Marketplace - A confusing economy means a less confident consumer

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Fresh data on consumer confidence shows a lot of mixed signals — Americans are feeling better about the economy and where inflation is headed, but worse about job prospects and family finances. Also in this episode, we look at the widening gender wage gap, a small business owner dealing with tariffs, how remote work is giving families more options, and growing natural gas infrastructure.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

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important elements that make the economy go round. Jobs, wages, and you, the American consumer. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kyris Dahl. It's Tuesday, June 30th, and it's good to be here with you. I want to start by taking a second to check in with you. Yeah, I'm talking to you. How's it going? What do you think about the economy right now? What do you think about your personal economy. I ask because today we got a fresh read on how Americans are feeling. The conference board's June consumer confidence survey is out. Overall, people are feeling a bit better about the economy this month compared to last, but look closer and things get confusing. People are less hopeful about the job market, but more optimistic about inflation, but also

less sunny about their family finances. Lots of mixed signals. Marketplaces Kaylee Wells explains. Consumers are sending mixed signals because they're getting mixed signals from the economy. Since human nature puts more weight on the short term, let's start with that. The declining gasoline prices is helping consumers. Michael Green is chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management. He says it's not surprising that the ceasefire in the Middle East is easing consumers' minds. He says the promise of a peace deal?

Is at least raising prospects that gasoline prices. and other costs will be lower, that inflation will be modestly better. Which also made consumers more confident about where the economy is headed in the short term. But Green says overall confidence is still lower than analysts would expect, given the pretty stable unemployment rate and the elevated but kind of tenable inflation rate. Economist Yelena Shuletyeva with the conference board says that's where the long-term sentiments come in. It's not that things are getting better. things are getting less bad.

Respondents mentioned the war a lot less this month, but inflation is still prominent in those writing responses, and that means that the level of prices is still very elevated for the consumer. Which also explains why consumers are less confident than last month about their family financial situation. Sophia Bague, an economist with Morning Consult, calls the dip in gas prices just a temporary relationship. Whereas everything else in the economy is the bigger picture that could be driving the trend of sentiment going forward. And we are trending downwards.

Bague calls this month's bumplet in consumer sentiment a blip. Whatever happens in the job market or if inflation continues to rise, we could see sentiment go back down again. Despite all those signals, more consumers said this month they think inflation will improve and their personal finances will improve too. Michael Green with Simplify Asset Management says that's just another side effect of human nature. We've got to feel like things are getting better. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. Consumers might have mixed feelings, but on Wall Street today, traders were feeling good. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

We were just talking about consumers and they're slowing confidence in the job market. Well, soon we'll get some data about where it's headed. On Thursday comes the June jobs report from the Labor Department. Tomorrow, we'll get private data from ADP, and today we got the job openings and labor turnover survey for the month of May. It was pretty much the same as April's report. Hires, layoffs, and discharges didn't change. Quits and total separations barely changed. But here's one trend that sticks out.

Recent jobs data has been showing that even as inflation rises, wage growth has been steadily slowing. And for women, it's slowing more. according to an analysis by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. As Marketplace's Justin Ho reports, the gender wage gap has been widening for more than three years now. Throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the gender wage gap got narrower. Kate Bond, chief economist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, says that was thanks to more women entering the workforce, broader minimum wage protections, and better access to contraception.

And there's research that shows that directly led to women, finishing college and going on to grad school and earning more money later on. Bond says a lot of that progress was down to policy decisions by lawmakers. And by the 2000s and 2010s, it stalled. Then came the pandemic. Demand for low wage labor spiked. So wages did too. Women are overrepresented in low wage jobs.

And so when you have low wage workers broadly have more earnings growth, that is going to reduce the gender wage gap. But since the pandemic, the gap has started widening again. Men's earnings grew 3.7% in 2024 adjusted for inflation. And women's grew, you know, in our findings, only 1.5%, but it was not statistically significantly different from zero. A lot of the job growth in the economy has shifted away from those lower wage positions that help boost women's average earnings, says Jana Rogers, a professor at Rutgers University. So as the demand rose again for other jobs, more dominated by men, their wages picked up. Also, Rogers says women are still disproportionately responsible for taking care of children and elders at home.

