Marketplace - Growing GDP, thank GPT

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

U.S. gross domestic product grew by 2% in the first three months of 2026. (It’s a stark improvement to the final quarter of 2025, which saw GDP growth of just 0.5%.) Experts agree massive investment in artificial intelligence is the main driver of that growth. But what does that mean for the rest of the economy? Also in this episode: Financial market predictions fall short of real-life crude oil costs, airlines face an aircraft technician shortage, and social media is in the midst of a bean craze.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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From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Thursday, today the last day of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody. There is some economic data with which we could begin today, and we will get to it in a minute, I promise. But we're going to start instead with a number. That number is 126.41.

The proper denomination is U.S. dollars. The commodity associated with it is Brent North Sea crude, which in the wee small hours of this morning hit the aforementioned $126. And 41 cents a barrel. That's June delivery, which is to say the futures price. Now, as we sit here at the two-month mark of the most severe energy shock the world has ever seen, as every day countries are chewing their way through their inventories and ever less oil is being produced and delivered, the competition for those barrels gets steeper and steeper. And that is showing up in futures market, yes, which I just talked about, but more significantly, in the physical market for oil,

the very high price you will pay to get a barrel delivered to you today. The thing is, as Marketplaces Elizabeth Troval reports, that spot price isn't what financial markets tell us it should be. Let's say I'm trying to buy a million barrels of crude oil. I had a contract from a producer in the Middle East, but that oil is tied up in the straight of Hormuz. So I need oil now on the spot market for a lot more money. Joe DeLora is with Robbo Bank. The physical market is skyrocketing. We've seen delivery for physical Brent crude going, you know, like $144.

dollars. Well above the on-paper prices being set by Wall Street types. It's a divergence of what people think versus reality. It's this tension between what financial markets think is going to happen with the war versus what it's like to actually get oil in the physical market today. Dan Pickering is with Pickering Energy Partners. The financial markets are essentially saying over a period of time, the expectation is peace is going to break out. and that prices will come down. My view is they don't reflect the tightness of the current physical market.

He expects that futures prices will have to come up to reflect that crude reality. The straight of where news is not opening, our inventories continue to draw down literally every single day. And I think where we're headed is that physical tightness in one part of the world is going to meld into physical tightness across the world. And the reality of the physical market is already starting to hit, says Tom Sang with Texas Christian University. Just look at oil price spikes this week. To me, it's almost as if the market woke up and said, oh, look, we got to stop being optimistic.

But are financial markets pessimistic enough? While there's always a chance this war could end tomorrow, saying thinks that with summer travel season coming up, prices should probably be even higher than markets are expecting. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Small solace, though it may be. Brent Futures did calm down as the day went on about $114 a barrel at the close. Equities, a perhaps useful reminder here that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is what's known as a price-weighted index. That is, the more expensive a Dow component is the more a change in that company's share price affects the overall average,

which gets me to the second most expensive company in the Dowell. 30. Caterpillar. Shares today up almost 10%. That drove the Dow overall up a percent and a half. The S&P and the NASDAQ followed suit. We will have the details when we do the numbers. Economic data was promised. Economic data there shall be. First of all, inflation. PCE came out today the personal consumption expenditures price index. I was about to say, as I usually do, that it's the Federal Reserve's preferred measure. But honestly, I'm not sure how incoming chair Kevin Warsh feels about it, so I'm not going to say that. Anyway, inflation, it turns out, is still a thing, up three-tenths percent month on month.

That is the core rate minus food and energy, because they bounce around a lot, up 3.2 percent year-on-year. So there's that. Also, we got economic growth. Gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 2 percent January to March. So said the Bureau of Economic Analysis this morning. Growth was a bit below what everybody had been guessing, but way better than the me a half percent growth in the last three months of last year. Part of it was the pickup and the end of the longest ever government shutdown.

Daniel Ackerman has the rest of it. A big reason for last quarter's GDP growth was, you guessed it. It looks like a lot of that is AI-related investment. Incredibly strong growth in anything that is AI-related. You have the spending on actual equipment, like data centers showing up in there, and then you have businesses investing in different types of AI software. That was Ishwar Prasad of Cornell, Michael Pierce of Oxford Economics, and Shannon Grine of Wells Fargo, all in agreement that AI is pretty much driving economic growth right now.

Pierce says it's not just that businesses are pouring money into AI. But also the boost that that's providing to the stock market. Pierce says that strong stock market is in turn propping up the top contributor to the U.S. economy, consumer spending. Even though it's going to higher income, older, wealth, your households, they're responsible for a lot of the spending in the economy. Pierce says some of the AI excitement is ironically limiting economic growth because U.S. firms are sending money abroad to import chips and computer parts.

