Marketplace - Finding work as a young person? In this economy?

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

The unemployment rate in December among people aged 20 to 24 was 8.2%. That’s up nearly a full percentage point from 2024, and much higher than the overall unemployment rate of 4.4%. The job market is tough, and getting tougher, but why is it particularly hard for Gen Z? Also in this episode: Trump’s focus on Venezuelan crude could redirect Canadian oil, companies use surveillance data for “personalized” pricing, and China’s trade surplus grew by 20% last year, in spite of U.S. tariffs.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.

There is, in no particular order, energy, inflation, and trade on the program today. It will be more exciting than it sounds, I promise. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle. It is Wednesday, today the 14th of January. Good, as always, to have you along, everybody. We begin today with global trade, not ours exactly, but very deadly. definitely related. We learned this morning that China's trade surplus, that is the difference between

what the world's second largest economy buys from overseas and what it sells to the rest of the world topped $1.2 trillion last year. That is a 20% year on year increase. A lot, needless to say. And it happened in the face of President Trump's tariffs. Chinese exports to pretty much every place in the world were up except here. And as marketplace, as Mitchell Hartman reports, that has implications for China, and it has implications for us. China's trade boom matters to U.S. businesses and consumers, says Jennifer Lee, senior economist at Bank of Montreal. I think everyone should be always concerned about China. Lee says China is so dominant in producing everything from consumer goods to rare earth minerals

that its costs of labor and production set the bar against which other countries, including the U.S., have to compete. But now, with tariffs boosting the cost of Chinese imports, consumers are facing more price inflation, says Gary Huffbauer at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The things they will notice are all the stuff in Target or Walmart. Furniture, clothing, electronics, a lot of that stuff comes from China. The price are now somewhat higher than they would otherwise be. Also, Huffbauer says U.S. factories are hurting because of the decline in trade with China. A lot of imports from China are intermediate goods which go into producing manufacturer goods. The firms can't get them, and they're more expensive.

And as a result? Manufacturing employment is actually down in the U.S. this year. U.S. agriculture is suffering, too, from the decline in exports due to China's trade retaliation. It's very painful for farmers, especially soybean. China just doesn't buy from the U.S. It buys from Brazil or other countries. Another reason all of this matters to the U.S. is that China is our biggest competitor in global markets. And here, China appears to be winning, selling more to Africa, South America, Asia, the Middle East.

And its biggest companies now dominate in the technologies electrifying the planet, says Bank of Montreal's Jennifer Lee. They're still way ahead of everybody else in terms of production of anything clean energy related. Plus, China isn't competing so much on its low cost of production anymore. says Columbia Business School climate economist Gernett Wagner. China is no longer the cheapest for labor. China is the place for advanced manufacturing. Robotics is certainly something China dominates these days. Wagner says that used to be the U.S.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, technology stocks seem to have fallen into disfavor. We will have the details when we do the numbers. We all know that corporate American knows. a lot about us. Specifically for us right now about our buying habits. What time we shop, what brands we like, what we put in our online shopping carts, and then delete, you name it. And that information is really powerful, not just for advertising, but increasingly to decide how much any given person might pay for something. You have heard perhaps of dynamic pricing when prices change in real time.

Now meet surveillance pricing. Companies setting different prices for different consumers. Marketplace of Kristen Schwab explains what's going on there. My husband, John, and I are standing outside a supermarket in Queens, and we decided to try a little experiment. How much would an Uber cost to get home? Okay, so put in her address. Okay, ready? On the count of three. One, two, three. I got 891. For a regular Uber X. I got 996. Why does it want me to pay more than you? I don't know. I don't really use Uber, so maybe it's trying to get me to use it more.

That's one theory, though the company says it does not personalize fares. In a statement, Uber said variations in prices reflect things like how many drivers are active and how many customers are requesting similar trips. In general, though, surveillance pricing is a thing and not a new one. In fact, it's been around in some form as long as commerce has. Joseph Turrow is author of The Voice Catchers, how marketers listen in to exploit your emotions, your privacy, and your wallet. People think that personalization is a 21st century phenomenon due to the internet. It goes back to peddlers and before. He says shopkeepers would game out what customers were willing to pay.

