Marketplace - Don't move a muscle!

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

First-time unemployment claims (layoffs, basically) have come in below 200,000 for four weeks running — the longest stretch since 1969. At the same time, the economy only barely added jobs in September. Few layoffs, barely any new jobs, and it makes ya start to wonder, just how petrified can this labor market get? Also in this episode: AI doomers touch grass at a monthly Bay Area picnic, the personal savings rate ebbs to a 4-year low, and Kai explains central bankers’ balance sheet agita.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.Read the stories in today’s episode:A frozen job market means nobody's getting laid off, but nobody's getting hiredOnly in San Francisco: A picnic to discuss AI riskNot too big, not too small: The just-right Fed balance sheetHere's where home heating will cost more this winterAmericans are saving less money — some can't afford to, others are focused on investingUsing retirement to finally dig into family history

There is a certain vocabulary element to the program today. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Thursday. Today, this one is the 8th of October. Good as it always is. Have you along, everybody. From the Labor Department this morning came its regular weekly report on first-time claims for unemployment benefits.

And on its face, it was good. historically low, 197,000 people lost their jobs last week. Those first-time claims have now come in below 200,000 for four weeks running. That's the longest stretch since 1969. We do know, though, from Friday's jobs report, the job creation in this economy is just kind of, meh, honestly. And more than one in four unemployed Americans have been looking for work for six months or longer. You think you know where I'm going, right?

it's a low-hire, low-fire economy, yada, yada, yada. Aha! Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has been forbidden to use that oh-so-over-worked phrase. If not a blank, higher, blank-fire job market, then what? They steady, quite stable job market. That's Jay Hatfield at Infrastructure Capital Advisors, who says the economy's in a precarious balancing act, contracting in some sectors, expanding in others.

We have what would normally create a recession, which is a hawkish-fed, high interest rates, and declining investment in housing. Balanced by red-hot investment in AI and data centers, creating new jobs in tech and construction. Kyle Moore at the Century Foundation offered this alternative catchphrase for the labor market. Stagnation situation. He says employers are stuck in the mud of policy uncertainty. When you have erratic tariff policy, for example, example, it makes it difficult to make consistent hiring decisions for having to expand going forward.

This low churned, stagnant labor market is especially hard for the long-term unemployed and new entrance to the workforce, because people who do have jobs aren't making room for them. Vicki Solemy at CareerSight Monster says lately job seekers have turned. More cautious about pursuing different roles. They're nervous and anxious about leaving the security that they currently have. Many are even willing to go without a raise rather than quit to find a better job. Then the employer that they're with doesn't have an opening to replace them, and so other job seekers, there is no opening for them to pursue. What's Solemie's alternative metaphor for this job market?

It reminds me of a frozen pond. Workers, they're not necessarily falling through the ice because they're not getting laid off. They're skating on thin ice, sticking it out right now. Trying not to fall through. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. Thin ice economy, I'd go with that one. Wall Street today, tech led the way down. Everybody else was along for the ride. We will have the details when we do the numbers. The national conversation around artificial intelligence seems to have gone over the past year or two from, hey, this is great, to, huh, is it a bubble, to, wait, it's going to kill us all?

That's the conversation we all have been having. But AI insiders in the San Francisco Bay Area have been talking about this stuff for years. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino put her ear to the ground at a gathering in San Francisco. An event listing for a picnic beckoned people in the AI scene to spend a Sunday afternoon talking about recent calls to slow down the technology. Did anyone bring either water or sunblock? It's one of those postcard perfect days at this five-acre park. on the San Francisco Bay, overlooking a Giants Dodgers game at the ballpark. Organizer Donnie Christie chose this spot because it's between the offices of Anthropic and Open AI.

Why can't people to labs just like meet at a park in between them and like work out a deal? Christy is a community organizer in the AI safety scene. I have been concerned about existential risks for a long time. Just like what do I do to save the world? He says he's starting small, hashing out ideas to prevent the collapse of civilization over chips and cookies. It's like a microcosm of the sort of cooperation that I want to see. A couple dozen people gather over the afternoon from AI startups, big tech, research nonprofits, and activist organizations. I joined a group sitting in a circle on a big blanket like summer camp.

