygmy pig or those, like, tiny pigs?”

I painted portraits, gang portraits, not the actual tiny little pigs.

First though, let's do the numbers.

Now industrial's down 322 today, 2/3 and 1% 49,363. Then has DAX attracted 220 points, that's a 10% 25,870, S&P 500 down 49 points, 2/3% 73 and 53. The maker of Art Drake's Outerware, Selman Shoes, and Wilson Tennis Gear, raises revenue growth forecast for the American sports, is that parent company beats sales expectations for the first quarter, takes a simple AS, climbed to 2% even.

Driven Brands holding, it's an automotive services franchiseer, get it? Driven Brands?

It owns make-o, body shops, and muddy key mufflers also take 5/0 change, broadcasting profits

for the fiscal year are going to come in below, expectations, driven Brands holding slowed 7.1% on the day. Bonds down, yield on the 10-year-teen note pay attention, this is coming back tomorrow. 4.65% you're listening to Marketplace. It's not getting any cheaper to run a college.

According to a higher education price index from the asset manager common fund, university operating costs were up more than 3.5% last year. That outpaces inflation for 2025, which if you check the CPI, the consumer price index, you know was 2.7%. We will leave tuition increases for another podcast, but the fact of the matter is that higher

education is in need of revenue, and they are increasingly finding in or some share of it anyway, in something called Executive Education. Rob Manelbaum had the story for Bloomberg Business Week, Rob, it's good to have you on. Oh, thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. Would you please just so we all know what we're talking about here, explain Executive

Education? Sure, Executive Education usually comprises sort of short courses that you can take, you know, as a company leader, they don't count for credit towards an MBA or anything like that.

“It's sort of like continuing education for the C-suite, right?”

It's different actually from what they would call a professional degree, which might be an executive MBA program or specialized masters. And as you point out in this piece, even though there have been these kinds of programs for a while at very, you know, name schools, they're now sort of becoming more relevant in the revenue sphere. Talk to me about that for a minute.

Sure, well, Business School just gets more and more expensive to operate with each passing year, and you can only raise money through tuition or school appropriations or legislative appropriations by so much, and business schools are desperately looking for alternative revenue streams to finance sort of their marquee MBA programs and their undergraduate programs and things like that. Are schools good at this? I mean, look, a lot of schools teach really well, a lot of schools do research

really well. Do they do this specific kind of thing? Well, they do it well. I don't think that many

“schools do it particularly profitably. I mean, I think they do it well from a content perspective,”

but I think it's very challenging for a school to turn this into a real revenue stream. Teaching executives is very different from teaching undergraduates and graduate students and a lot of the faculty don't have that kind of experience. And when you're talking about tenured fact, will they, they're, you know, doing research and things like that, they'd often don't have the time.

Along those lines, you refer to this at some point in this piece as basically a B to B operation,

And that is actually another part of the problem is that it's really a sales organization that

“that thrives doing executive education because they're cultivating relationships with companies.”

The real money when you're running an executive education program is in doing custom programming for individual companies in your area. And they also sort of rely on companies to sponsor open enrollment courses. So you might see the course online, but a local company is guaranteeing a certain number of seats. So it's very important to cultivate those relationships with companies. And that is also something very difficult to do in a traditional academic environment.

You know, it's, it sales work and sales work that, you know, should be highly compensated.

And that's just really tough to do. So broadly speaking, this is, this is challenging work, but it's going to grow, right? I mean, just in the face of the revenue challenges.

“I think so. You know, a lot of companies are, have a lot of existential questions on their mind”

that have to do a lot with AI. You might have read that somewhere. And I think that schools are racing to, to tap into that, not just an executive education program, of course, but in, in their graduate programs and their undergraduate programs as well. Robin, I'm running in Bloomberg Business Week. Rob, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thanks so much, Kai. I appreciate it.

(Music) Retailers, as Novo was talking about earlier, are doing what they can to keep careful consumers spending. And it turns out, even really small businesses can do all right. If people spend just a little bit on something that makes them happy, here's the days and storm of our series, my economy. My name is Rebecca Holopter and I am an artist.

I came out to Los Angeles from Missouri to be an actor and work in the film industry. And then I also

am a pet portrait artist. About a year ago, my friend was like, "We have the first Friday

“Art Walks. You should pop up and do pet portraits in 10 minutes." So now I do these pop ups”

two to four times a month. Most of our dogs and cats, which are very fun, and I love it when they have a costume on. That's probably my favorite. And then I've also painted, I like a, is it a pig-me-pig or those like tiny pigs? And I've also painted a pigeon, which I loved. I've also done personally, I didn't like it, but I did it anyway, a hissing cockroach. It was, it's pretty, the colors are pretty, but yeah,

that was probably the, I feel bad saying the worst one. I want to judge someone's sweet little pet, but that was pretty gross for me. I do a four by six and that is 40 and a six by eight and that is 50. For the longest time, I was a waiter thinking I had to have like a side job that didn't have anything to do with my creative career. That would be like the steady paycheck. The pet portraits have kind of substituted that role for me in the sense of, yeah, if I need to make extra money this

week, I can go pop up somewhere and make that extra cash. Serving was kind of draining my soul and this definitely doesn't drain my soul. It's silly to say like a pet portrait pop up makes feel all these things, but it does make me feel like I do get to make people happy with my art and my creativity. It's made me feel more confident in my skills and my abilities too, because a lot of times you're creative work, no one sees that part of the process. So also sometimes

at these markets, other vendors watching me do it for hours of the time gives me like a little boost of being like, oh yeah, you are good at this, Rebecca. You are doing a good job. So yeah, it's giving me a lot. Rebecca Halopter running a pet portrait business and hustling fracking jobs too, here in Los Angeles. Let us know how you are making this economy work. Would your market placed out of work slash my economy? This final note on the way out today in which I do

over in the UK, does most of its business in Africa and Asia. It announced layoffs today,

7,000 people about 15% of its workforce. Here is the money quote from the CEO on a call today.

“It's not cost cutting. He said, it's replacing low value human capital. What is it?”

So Neil Mahara is Jordan Manji, Jenna Win, Olga Oxman, every gen. K Smith are the digital team around here. I'm Kai Rizdel. We will see tomorrow everybody. This is APM.

“There's so much happening in the world and if you have particularly shall we say inquisitive”

kids, it can be hard to answer their questions. Hi, I'm Ryan.

And I'm Bridget, and we host million bazillion, a podcast from Marketplace, about money for

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