Marketplace - Central banks move in step, for now

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

The U.S. Federal Reserve meets this week — so do central banks in Japan, England, Canada, and the European Union. Most will keep rates unchanged for now, as war in the Middle East shakes up the global status quo. But as other banks weigh imminent rate hikes, the U.S. may move in the opposite direction. More on why in today’s episode. Plus: Consumer sentiment crept up in April, Medicaid cuts slash pediatric care options, and five Big Tech firms post earnings this week.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.

In no particular order, economists, they're just like us. How much your money is going to cost. And yes, you can get insurance for that. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the 28th of April. It is always to have you along, everybody.

If you get a bunch of economists and analysts in a room, and you ask them to name the, I don't know, top three most important factors in this global economy of ours, I am going to bet that most, if not all of them, have somewhere in that top three, the cost of money, interest rates. So it is no small matter that this week is kind of a central bank of paloosa, if you will. The Bank of Japan left its key rate unchanged this morning. We're going to hear from the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, and the Central Bank to and the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee meets today and tomorrow. Almost certainly, by the way, Jay Powell's last get-together ends press conference as Fed chair.

Anyway, Marketplace's Justin Ho is going to get us going with what those central banks are up against and how that might square or not with what the Fed is dealing with back here. Central banks around the world are facing a similar dilemma. David Kelly at JPMorgan Asset Management says on one hand prices are rising. Because what they've seen particularly since the start at the Iran, war is a big increase in energy prices. That's adding to inflation. And central banks deal with inflation by raising interest rates. But Kelly says on the other hand, the Iran war and higher energy prices are also slowing down economic growth all over the world. And central banks deal with that

by lowering interest rates. It's a fine balancing act in the way you're trying to set monetary policy to try to keep inflation in check without slowing down the economy. As a result, Kelly says most central banks are going to keep interest rates unchanged this week. But Dean Turner, with UBS Global Wealth Management, says inflation pressures are rising. There's going to be a lot of expectation that central banks are going to look to tighten policy in the coming months, which is essentially raising interest rates. Turner says that's different from what the Federal Reserve is expected to do, especially since Kevin Warsh, President Trump's nominee for Fed Chair, backs interest rate cuts. The bias there would be that, especially with the new incoming chair, that the next move in interest rates will be. down from the Federal Reserve. If the Federal Reserve starts diverging from the other central banks,

investors will start to move money towards countries where rates are higher. Alex Grasino, with Manulife Investment Management, says that it'd mean less demand for U.S. assets and dollars. So you're probably seeing some downward pressure on the U.S. dollar if this directly happens. And a cheaper dollar makes imports more expensive. But Grisino says all of this could change, depending on what happens with the war in Iran. You know, if you're to wave a magic wand, And we got full flows through the Strait of Hormuz back up and running. A lot of the market posturing around what central banks will do probably dissipates pretty quickly. In other words, central banks around the world could start worrying less about inflation and more about economic growth.

I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace. Wall Street today, traders were maybe waiting to see what the Fed says tomorrow, although it's not like there is going to be a rate cut. Speaking of oil, by the way, is that last guy and Justin's spot was doing. doing the straight still closed, crude up another couple of three percent on both benchmarks. Brent North Sea, the global benchmark, just shy of $11 a barrel. Also, you might have heard the United Arab Emirates is going to leave OPEC after 60-something years in that cartel. There is a whole lot of petro-politics going on that I will spare you, but it is a very big deal. Elsewise in market

capitalism, a fade by the three major indices. We will have the details when we do the numbers. The American consumer, as you know, and may well be experiencing personally, is not feeling great about this economy. And should you need data to validate those feelings? The conference board is only too happy to oblige. To be fair, the group's latest survey out today does show consumer confidence has ticked up this month. However, comma, it is still below the long-term baseline where it has been languishing for more than a year now. One perhaps not surprising culprit? prices that just keep on rising. Daniel Ackerman made some calls.

Gary Hoover is a professor of economics at Tulane University. And he's a normal guy. Likes a little treat sometimes. For lunch every day, for dessert, I like to have a small cake or a pie. A little individual cake or a pie. He says those used to cost 84 cents a piece. Now they're up to 93. I have noticed that increase and I am upset about it.

But for now, he's still enjoying those cakes. And consumers across the economy are still buying things, even the goods that are hardest hit by inflation, like gasoline. Hoover says in places like New Orleans, where he lives, there aren't many other ways to get around. Our mass transit system isn't one that would allow for easy substitution. Gas prices are also on the mind of Ted Rossman, he's principal analyst with bank rate in New York City.