They would actually keep notebooks on the people they spoke to and would write down specific characteristics. Characteristics like what kind of clothes you wore or who your friends and family were. The difference, though, is before a business owner had to guess if a woman's baby bump was indeed a baby bump. Now a retailer knows the instant she adds prenatal vitamins to her cart. It's legal to do it. And some economists would say that price differentiation is just part of the way that economics works. But to me, that's problematic. He says a lot of consumers have no idea surveillance.

pricing is happening. Instacart recently ended a pilot that allowed retailers to charge different prices for people living in the same city. How common this kind of practice is, no one really knows. But Chica Jane, a retail partner at the consulting company Simon Coucher, says retailers are watching us closely. Behavior patterns, their browsing history, their loyalty that they might have, whether it's through credit card or through points. And so you do see that happening more more. Often, retailers are using that info, technically not for surveillance pricing, but surveillance discounting. Here's a coupon for being a member or 10% off that immersion blender sitting in your cart. It's why, as a consumer, it is more difficult than ever to figure out

if you're getting the best price. Garrett Johnson is a marketing professor at Boston University. Price discrimination sounds really scary, but effectively it means that it's good for some consumers and not so good for others. He says, if you want to compare prices, you kind of need to hide. You can open the website in incognito mode, using your mobile phone, maybe even turn off your Wi-Fi. But are we really going to do this dance every time we buy something as mundane as toothpaste? I decide to shop for toothpaste on walmart.com on two different browsers.

On one, I'm signed into my account, which has my information. On the other, I'm anonymous, but add my shipping address for an exact location comparison. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Most of it looks the same. Oh, here's one. Same Colgate toothpaste, same cool mint flavor, same 6.3 ounce size, different prices. On the page where I am not signed into my account, it is $3.74. And on the page where I am signed into my account, it is $3.74.

$3.96. I reached out to Walmart about their pricing policy. In a statement, the retailer said, because prices can vary by market, customers may occasionally see slight differences as price matches and changes are executed in real time. All this to say, personalized pricing or not, there's some kind of algorithmic something happening here. Turns out, companies know a lot about us, But we don't know so much about them or how they decide what we pay. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. With full awareness that two-month-old economic data is of, shall we say, limited usefulness, I will note here for the record that we got last November's producer price index this morning,

up a bit from October, were wholesale prices running at 3% year-on-year. So maybe that portends higher consumer prices at some point. But the thing about inflation and where the data says it might be headed is that at least half of the challenge is how we feel about where prices are going. And we're already been feeling like inflation's going to pick up. You throw in the uncertainty surrounding the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department going after Chair Powell. Well, marketplace of Nova Sopho takes it from there. The direction of inflation and the direction of interest rates are as much about what we think, will happen as about what's actually happening.

If you expect inflation to be worse in the future, you want to avoid those future of price increases, and you might do that by buying things now when you still think they are relatively cheaper. Joanne Schu directs the monthly surveys of consumers at the University of Michigan. If enough people rush to buy things, they'll boost demand and push up prices. Conversely, workers may also demand higher wages if they think life is going to cost more in the future. If enough workers do that and firms feel like they are able to pass on those labor costs in the form of higher prices, then that is what becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Right now, the University of Michigan's survey finds long-run inflation expectations are not terrible, 3.4%. But it could get worse if people lose faith that the Federal Reserve will act in the interest of keeping inflation in check and think that it's influenced by politics instead. Yelena Shuliatyeva is with the conference board. And this way, it could result in high inflation expectations, and it's very difficult to put it back, so to say, in the Pandora box. It's not just consumer expectations we have to worry about. Financial analyst Stephen Kates of bank rate says bond markets could get skittish too, if they think the Fed's short-term actions are counterproductive and will fuel inflation in the long term. If there's expectations that inflation is going to be higher in the future,

then long-term bond yields are going to rise. Borrowing costs are going to go up, and we can get into this cycle that can be a bit of a flywheel. That's hard to stop. Long-term bond yields are what determine what consumers end up paying in credit card rates, car loans, and mortgages. I'm Nevasafo for Marketplace. Coming up. And you're looking through the images and you're like, God, these suck. Not everything can be picture perfect, I suppose. But first, sure, why not? Let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is down 42 points today, a 10th, 1%, 49,149. The NASDAQ dropped 238 points. That is 1% finished at 23,471. S&P 500 down 37, about a half percent, 69 and 26. Tech was down, as I said, but the AI Data Center construction boom has been great news for some heavy equipment companies this year. Caterpillar, most particularly, the manufacturer of those big excavators and diggers is skyrocketed to a market valuation of around $300 billion. Texas base, by the way, Caterpillar is. Ticker symbol, anyone? Come on, it's pretty easy.