Essentially, a lot of that equipment comes from South Korea, from Taiwan. But with so much activity concentrated in one industry, there's a question of whether this is economically sustainable. Stephen Kates is with bank rate. There are some risks. I'll put it that way. But Kate says, compared to, say, the dot-com bubble of 2000, the AI boom appears broader. Construction is happening. Equipment is being used. And Kate says companies like the chipmaker Nvidia are making revenue from sales, not just relying on investment. This is not Pets.com that never made a single dollar and always ran negative profits.

Looking ahead, Shannon Grine of Wells Fargo says she'll be watching consumer spending for hints of where GDP might be headed later this year. It's just in the wake of the ongoing conflict in Iran, sustained inflationary pressure, the slowing labor market, all of these sort of headwinds that are facing the consumer sector. Today's report showed a slowdown in consumer spending on goods. If it continues, Grine says that could be a drag on economic growth. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. As we are wanted to do when we get a whole lot of macroeconomic data, as we did today, the micro is where we turn.

We've called two of our retail regulars to get their take on things from the other side of the cash register. First up, Kalina Bruce, she runs Noir-Lux Candlebar up in Seattle, Washington. Business is pretty steady. We've definitely been filling the shifts in consumer spending over the past year. And so I think that shows up in like a slight dip in overall sales. But we're kind of leaning into our existing partnerships and more community-driven events. We recently just opened a pop-up space in downtown Seattle. FIFA will be in Seattle in a couple of weeks.

And so there's a program called Seattle Restored, which is really focused on activating a lot of the empty retail spaces in downtown Seattle. And so as participants of that program, we have a new space for six months. We're really hoping to see an increase in spending while FIFA is here, but also if this particular location works out, we're hoping to explore a long-term kind of permanent space here. Our costs continue to increase over several areas, particularly as it relates to our cost of goods, our raw materials, shipping. We're always trying to source locally to kind of help offset some of the cost increases. But ultimately, we still have not increased our pricing for our customers. We're trying to maintain an accessible price point, but also, like I said, costs are continuing to increase overall. I feel like I always say, I'm optimistic.

I feel really optimistic about what's on the horizon for our business in particular, although I'm always anxious because a lot of my peers in the sector are constantly making announcements that They're closing. I also just with FIFA coming to Seattle, like, everybody in Seattle is, like, getting activated. But there's also rumbles that it may not be as heavily saturated with tourists as we think. There's also just the complete uncertainty of it all, of just, like, hoping for the best, but also really not knowing what to expect. That was Kalina Bruce.

Noir Lux Kennelbar in Seattle is her business. We will check the fly fishing economy in a little bit. While the flying public is dealing with airline ticket prices 20% or more above where they were not all that long ago, airlines are dealing with a different problem. Old planes and old people fixing those planes. Alison Polly wrote about the shortage of aircraft technicians and mechanics in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. How did we get here with aircraft mechanics being in such short supply?

It's been decades in the making, but the big issue right now is a ticking demographic time bomb. So there's a big retirement cliff that is coming where many aircraft maintenance technicians are over the age of 60. And that means there just aren't enough people who are getting into the field and we're losing a lot of aircraft technicians who are retiring. All right. So what's the industry doing? So there's a lot of different approaches that the industry is taking. First of all, they're trying to get more people into schools to train up for this role. And the average amount of time that it takes for someone in one of these programs is 21 months. So it's not like you can just sign up, walk onto the job, and get started.

You have to pass a lot of tests along the way. So they're trying to increase enrollment in these programs. A couple years ago, United Airlines, for example, was offering a $75,000 signing bonus for aircraft maintenance technicians in San Francisco. Now, a lot of people responded to that, so they don't need to offer that signing bonus anymore. But at the same time, airlines are constantly thinking about their pipeline because they're losing workers as they choose retirement. All right. So we'll get to the retirement thing in a minute, but let's go to the other end of that pipeline. If I'm a 20-year-old kid in a vocational program someplace, studying, you know, airframes and power plants, how much am I looking to make if I get hired at, you know, United or whatever? Yeah, so people with a license who graduate in their first year, this includes all the benefits can earn about $81,000.