I filled up yesterday and it was about $60 to fill up the family SUV. I mean, that's noticeably higher than it used to be. Rossman says he's been thinking about ways to save on gas, like combining errands, but he hasn't really implemented them yet. And this gets at what's been the paradox of the American consumer. People are not feeling great, but yet they're spending anyway. It's been really one of the biggest puzzling factors in the economy of the past few years. And we really haven't seen that change.

One explanation is the labor market, says Dana M. Peterson, chief economist with the conference board. Even though there's not a ton of hiring, overall unemployment remains low. As long as people are working, they're getting income. And they are still spending. They're just not happy about it. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. There is a reality about the industry that accounts for almost one out of every $5 spent in this economy that gets lost in all the high-level policy machinations that happen. Healthcare is a business. There are bottom lines for all the sole practitioners and medical groups and hospitals out there.

So the news that Idaho is cutting how much it pays doctors, dentists, and therapists who treat Medicaid patients to close the state budget gap is a very live issue. Pediatric practices are failing at the most since about half the kids in this country are insured through that joint state and federal program. And as Alex O'Gon reports, other states are thinking about similar cuts. Medicaid meant everything to carry Warren when her kids were little. It covered vaccines, doctor's visits. It was ginormous in helping me be able to raise my children and be able to afford healthy things for them.

Now Warren sees the other side of Medicaid. She runs the business operations for Cordillane Pediatrics in northern Idaho. 40% of the practices patients have Medicaid. She says the payment is so low it doesn't even cover the car. to see a patient. That reality has practices like hers on thin margins. Then last year, Idaho cut how much it pays doctors across the state, sending her practice over the edge. There's been tears, sadness, anger, bitterness, frustration. After losing 13% of the revenue, the doctors made a tough call, sell their practice to a local community health center, which actually gets paid more to see

these patients. It was just a move we had to make to protect our community. And that's our biggest focus is ensuring that the community has care. Idaho is a warning sign of what's to come. States are facing budget shortfalls driven by tax cuts and an anticipated $1 trillion reduction in federal spending on Medicaid over 10 years. In Colorado, for example, the state already pulled back a Medicaid rate increase. The governor said the 2025 tax bill forced the change. The new law shifts more Medicaid costs to states, forcing a choice, cut benefits, or what they

pay doctors. It's really difficult for states to be kind of generous on both of those at the same time. That's Diane Alexander, an economist at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. She found back in 2013 when the Affordable Care Act temporarily raised Medicaid rates, it made a big difference. Increases as small as $10 per visit made it easier to get into a doctor. It doesn't sound like that much on paper, but on the other hand, that was like, I don't know, maybe like a 10 to 15 percent increase in the baseline rates. But a few years later, when the rates went back down, Alexander found access went with them. We saw kind of the reverse effect.

So within a year, most of the gains had been lost when the payments went back down. Alexander worries that if states cut rates again, we could see similar effects, meaning people have insurance on paper, but they'll have trouble finding a doctor who will actually see them. Dr. Andrew Racine is the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He worries this will hit kids care particularly hard. In pediatrics, we don't like to be catamination. because our glasses always have full. This is the most significant threat to Medicaid in the history of the program. Which has been around since 1965. Racine Warren's reimbursement or coverage cuts could escalate the trend of hospitals closing or scaling back pediatric services.

Since 2008, hospitals have closed a third of pediatric inpatient units, which includes things like pediatric ICU or pickus. It doesn't matter whether you're on Medicaid or not. If there's no picky, there's no picky. Elizabeth Parsons, a pediatrician at Pocatello Children's Clinic in southeastern Idaho, is worried about her practice's future. To cope with the cuts, she and her colleagues are taking a 25% pay cut and working longer hours. It's become more difficult for us to see Medicaid patients because the margins have become negative. I hope that we can survive. I don't know. Pediatricians worry that the cuts combined with expected coverage losses will leave kids in a lurch, unable to get basic care to keep them healthy. I'm Alex Olgan for Marketplace.

Depending on how much time you spend online, you might have already noticed this, that there are courses out there that you can take on almost anything. How to start your own business. How to alter clothes. Something called manifesting. The revenue estimate on the global digital education market come 2030 is $134 billion. That's from the consulting firm, Grandview, research. Emily Stewart wrote about all of this the other day. She's a senior correspondent at Business Insiders.