Care work is probably the biggest constraint that women face. So they're just not as able to respond to opportunities in the labor market as men. That constraint is a bigger challenge for women now that many employers expect their workers to be back in the office, says Courtney Schubert, an economist with macro policy perspectives. It's also a challenge for women in jobs that require long hours, including four, finance, law, and other high-paying professional services. The fields that are sometimes more time-intensive for full-time work or even for part-time work, that's where we tend to see the greatest differences in gender pay.

Schubert says all of this is an even bigger hurdle for women now that inflation has been picking up again. So for most workers, real disposable income is declining, but it is hitting women harder than men. As a result, women are more likely to cut back on spend. Lissa Bronstain is an economics professor at Colorado State University. She says that's a problem because every dollar of women's income tends to have a bigger impact on the broader economy. Not because of anything intrinsic about women, but because women are more likely to be in lower paid, stretched thin jobs covering the household's basic needs. And people with lower incomes tend to spend that money faster. So underpaying women squeezes exactly the households most likely to spend.

every dollar, which makes the hit to demand bigger than the paycheck alone. In other words, a widening gender wage gap holds back the entire economy. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. I have been done an official count, but over the last year or so, I'm willing to bet that tariffs have been a leading topic on this show, and for good reason. Because while a lot of the taxes put in place by the Trump administration have been ruled unconstitutional, For some businesses, the reversal of those policies came too late. For the past year, I've been keeping in touch with Nicole Panetary, who owned The Tiny Owl, a children's shop here in New York City.

Nicole, it's nice to talk to you again. Thank you for having me. So we last talked in the fall, and you were about to close the doors on your children's door, the tiny owl. mostly we talked about because of inflation, tariff pressures, also a big box store moving into the neighborhood. And you're about to turn your attention to your other shop, The Brass Owl. Where do things stand now? Unfortunately, I have now closed the Brass Owl. The Brass Owl was open for 12 years. And shortly after we spoke, things started getting a little difficult. and I wound up taking a job to take myself out of the payroll equation and hoping that would make things financially a little healthier.

And I didn't really see the results of that. And then when we got into 2026, things continued to decline. So we made the decision. And I believe it was March of 26 to close. And our last day was May 9th. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. I mean, before we get into the business of it, how are you? That's a great question.

I'm good. You know, there's so much to be proud of. Twelve years owning a business in New York City, I feel so proud, and I feel like I did more than just have a store. I feel like I really built a community. But it's really sad to see it go away and to see all my hard work kind of just dissolve. There's like a silver lining. because I have my weekends now. I don't have to work weekends. So there's a little bit of a silver lining.

Okay. We'll take one silver lining. What happened? Was it kind of more of the same of what was happening? What I mentioned at the top about the tiny owl? What was it like to come to the decision to close and what was the turning point? A hundred percent the same factors. But it really started with opening the kid's door, seeing that decline, that started draining the money as a total from my overall LLC, and then the big box coming in, and then the economy getting worse, and then the gas prices going up, and it just kept snowballing, and I just really couldn't dig out of the hole anymore. And there's no forgiveness for a small business to say, hey, I've had a bad three years, but look at the first nine, somebody helped me out. So I kind of got to a point where I ran out of money.

I mean, 12 years is a lot of business expertise and a lot of history. What changes did you see in the last year compared to, you know, the 11 before? I would say mostly the discretionary income in our neighborhood. I would say it was the biggest change because so many people would come in and say things like, oh, I'm just like, I'm a in between jobs or when I get my next paycheck, I'll come back. And I heard it more and more. I think people were feeling, you know, even though we've been through so much, we've been through inflation, we went through COVID, I think that people were starting to feel the strain in a way that made it more difficult to shop in a boutique. You know, you're pretty ingrained in the local business community. You have a business group you started. What are you hearing from other business owners in your area about what it is like to operate right now. We actually recently just did a

survey with our local businesses on some of the issues they're seeing. And a lot of them are saying the same thing is that the economy is just very difficult right now. We need commercial lease assistance or stabilization. Commercial tenants are responsible for property taxes. We need help there. There needs to be a vacancy tax. And they are seeing a huge slowed down in spending due to the economy due to inflation and tariffs and gas prices and war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You said you got a new job as a buyer. What's next for you?