CAT, not a third of 1% competitor Deere and Company. They do green. Tractors and mining equipment, bunch of stuff, added 2.5% on the day. Bonds up, yield on the 10-year T-note down 4.13%. You're listening to Marketplace. Marketplace podcast is supported by Intuit QuickBooks. In a new year, momentum matters. For small business leaders, every smart decision comes down to cash flow, which determines where you stand today and how you move forward tomorrow. With Intuit QuickBooks's powerful money management solutions, gain the clarity and control to turn cash flow into confident growth. QuickBooks saves you time and yields real-time insights. With QuickBooks, schedule bills based on cash on hand,

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Licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdal. A couple of oil data points on the way to this next item. First of all, crude. Both oil benchmarks, West Texas and Brent, have been rallying since the first of the year. Down a little bit today, I should stay.

Still, though, on the cheap side, $60 to $65 barrel, each of them, worth keeping an eye on. Also, there are noises being made. That's amorphous, I know, but that's really the only way to characterize the reporting, that Venezuela is going to start ramping up production soon-ish. Which gets us finally to the point. President Trump taking Venezuela's oil is complicating the U.S.-Canada energy relationship.

Canadian crude exports to the United States have been increasing for years, in part because it is so heavy and so thick, perfect for the specialized U.S. refineries that you need to process it. Heavy and thick, just like Venezuela's making this another moment that Canada is going to start looking for new energy markets. Marketplace is Elizabeth Troval. How's that one? The U.S.-Canada crude oil relationship has a lot going for it. Proximity, friendship, and, crucially, timing. Around the same time that Latin American crude was beginning to soften, Canadian production was beginning to accelerate. That's Kevin Byrne with S&P Global Energy.

In the 2000s, U.S. refiners were able to replace missing Venezuelan heavy crude with Canada's. But now, if some of that Venezuelan crude comes back, Abbey Regindran with Energy Intelligence says That is likely going to have to get kind of backed out of other sources of which Canadian crude is going to be your number one source of being substituted away from. This will play out on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Refinaries there were literally built for heavy Venezuelan oil. Over a million barrels per day of Canadian heavy crude is used currently in the Gulf Coast,

according to Kevin Byrne. if it has to compete with more Venezuelan crude? It comes down to price, and it's ultimately the impact. It's going to be a price impact. But Canada can sell to other countries. Ryan Kellogg is with the University of Chicago. This is sort of yet another reason to think hard about diversifying their market and try to find markets that are not the U.S.

And since Canadian oil is landlocked in Alberta, that requires building more infrastructure. Rory Johnston is an analyst with commodity context in Canada. Most of the debate now, most of the discussion, is going towards expanding pipeline capacity to the west coast of Canada, through British Columbia. So those barrels can get directly to Asia from Canadian shores. One big potential buyer, China. If all of a sudden, China is getting less Venezuelan barrels,

that just increases their demand for Canadian barrels. And I think we've already seen reports that we've seen increased bids from Chinese buyers. for Canadian heavy crude at the West Coast. Johnston says the recent geopolitical move with Venezuela underscores to Canada that the U.S. is a less reliable partner than it once was. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Fair warning. I'm going to throw some numbers at you here, something they tell you never to do in business journalism radio class,

but I'll go slow. The past few months have been rough for young people just entering the workforce. The unemployment rate in December for people 20 to 24 was 8.2%. That's down a 10th of a percentage point from November, still though well above where it was a year ago. It's also way higher than the 3.7% unemployment rate for people in what economists and demographers call the prime working years. That's 25 to 54. So Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has more now on what it's like to be 20-something and trying to find a job in this economy. 24-year-old Bella graduated from the College of Charleston last spring with a degree in psychology.

By the time she finished school, she knew she didn't want to be a psychologist. So she started looking for any job. Yeah, sales, receptionist, food of beverage, anything. Bella's been applying for positions since August. We're not using her full name because she's concerned it could hurt her job prospects. She blocks out time for her search, spending up to four hours on job boards every day. They make it very easy to apply for jobs on there. You can just upload your resume and quick apply.

But I think with that, these companies probably see a lot of people applying that way, which makes it hard to sift through on their end. She's applied for about 30 positions, but hasn't landed an interview. It feels like a cycle to me where I feel depressed because I don't have a job. And then I go and apply to some things and then not hear back. And then it just starts over like, oh, I'm depressed because I don't have a job. I didn't hear back from them. And then it just kind of repeats itself. Bella is caught up in a cooling job market where employers aren't laying many workers off,

but they're not hiring new ones either. Economist Guy Berger is a senior fellow with the Burning Glass Institute. Who is vulnerable to weak hiring people that are coming into the workforce for the first time? Whether they're high school graduates and their late teens or associate degree completers in their very early 20s or college grads. and these groups have really gotten hammered. Berger says it's possible AI is taking some of these entry-level jobs, but he thinks for the most part, employers are just sitting tight. This just hits. People that need a job more than people that already have a job,

and who needs a job almost more than anybody else, somebody would just finish school. That hit at the beginning of a career can create a scar that lasts a person's whole life. UCLA economics professor Tilvan Wachter studies young people who enter the workforce during a recession. It takes a while to find that good job, and then it takes a while to re-accumulate those skills, and you're just behind. Von Wachter says these workers tend to earn less over the course of their careers, making for more stressful marriages, smaller families, and worse health. People who entered the workforce in 2008, they are still feeling that.