Emily, thanks for coming on the program. Thank you so much for having me. Tell me about these courses, would you? I guess, first of all, who is offering these things and about what subjects? I mean, basically anybody can offer an online course if you think about it. I wrote a story about this recently, and the way I kind of came into it as I was talking to people who flip stuff that they find at goodwill online. And they said, you know, actually the money for us isn't in selling stuff. anymore, it's in offering courses. And so what we've seen, you know, over the years, especially

online, is people can offer a course in anything. A lot of influencers do it. A lot of marketers do it. And it's pretty good money if you can actually get around to it because you basically film some videos, put them online, sell them, set them and forget it. All right, the flip side of this is who's buying them? Who's taking them? Who's paying the $50,000 to take these courses? I mean, that's a question. And some of them, to be clear, are not, you know, they're not that expensive. I found some online for, you know, $44 where you can manifest money. But a lot of people do it. You think about, you know, in this day and age, a lot of people feel like their skill set isn't quite right for the labor market. They're worried about money. They're also maybe not so sure

about traditional education. And so a lot of people go looking for these things. I mean, I hear masterclass ads all of the time. And not to say that these are like bad necessarily, but the problem is there are so many that it can be really hard to figure out what is worth your money and what's not. Right. So there's definitely a caveat amtore thing about this. But I do want to back up to something you said. There is in the air now unease about this economy and college maybe for some is too expensive and not working out. So they're just looking for other ways to get stable. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, right, if you're thinking about going back to school or you're thinking about going to college, now you might be sitting back and thinking,

you know, this is $40, $50,000 a year, here's an online course that tells me, you know, maybe I can learn these skills in a set of weeks that will be much cheaper, why not do that? And if you think for the people selling the courses, there are also bigger incentives. You know, a lot of influencers, people feel like, well, I'm really subject to the algorithm.

Today, the algorithm loves me. I get an audience tomorrow I don't. And so one way to monetize their audiences is to sell them things directly. and sometimes, you know, that is a course. You say this in the piece, but there is a certain snake oilishness to this, right? You don't really know who's actually giving you useful stuff and who's just kind of, you know, scamming you. Yeah, I mean, some of this does feel like multi-level marketing a little bit where the idea isn't so much that you sell a product.

It's that you sell other people on joining your network. You know, I found a lot of courses that are courses on how to make courses. And some of them say point blank, you don't have to have expertise. You can just make a course. And it's like, well, wait, wait, wait. Why would I make a course on nothing? You know, and I talked to a couple people for this who had had bad experiences who had felt like they had coughed up, you know, $1,500 did not get what they thought they were paying for.

And, you know, regardless of the people even offering the courses, people tend to drop off of these things. I mean, who among us has signed up for something and then have given up? And so it is one where I think a lot of the time the, you know, the expectation does not line up with reality. Not for nothing, but you could do a course on, I don't know, how to write for Business Insider. I don't know. I mean, that sounds nice, but I feel so bad if I didn't like it. No way. You and me both. That'd be on the radio. I don't know. Emily Stewart, she's a senior correspondent at Business Insider. Emily, thanks a lot. Thank you.

Coming up. People are having drinks, buying snacks. I mean, what's not to like? First, though, let's do the numbers. Down industrial is basically flat, down 25 points, 49,141. The NASDAQ off 223. That's points. The percent is nine-tenths of one.

Closed to 24,663. The S&P 500 gave back 35 points, about a half percent, 71 and 38. Dan Ackerman was telling us. us earlier about consumer confidence ticking up in April despite rising prices. No sign of that and how shares of some big retailers did today. Walmart flat, target down 2%. Costco wholesale slipped four-tenths of 1%. A lot of big tech companies are reporting earnings tomorrow. More about that post-haste from Henry Epp. Amazon slipped about a half percent. Meta-half platforms declined one and a tenth percent. Alphabet, that's actually Google. Tick down

two-tenths percent. YouTube as well, a bunch of other stuff. Bonds down yield on the tenure. T-note rose, 4.34% you're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Should you be looking for something corporate on which to hang your economic hat the next couple of days? Might I recommend Big Tech, capital B, capital T? Tomorrow and Thursday, most of the heavy hitters in that slice of this economy are going to report results for their first quarter. And you know the names, as well as I do. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple.

They are together worth $16 trillion. did that math. That is a quarter of the value of all of the companies in the S&P 500. And the way those companies are getting and spending their money can tell us some things about the economy now and what it might look like in the future. Marketplaces Henry App has that one. There's a good reason we watch these results each quarter. Big Tech makes up a large chunk of the American economy. Jacob Bourne is an analyst at e-marketer. In a span of 48 hours, you have just a handful of five companies that, you know, they can swing the market in either direction. But it's not just the stock market. Big Tech can also tell us how consumers have been doing

lately. Industry analyst Julie Osk says, take Apple, which reports on Thursday. Apple gives us a view of consumer confidence in the markets and their ability to continue to spend when we look at things like upgrade cycles of iPhones. Which can tell us how much discretionary spending consumers are doing. Meanwhile, Amazon's results will give us an even broader view of shopping habits. And then there's META and Google, which make a lot of their money selling ads, Osk says. There you also get a sense of the strength of the economy, just based on what folks are spending, to drive awareness and acquisition of consumers.