Do you see another business in your future? Sadly, no. I wish the answer was yes. I said maybe who knows down the road what happens life, you know, you never know. But there's no other way to say it, but completely honest, I have a significant financial hole to dig out of. So the possibility of doing a new business would only come with if I win the lotto. Nicole Panetta Terry in Queens, New York,

she is a former small business owner and also teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Nicole, thanks again. Thank you so much for your time. Coming up. This change since the pandemic made it possible for them to have children. Work from home is giving families more options. But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial average rose 135 points, a quarter percent, to finish at 52,317. The NASDAQ added 393 points, 1 and a half percent, to close at 26,213. And the S&P 500 gained 58 points, 8 tenths percent, to end at 7499. For the second quarter that ends today, the Dow expanded 12 and 9 tenths percent.

The NASDAQ acquired 21 and four tenths percent, and the S&PATs percent, and the S&PATs percent, and the S&P increased 14 and 9 tenths percent in just three months. Chip-making companies wrapped up their best first half of a year in more than 20 years thanks to what else, all of that AI spending. Micron Technologies accumulated 8 tenths percent. Intel added 6 percent. Marvell technology rang up 7 and a quarter percent. Bonds fell.

The yield on the 10-year T-note rose to 4.45 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. We're approaching the end of our budget year. here at Marketplace and your support is crucial to powering economic reporting that puts you first. And if we hear from 500 listeners before June 30th, you'll help unlock $50,000 from the Marketplace Investors Challenge Fund. So don't wait. Give now and support this nonprofit public media service. Marketplace is here for everyone and it's powered by you. So please donate at Marketplace.org. And thanks.

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journalist Lindsay Sievert, Tomorrow's Cure explores the innovations changing the health care landscape. Featuring conversations with leading physicians, researchers, and medical experts, the new season examines everything from AI-powered diagnostics and cutting-edge cancer therapies, to surgical technologies improving patient care today. Not sure where to start? Listen to the season premiere featuring M.D. Anderson Radiation physicist Dr. Page Taylor and Mayo Clinic Radiation Oncologist Dr. Adam Holtzman. They discuss why carbon ion therapy is generating excitement in the medical community

and what it could mean for the future of precision cancer treatment. So go ahead. Follow tomorrow's cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab. The demand for natural gas just keeps growing. In the next five years, the U.S. will rapidly expand its exports of liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, the data center building boom is creating more need for natural gas-powered electricity. To meet that rising demand, the U.S. needs a critical, invisible infrastructure. Pipelines. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has more.

There's a growing underground highway that gets the United States cheap and abundant natural gas to new customers. Jameson Cochlin is with natural gas intelligence. The pipeline buildout was pretty crucial to natural gas production growth as shale plays expanded across the country over the last decade or two. And right now there's kind of a renaissance of sorts because of these data centers, because of these LNG terminals that are coming online. And Matthew Piotic with S&P Global Energy said, As well, data centers are often being built close to where natural gas is being produced, natural gas that will be exported abroad must travel a lot further. Now we have the requirement for more connective tissue.

A pipeline path that enables flows to move all the way along your initial production enabling capacity, all the way to the Gulf Coast. That means lots of additional pipelines. Dan Pickering is with Pickering Energy Partners. Essentially what you're doing is digging a big trench in the ground, laying massive, imagine pipelines that are bigger than you can reach around in the ground and moving that over hundreds and thousands of miles. It's a big, long, complicated process.

Get landowner approval, dig those trenches, get all that pipe imported laid in the ground from one into the other, welded it together, covered back up so that, you know, the earth is as it was before. And that will continue to generate economic activity over the next several years. Jay Singh is with Ristad Energy. Certainly lots of steel and lots of construction work, lots of welding. They do tend to create jobs, albeit temporary. The long-term economic benefit is more for the producers of natural gas in places like West Texas. Ed Hers is with the University of Houston.

Those producers in the Parmian Basin look at natural gas as a revenue center, as a profit center. Producers can charge more for their natural gas when they can actually reach their customers. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. We heard from Justin Ho earlier in the program about how the gender wage gap has been widening since the pandemic. This next story is about another pandemic-related work trend, but a more positive one. More than a quarter of parents work remotely for at least part of the week now, according to government data. And this shift in job flexibility has given parents more career opportunities and in some cases has made it more feasible for people to actually have kids. Claire Kane-Miller at the New York Times wrote about how work-life balance is changing.