You do not need a college degree for this, but the pay does range based on where you're working. If you're working at a smaller place, you're probably not going to be making $81,000 right out of school. Right. You mentioned that there's a retirement cliff coming here. I'm obliged to note, if I could sort of torture this metaphor here for a minute, that much as the people working on the planes are not young, the planes themselves are not young. They need more maintenance, and there's a huge backlog of new plane orders. That's right. And so that means the work is mounting. So there's a lot of demand. So airlines have ordered more planes, but because they're not being delivered, they're holding on to the older planes for longer. What's your sense of, you know, with this retirement cliff coming and with the long trainup time that it takes, it's going to be a while before airlines and aviation in general get out of this jam.

That's right. And next year, 27 is predicted to be the worst in terms of the shortage. So in North America, there will be about 7,000 fewer certificated mechanics than are needed. So it's going to take a while. there are, as we mentioned, lots of things in progress, but you can't speed it up to the point where people aren't getting their training. And you're also losing, as these retirements happen, you are losing some of the most experienced people who have worked with these planes for the longest. So more people are coming in, but it does take a while to get better at the job even once you've been hired. We should say here on the way out that for those of you who are nervous flyers, commercial aviation is still incredibly safe. Just want to point that out. It's incredibly safe.

That's right. Alison Foley at the Wall Street Journal, Allison, thanks a lot. Thanks so much for having me. Coming up. Less than that is not going to give you the benefits or the bean of fits, as they call them. Benefits. It's a story about beans. Benefits, get it? First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is up 790 today. 1 and 610% finished at 49,652. Caterpillar, I watch you through. Most expensive stock in the Dow 30, by the way? Anybody? Anybody? I'll tell you at the bottom. NASDAQ gained 219.9.10%, 24,892.

S&P 500 added 73 points, 1%, 72,9. Airlines, since we were just talking about them, United, picked up 1 and a half percent on the day. Americans stored 3.5% Delta Airlines. Also took off to the tune of about 2 and 2 thirds of 1%. All right, anybody? Last chance. Goldman Sachs. Bond's up, yield on the 10-year T-note down, 4.37, You're listening to Marketplace.

This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Back to the retail counter. We go where Dylan Demery is the owner of She's Fly. That's a women's fly fishing company in Fort Collins, Colorado. So the retail side of the business this year has been very slow. We've seen a definite drop year over year. I haven't seen as much spending on gear or even just, you know,

She's Fly merchandise this year at all. I'm seeing the bulk of our sales are coming in the form of retreats. So people are booking retreats, which is nice. About monthly, I will go through our store, our online store, and make sure that the prices we have are what the suppliers are selling for. Actually, the waiters went up, I'd say probably 20%. and then fly rods went up a bit, but that could be attributed to a new design with the fly rod maker we're working with. Fly fishing gear can get very, very, very expensive, very quickly.

And we try to stay in that mid or lower range because so many of our clients are beginners. And we always say the fish don't care what rod you use when you get out there. The things that keep me up at night are lately it's been the problem with the airlines and jet fuel. So that is going to impact our retreats because they are kind of all over the country. We have a retreat in New York in September and we haven't bought our tickets yet because we just don't know what it's going to look like. we also usually would fly in and out of Bozeman in Montana for that retreat. But we are not sure if the flights are going to be affordable enough. And so now we're considering driving.

And then with the gas prices to drive up there. So we're just saying what's going to be the lesser of two evils here? Do we drive? Do we fly? How's that going to work out for the business? So yeah, it's been definitely a curveball we didn't expect. I did not expect that this year. Dylan Demmery of She's Fly, Fort Collins, Colorado.

We turn now to the humble legume. Beans. They're shelf stable. They're high in fiber and protein. And you can find a can of them at your local piggly-wiggly for like a buck. Unassuming, yes, but beans are having a moment. The hashtag Bean Talk on TikTok has 11,000 videos associated with it. Last year, Grubhub, the food delivery app,

saw bean orders jump by 135 percent. Julian Deutsch is a consumer goods reporter. She's with Bloomberg in London, where she wrote the other day about the bean craze. Julian, thanks for coming on the program. Good to have you. Great. Thank you so much for having me.

Talk my favorite topic, beans. Which that sentence I'm not sure has ever been uttered on this program. I would like you to tell me, as I alluded to up in the introduction, social media is where this whole thing started. Would you tell me what bean talk is, please? Absolutely. So Bean Talk, I've gone down that rabbit hole for quite a long time now. Essentially, it's a bunch of people who are very enthusiastic about beans. Most of these people are doing something called the Bean Protocol, which is where they eat minimum of two cups of beans per day. They say that less than that is not going to give you the benefits or the benefits, as they call them. And so there's a whole list of ailments. They say it cures. It says it cures their skin, skin issues, endometriosis, menopausal symptoms. One woman even said it cured her driving anxiety. I don't know if a doctor would totally back to that one, but it's definitely the cure for everything on Bean Talk.