One thing I agree with is that safety is like an engineering problem. I pretty strongly disagree with that. Really? Okay. I want to hear this. That's Sky Gunasekran, who has a more optimistic view than Elliot Calendar. Gunasekran researches AI agent collaboration at a productivity software company and thinks improving cybersecurity systems would go a long way. But she supports international cooperation to slow the race. I think there's lots of reasons without even talking about the end of the world

and all of these different kind of things. If you just want to think about, okay, like, what are we seeing right now? She points to rogue hacking incidents and anthropic reports that nefarious actors have attempted to use AI for cyber espionage or to build weapons. We just need to spend some time to understand. The more pessimistic, Elliott Calendar, is a protest organizer who spent more than a month demonstrating in front of OpenAI and is now planning actions at the U.S. Capitol, calling for a complete,

complete stop to advanced AI development. We get to the point where it's actually superhuman and everything, and it'll break out once, and then it's over, game over at that point. So, like, just decided that was what I'm going to do the rest of my life, is to make it not kill everyone. Matthew Coriotti sits somewhere in between, both on the blanket and philosophically. We can treat them like people who are managing dangerous animals. He says AI companies should be heavily regulated and held liable for harms. Coriati recently turned down a software engineering job at Amazon with a nearly $200,000 annual salary to take a fellowship with an AI safety nonprofit for a third of the pay.

The world is at risk, and I want to do things to reduce that risk. Everyone I spoke with at this AI picnic expressed that sense of urgency, rearranging and accelerating life plans against the drumbeat of AI Doom. Gunasekran says she's questioning plans to get a PhD. Calendar says he's recalculating risk. I walk across a crosswalk when the cars are still coming at me because it's like if I can save like 10 seconds by taking like a one and a hundred million chance of getting hit by a car, then it's actually worth it for me.

Whereas it wouldn't be if I had like a lot more time left. It's that kind of thing that sometimes gets this crowd labeled as Dumer's. And it's usually not a compliment. But organizer Donnie Christie takes it in stride. I feel like I have a role. It's like a night watchman. I want to help calibrate what is like a Buddhist might say, like a skillful fear, like skillful action in the face of danger.

Well, we are here touching grass, though, so I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. Even Dumers enjoy a nice picnic, at least with sunscreen. In San Francisco, I'm Megan McCarty Carrino for Marketplace. Go to any financial dictionary. Open up the entry for balance sheet, and you'll read something that basically goes like this.

A balance sheet is a snapshot of an entity's financial condition, listing its assets and liabilities as of a particular date. The particular date of interest to us today is today, because every Thursday at 4.30 Washington time, the Federal Reserve publishes an update of its balance sheet. Now, setting aside for a second, the fact that the Fed's balance sheet is different than a regular corporate balance sheet, say. It kind of has to do with the nature of money itself. There's a whole different explainer.

As of today, actually, as of the close of business yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States had total assets of a hair more than $6.7 trillion. Chairman Warsh has made no secret of the fact that he wants that balance sheet to be smaller. One of his task forces, in fact, is all about how the central bank manages those assets. So for the next two or two and a half minutes, why that's a thing? My name is Emmy Nakamura. I'm a professor of economics at UC Berkeley. Well, I'm George Selgin, and I was a director at the Cato Institute,

but now I'm just a senior fellow there and not a particularly active one. Okay, fair, but moving on. The Fed's balance sheet is far larger than it was. was historically. And so it's an important question, to what extent this is something we should want to reverse. Traditionally, it was just treasury bills and treasury notes. It was very boring stuff. In 2008, though, all that boring stuff the Fed was holding got a whole lot less boring, thanks to subprime mortgages and the ensuing financial crisis. There was a notion that markets for housing were distressed. And so the Fed started to buy various kinds of mortgage-backed securities. They

started buying longer-term bonds. And so this was a period when the Fed's balance sheet became much more interesting. The Fed was trying to stimulate the economy when interest rates couldn't have gone much lower. We talked about that at the time. We were at what was called the zero lower bound. So since negative interest rates weren't something that then-Chair Ben Bernanke was interested in, the Fed did something called quantitative easing. By buying all those assets that Emmy Nakamura was just talking about,

it injected trillions of dollars into the economy to help banks lend and businesses to grow. And over the next decade, the assets on the Fed's balance sheet grew from $800 billion to $3.7 trillion. Janet Yellen, when she was chaired, did try to shrink it back down. The markets didn't care much for that, which, to be honest, is yet another whole explainer. But anyway, the pandemic happened. The economy came to a screeching halt. Federal Reserve was once again the lender of last resort. And that really was a response to the fact that during these periods of time, companies and

banks, they massively increased their demand for money and the Fed was sort of satisfying that increase in demand. By 2022, the balance sheet topped out at nearly $9 trillion. It has been unwinding since then to today's $6.7 trillion. Not small enough for Chairman Warsh, as he says all the time. How big, though, should it be? I don't want to say a number, but it wouldn't be trillions. Not much I can safely say.