Now, to be clear, we aren't not in a recession right now. And Von Wachter says the fate of these young people hinges on what happens in the next few months. We hope that young workers who have had a hard time finding a jobs will recover, right? But if it takes a long time for them to find a job, then they are at risk of these longer-term chronic expenses. In the meantime, young people are pivoting,

some of them more than once. 24-year-old Corbett Glarros graduated in 2023 with a degree in biology from George Washington University. He applied for over 100 research jobs. Most of them, you didn't even get a response. It was just like waiting this, even a rejection would have been nice. So he got another degree, a master's in business studies, with a focus in AI and quantitative business.

Still, he couldn't find work in his field. He's fallen back on his bartending skills. Because, I mean, the money's good. Pays the bills. Glareos says that bartending involves problem solving, which will be useful in any career. Also, there's a steadiness that he likes. People, they get off work, they want to go eat, they want to go drink. You're always going to need somebody to serve that food and alcohol. I'm good at that, so I'll always have a a job. He's grateful to have work, even if it's not the career he imagined. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace. Young workers are having their troubles getting started, as Stephanie Hughes was

just telling us. But the job market can pull you in all kinds of different directions. And even for older workers, experience doesn't always mean stability or knowing where your career is going to go next. Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy. I'm Christina Peters, and I've been a commercial food photographer for over 30 years, and I'm transitioning to the fine art world. I'm based in Delaware, and before that, I was in Los Angeles for many, many years. First time I started shooting, I was eight with my dad's camera. This was in Days of Film. When I was little, I had the visual in my mind of what I thought the image was going to look like. And again, this is Days of Film. And so you take all the pictures, you run the film through Kodak, and then you get it back two weeks later, and then

you're looking through the images, and you're like, God, these suck. You know, these really suck. Why? Like, why do they look so different from what I remembered? And so that started the quest to pre-visualize something and then be able to exactly create it as a photograph. Making photography a career without it being a full-time job at another company, everything is gig work. I joke around that I'm always unemployed. A job could be one day, a job could be three weeks. But once I focused on food, that's when things really took off from me. So there's different types of food clients.

When we're working with a magazine and photographing at a restaurant, if the client has a chef and they're insisting on doing the food, then I ask the questions like, okay, so this is different than plating for the restaurant, you're planning for camera. Do you know what that means? You have to tilt things up so that we can see things. It'll look normal in the photo, but on set, it'll look crazy. And when we are doing things commercially like for the big brands, so like fast food brands, what you see on those ads are completely not like what you get in real life. You know, we might have spend an hour and a half in the studio creating that food product. Multiple hands are on the food. It's going to have oils on it. It could even have colorant and things like that that are food

safe. But yeah, not a feeling. In 2020, I was like, well, I've always loved fine art photography. I've been doing it on the side for decades. Why don't I really start focusing on making a print shop. But let's be honest, people don't need fine art. I mean, arguably, I think they do. But when I'm working with an ad agency, the end goal is to sell that thing, not to make an image that is connecting with somebody and giving them an emotional response. It's very, very different. So that's not making near as the amount of the commercial photography at all. So I want to flip it. But yeah, I'll be it. I'll always be shooting.

There'll always be a camera in my hand. That's never going away. Just maybe what's in front of the camera is going to be changing over the years. Christina Peters. She is a photographer in Newark, Delaware. We definitely do need fine art by the by. We cannot do this series without you, so take a second, would you? Let us know what's going on.

Marketplace.org slash my economy. This final note on the way out today in which I tell you something, already know in your gut. While I was out yesterday on a reporting trip, Stephanie Hughes covered CPI for us. Not so bad, right? 2.7% year-on-year. But the Hollywood reporter dug into the data in its area of interest and uncovered this little tidbit from the category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls subscription and

rental of video and video games. That includes Netflix and HBO Max and Disney Plus. Inflation there in December? Hang out of your hats, gang. up 19 and a half percent month on month. I will be right back. I have to go cancel some of my subscriptions. Our media production team includes Brian Allison,

John Foki, Montana, Johnson, Drew Jonstadt, Gary O'Keefe, and Charlton Thorpe. I'm Kyle, Rizzdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more.

That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.