Claire, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. So I think most of us office workers can remember the before times five days a week in person. How have the rules changed for parents you talk to in this story? So for people who can work remotely, most of them are working remotely some of the time. Few of them are full-time remote, but a lot of them are hybrid. And it has changed their lives in really dramatic ways, both on the days that they can work from home, but also they said that it's opened up a new culture at work where it's become more acceptable to say you have family demands or to talk about a caregiving need that comes up during the workday that they used to feel they would have to hide. Mm-hmm. Has this, the flexibility around work, actually helped people make the decision in having children?

So several of the women I interviewed for my story, it surprised me. They said it actually made the decision for them. That they either weren't going to have children. They were sure that they could not have children, you know, with a job that they had to be in the office five days a week, or that they were really on the fence and deeply ambitivis. about it. And they said in no uncertain terms that this change since the pandemic made it possible for them to have children. You know, more mothers are working now than they were before the pandemic. I wonder how much of this is out of choice and how much of it you think is perhaps necessity that's become feasible. Sure. So this is quite stunning development that so many more

mothers are in the workforce, especially because at the beginning of the pandemic, it looked like it might sort of wipe out women's progress and careers. And remote work and flexibility, as well as this attitude that we've been talking about, about openness to caregiving is a part of it. Another part of it is, of course, prices have gone up with inflation. People are having trouble making ends meet. Their earnings might not be rising as fast as prices. But I want to be careful when we talk about this, because surveys show that most mothers, most parents want to work. maybe they don't want to work full-time. Maybe they don't want to work the same number of hours at every stage of their children's lives.

But this is not really a choice people have. It is something that they want to do and that they need to do. And these changes since the pandemic have made it more possible to do that. And of course, there are so many jobs that require in-person work. You know, you can't work from home. What are some of the options you explore at the end of your piece where government or corporate policies could help create more work-life balance for everyone? So the most important thing for people whose jobs can't be done at different times or places,

you know, different hours or from home, is predictability in their schedules so that they get their schedules, you know, many weeks in advance and they can arrange child care around them. They know when they'll be gone. For example, teachers have this. The health care field has a lot of this. So there's a lot of women going into health care because hospitals, doctors' offices put out schedules well in advance. And even though you do need to be there, you can't do many of those jobs from home, you know in advance on what they will be. A lot of hourly service workers do not have

this. A lot of people working in like cashier type jobs or retail, they get their schedules at the last minute and they're expected to sort of be on call until those schedules come through. And that can make work-life balance obviously incredibly difficult. Some other ideas that researchers raised to me during this reporting is that our school days, as everyone knows, are not aligned with working hours. Schools usually around 9 to 3. It's closed for the summer. That's not aligned with working hours at all, which makes this really challenging. And so work hours could change, school hours could change. Some offices have also experimented with an idea where everyone needs to work at the same time together for certain hours of the day and then the other hours they can do when they want.

And so maybe if it's important for you to be with your kids from three to five, then you pick up that work from eight to ten or whatever it is. You know, a lot more offices are trying to get people back in person. I wonder if you think this work flexibility we've seen will stick. There have been a lot of indications lately that some of this might be changing. Like you said, there are these return to office mandates. I recently covered a few large companies that cut pages. family leave time. But the reason that I think this will stick is about a quarter of parents are still working remotely some days of the week. And that has not changed. That has been really steady since the pandemic ended. So there still seems to be some openness to the idea that this flexibility is now built in and that it's actually really helping things like retention and work family balance for people who otherwise might not be able to stay in their jobs. Claire Kane-Miller reports on

gender and families at the New York Times. Claire, thanks for sharing your reporting. Thanks for having me. This final note on the way out today saw this on CNBC. We've talked a lot on the show about the drivers of inflation. Here's one allegedly behind the great egg price spike that happened a few years ago. Three of the country's biggest egg producers, Cal Main Foods, Versova, and Hickman's Egg Ranch have agreed to a $3.3 million settlement with the Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general, including New York, California, Wisconsin, and Florida over price manipulation. They allege that the company is illegally coordinated to inflate a daily price index for eggs. A federal judge still needs to approve the proposed settlements.

Jordan Manjee, So Neil Maharaj, Janet Wyn, Olga Oxman, and Virginia. Virginia K. Smith are the digital team, and I'm Kristen Schwab. We'll be back here tomorrow. This is APM. The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive, but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250.

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