And so we wait for those task forces to report back. Yes, it's been 100 degrees here in Southern California this week, but winter is coming in some parts of the country. Parts of Montana are even expecting snow. So it is time to at least start thinking about turning the heat on. There's a new forecast from the Energy Information Administration along those lines, And some of which is bad news, but some of which is actually good news. Marketplaces Caitlin Tan has the details.

So what's it going to cost to heat our homes this winter? Well, it depends. Most Americans are not going to experience the same winter economy. Cobanks Terry Vishvenoth says it depends on where you live and how you heat your home. Let's start with the good news. If you use natural gas and live close to the supply, say in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, you're in luck. Yeah, you know what? Your heating bill might be lower this year, and I think that's good news. It all comes down to our huge natural gas supply, says Tom saying with Texas Christian University.

We can't export any more than we currently can. So we do have a surplus of natural gas right now. Which also keeps prices down for the propane market. It's a derivative of natural gas and oil. We could kind of say we have an abundance of natural gas and we're producing record amounts of oil. So we also have an abundance of propane. So that's all great. But say you live in New England where a lot of homes use heating oil, which is basically diesel. It's going to be a much more expensive winter. It potentially could be, you know, they could have record high heating oil bills.

The federal forecast estimates a 34% price jump from last year. Mark Wolf with the National Energy Assistance Directors Association thinks it could be more if the wars in Ukraine and Middle East continue. Because right now, prices are really high, and we really don't know what will happen to them. Wolf is also tracking the cost of heating homes with electricity, which will also be spendier this winter. Utilities have been rebuilding their distribution system, the wires, and the generation capacity, and that's expensive. There's one other factor that could change all of these prices. Weather. This winter is supposed to be warmer, especially in the north, thanks to this year's huge El Nino.

I'm Caitlin Tan for Marketplace. Coming up. We are doing all the things that the retirees are supposed to do. Is it just me or does that sound a whole lot like a job? First though, let's do the numbers. The Dow Industrial has added 51 points today, about a 10th percent, 51,231. The NASDAQ down 345, that's 1 and a quarter percent. 27,193.

The S&P 500, down 36 points, about a half percent. 7765. A new report from the water accountability non-profit food and water watch says U.S. households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago. That increase outpaces, outpaces, rather inflation, grocery prices, and household incomes. Worries about oil supply in the Middle East following new attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, pushed the price of Brent crude up as much as 5%. Today peaked at $105 a barrel. West Exx's intermediate. Also ticked up nearly 4.3.5% to $92 a barrel, eased slightly at the close. Bonds up, yield on the 10-year T-note down 5.22%.

You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Risdahl. The personal saving rate in this economy, it is saving, by the way, not savings. It's defined as how much we all saved, divided by our total disposable income. It bottomed out in August, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, 4.1%, the lowest it's been in almost four years. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes dug into what's going on. Saving has always been automatic for Stacey Burnett.

That New England practicality was imbued in me since I was, like, hatched. Burnett, who lives in southwestern Connecticut, says she used to max out her retirement contribution and put aside an additional 15 to 20% of her income every month. Then, earlier this year, she bought a nearly century-old house. It needed a lot of love. and when Burnett made her budget for repairs this spring, she planned to spend $120,000.

She says that already felt like an insane amount of money. And then? Between April and when the work began in August, the prices of everything just went crazy. For example, she says cabinets for her kitchen doubled in price. Shipping costs went up. Burnett went from saving a big chunk of her income to spending all of it, and then some.

I have one credit card that's maxed out, and I'm trying to pay that down because that interest on it is insane, and it's very uncomfortable. Rising prices have hit a lot of people's ability to save. Vicki Bogan studies household finance as an economics professor at Duke. Inflation and the price levels are rising at significant rates. It rates that people historically haven't been used to. And they're rising at a faster pace than wages. When you dip into savings to cover current expenses, that's known as dis-saving, and it leaves households feeling financially fragile. It's a psychological tax almost to be in a situation where you can't pay your bills until you get that paycheck.