So, first of all, always consult your own medical professional. But let me ask you this. There is something else, well, I mean, there are a lot of things driving this. Health benefits, sure, beans, protein, all that jazz. Beans are cheap, though, too, right, at a time when food prices are going up. Exactly. And, you know, I actually got into the story because I would go to the grocery store here in London. and there's a bean company called the Bold Bean Company,

and they're selling jars of beans for more than three pounds. And I thought, who on earth is spending? Wow. So three pounds is like five bucks, give or take? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. And most, you know, can get a tin of beans or a can of beans for, you know, 50 pens, so less than a buck, right? So I thought, who is doing this? And I started telling my friends about it, and they said, oh, but they're really good.

They're totally worth it. And so I think it's, and then I start trying as, you know, very important research for this story. And I get it now. They are really good. They're better than kind of the typical bean. But anyway, the point of this is that even that kind of more expensive bean is actually still much cheaper than meat. Right.

And so if you're still looking to get your, you know, your fiber, your protein, you're trying to move away from processed foods. Beans are a really good alternative for a lot of people. Can we talk food trends here for a minute? You are a consumer goods reporter, so you are, I'm going to assume, up to speed on this thing. But do you remember the cottage cheese fad of like a couple of three, four years ago? Is this that?

This is sort of an iteration. of that, yes, exactly, which I was supposed to say actually the cottage cheese thing is still going very strong, at least in the UK. But beans are definitely part of that. It's, you know, people are really trying to find ways of getting lots of their nutrients, so even like high protein yogurts are selling like crazy. And a lot of backlash against processed foods. And so I think people are just really excited about things that are much more just pure nutrients and things that are easy to cook. I should say also convenience is a huge factor here too. Like one of the trends you see in the U.S. a lot of people who want, you know, nicely seasoned beans that they can just open a packet or open a can and just heat them up and go.

And so that is something that's taking off a lot more in the U.S. too. So that convenience factor is a major part of this. I will say scoff, though, I did as I dug into your piece because I was like, come on, beans. There was a recipe there. I forget who the TikToker was who did it, but it looked pretty appetizing. It was this pesto-y kind of thing with some barata onto. I mean, you know, I would try that. Yeah, yeah, that's Natalia Rudin, who is, you might know her better from her handle, and that's nourishments.

And she kind of took off because she used to be a personal chef, and she would do these series about, you know, what she would cook when she got home. And she's made beans look a lot more appetizing. And bull bean company, part of their whole mantra as well is trying to teach people how to cook with beans. So they have lots of great recipes. I did like acaccio pepe bean recipe, which was actually delicious. So I think there are ways of making the very humble bean. a lot more interesting. So you're a, you're a believer, if you will. They converted me. I am now one of those people who is spending more than three pounds on jar beans, unfortunately, but they're very,

very good. And actually, my parents are coming from the U.S., and they are bringing a bunch of other bean products that I want to try from America. So it's happened. They've got me. You're all in. Gillian Deutsch at Bloomberg in London. Jillian, thanks a lot. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. This final note on the way out today in which we started with a number, we will end with with the number 100.2. That is the percentage of our total national debt held by the public as compared to the total size of the U.S. economy. That is, we owe more than the whole economy is worth. The data came today from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. There are some technical bits of that that we honestly don't have time for, and there is nothing magic about 100% versus 99%.

But here's a fact. The more we owe, the more we spend on the interest on what we owe, which means there's less to spend on everything else. Also, and not for nothing, I always find it curious that when the federal debt and deficit are mentioned, it's only spending cuts that are talked about, not, shall we say, the revenue side of that equation. Our daily production team includes Livy Burdette, Andy Corbin, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, McAllis-Ais-Sia, and Sophia Terenzio. Willstorie is the supervising senior producer. And I'm Kai Rizdahl. We Will. See you tomorrow. everybody. This is APM.

Business and the ways we do it are changing in ways that are both more subtle and more radical than you realize. Welcome to compound interest from Samafour Business. I'm Liz Hoffman. And I'm Rohan Goswami. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution. But now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week, we'll talk to the operators, the experts, and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance your sushi order. We'll unpack the transformation of how business and consumers engage with our economy and figure out what lies ahead. Listen to compound interest from Semaphore Business wherever you get your podcasts.