But investors won't be looking as much at those consumer-facing aspects, says Brent Thill at Jeffries, because companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google. They are effectively feeling the AI investment boom of over $700 billion invested this year in infrastructure, and they are the foundation for AI. Which is a bet on the future of this economy. And as big tech spends to make that bet, it's boosting other sectors, Thil says. You're seeing energy, semis, hardware, infrastructure, all these stocks are absolutely ripping higher. Phil says he'll be watching whether Big Tech,

keeps spending on data centers and whether it's suppliers can keep up. I'm Henry App for Marketplace. We've talked a lot the past couple of years about how in-person events just kind of keep getting more and more popular. There are what fans want, and honestly, live shows are where the money is for performers. An economic corollary to that is that the more people are paying up for concerts and sporting events and whatnot, the more risk that promoters and performers are looking at if something goes wrong.

Enter then insurance policies, very specific kinds of insurance. Joe Words is a weather and climate reporter at Bloomberg. Joe, it's good to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Set the scene for me. Bad Bunny has sold out a bunch of shows down in Columbia. Rain is in the forecast. Obviously, multimillion dollar investment.

What happens? Yes, right. 145,000 tickets sold. This is three days of concerts at, at the big stadium there. And really about $23.7 million on the line, not just in ticket sales, talking, you know, food, drink, merch, all sorts of stuff. And yeah, it's a tricky time of year in Colombia.

We got some rain in the forecast. And it's a notoriously tricky place to do forecast. Just it's got tropical climates and, you know, microclimates there. So his organizers think, you know, we need to ensure. against a potential washout here. So with an eye on the forecast, they set up these weather stations like inside the stadium and broker the insurance that way. Tell me about how that went.

Right. So what they set up was a parametric insurance policy, and this is a policy that will, you know, pay out a set amount and that needs a specific pre-agreed trigger. And the weather stations that they set up were to measure if that trigger. happened. And in this case, a pre-agreed amount of rainfall. And this is an amount of rainfall that the organizers thought would lead to losses for the concert event. The thing is, weather's changing everywhere. Climate more broadly is changing everywhere. And I imagine this applies sort of more broadly than just bad bunny concerts in Medellin, yeah? Yeah, that's right. Look, you know, these parametric

policies and these weather triggers are pretty common with more extreme events. We see them in like renewable energy, right? So a firm might buy them to cover an unexpected, you know, wind downturn or cloudier skies and imagine. And you want to cover some potential losses for your solar energy project or something like that. And in the entertainment industry, we're seeing events really be the predominant driver of a lot of profits in the entertainment industry space. And maybe the risk for your event is not just the... the event itself, but maybe it's a few hours before the event where people are having drinks, buying snacks, and a lot of your profits come from that. You can use these types of parametric

policies to cover that risky period that really might eat into your margins. Yeah, you keep you, you were using the word casually, but honestly, that's what's going on here, right? These companies, the event promoters, also the brokers, the insurance companies themselves, This is a new way or a reimagined way, I suppose, of pricing climate risk. That's right. It's a new way to price that risk, and they're getting better at pricing that risk, both using new tools to look at the data and look at the long-term trends for the bigger risk, but also their pricing exposure, right?

How will they know if this triggering event happens? And now with technology making these sensors smaller and more portable, you can pack it up in a flight case, get on a plane, go to Columbia and set it up and make sure that you're confident that these triggering events have happened and that the payout terms are met. The kicker to this piece is that like three days after these concerts, there were, in fact, huge rainstorms in Columbia, yeah? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, huge torrential rain just a few days later.

So it looks like a smart policy. There you go. Joe Wirtz, Bloomberg, he's in London. Joe, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thanks a lot. This final note on the way out today, it's a new working paper out from the Bureau of Economic Research about CEOs. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including this. The average age at which CEOs are being appointed has risen sharply since the beginning of the century from 51 to 61. There is no single reason for that the paper says, but quoting here, rising demand for generalist human capital leads firms to tradeoff peakability for a huge. accumulated experience.

Jordan Manjie, Zaniel Maharaj, Janet Wyn, Oga Oxman, and Virginia K. Smith are the digital team. I'm Kyle Rizda. We will. See you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. Headlines shift overnight, and then again in the afternoon and again

in the evening. You see where I'm going with this. Hello, I'm David Brancaccio, special correspondent from Marketplace. We'll deliver economic news designed to keep you both sane and informed. One of my favorite ways to make sense at all is with the Marketplace newsletter. Every weekday, our team curates must-read stories from the week and delivers explainers.

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