People at the very top of the income spectrum are saving less, too. But for a different reason, the stock market has been going gangbusters for the past few years, and they see their investments shooting up. As their stock market wealth rises, the less and less they seem to feel they need to save out of their income. Jonathan Pingles, the chief U.S. economist at UBS. Basically, every time marketplace plays, we're in the money, when we do the numbers, people with money in the stock market get a little dopamine hit. And so don't feel obliged to save as much of their income.

I mean, in some ways, it's a really remarkable feature of some of the inequality that we're seeing across income groups. You could think of the saving rate as being hit at both ends of the K-shaped economy. Well, the economy depends on strong consumer spending. Lack of saving is also a problem. For example, it hurts the housing market. Coming up with a down payment, actually, is a challenge for many households. And on a longer-term basis, it also increases things like our reliance on Social Security, limits reform. Pingel doesn't think the recent Fed rate hike will significantly change people's saving behavior.

A quarter percentage point boost doesn't mean they're rushing to the bank to open CDs. And for the lower income households, you know, it means higher credit card interest rates, higher home equity lines of credit. You know, it's not really clear that this is going to be the boost that frees up more of their income to be able to save. People still have to buy things. If they're borrowing to buy those things, that's getting even more expensive. So the number under saving and their budget spreadsheets stays at zero. I'm Stephanie Hughes from Marketplace. The median retirement age in the United States, the Employee Benefit Research Institute tells us, is 62.

That can obviously move up or down, depending. depending on how you save. And if you do get the chance to clock out early, though, you might finally have the time to do all those things you have been putting off. That brings us to today's installment of our series clocked out. My name is Kirti Desai. My name is Vijay Dissai. I'm 56 years old. We are both retired from IT careers. We live in Alfreda, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta. We were lucky that we could retire at 55. We've led very busy life, just like most Americans do, you know, taking care of kids, parents. And so this was a planned retirement for both of us.

We are doing all the things that the retirees are supposed to do, you know, going for long walks in the morning with the dog and traveling. We're trying to hit all the national parks and, you know, all the states and all the major league ballparks, all that kind of stuff. But we are also super busy with all the activities that we really really. had been putting on the back burner that we no longer have an excuse. I'm trying to create a digital presence for my father, who was a very well-known sculptor back in India. She was being very polite about her dad's work, but I think somebody who was created like an equivalent of Statue of Liberty for Indians, right?

So there's a statue of a Hindu philosopher down at the tip of the Indian Peninsula. Pretty much every Indians, we're talking about a billion people who know this, and there's like a 2 million visitors every year. Unfortunately, he passed away 25 years ago. And then while touring India a few years ago, my kids mentioned that where can we find more information on grandpa? And that's when it struck me that there is nothing, you know, on the internet. So I wanted to create something for my future generation,

and, you know, for the rest of the world to know. So I've been working and working with Vijay to create a Wikipedia page for my dad. And the people that he worked with are also now passing on. So that kind of gave an sense of urgency to our retirement. We've traveled to India to go see a lot of his artwork. That's been a very humbling process for me. So it's been good. It's been good to work and collaborate with Vijay.

He keeps me together. I can say that. I think she's been very kind. I'm not sure I'm helping that much. I'm in the background. So travel has been a major portion of this first year. For me, it's been a bit much. But looking forward to staying home during the holidays for sure.

Kirti and Vijay D'Sai from Alfred at Georgia. Kirti's father, by the way, was Nariensson Vandekar. You can find his work online if you go looking. If you have left the workforce recently and you have a story you want to tell, hit us up, would your marketplace.org slash clocked out? This final note on the way out today in which the Congressional Budget Office weighs in, indirectly, to be sure, on those rising bond yields we've been banging on about. The CBO gave its first guess at the bottom line for government's fiscal 2026.

Today, the ink is thoroughly read. we spent $2 trillion more last fiscal than we took in. All that government debt is both a cause of higher bond yields. We've talked about how all that debt is making investors nervous. It's also a victim of them because we are spending more every year to service all the money that we owe. Andy Corbyn, Mika Ellison, Maria Holland Horse, Sarah Leeson, and Sean McHenry and Sfayette Taranzeo.

Our other Marketplace production team, Will Story, is the supervising senior producer. I'm Kai Rizdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.