Marketplace - Happy New Year! The cold weather could cost you.

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Natural gas prices are creeping up — the commodity leaped recently in futures trading.  That means your January heating bill may be higher than anticipated. In this episode, what makes natural gas prices heat up and why we can’t just pump more in. Plus, Boeing’s New Year’s resolutions for a stronger 2025 and how women might benefit from the “great wealth transfer.”

From all of us at Marketplace, we want to say Happy New Year and a special thank you to everybody who stepped up to donate and help us plan for the year ahead. The support of our Marketplace investors is so important to keeping our public service newsroom running strong. If you didn't have a chance to donate, it's never too late to support the news you rely on, you know. Give now at marketplace.org slash donate and thanks. We've got an appetizer sampler of stories for you on this first day of 2025, from Boeing to small business to women's growing share of wealth and what that means for the economy. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristin Schwab in for Kyra's Doll. It's Wednesday, the first day of January.

Happy New Year! As we enter 2025, we move, as we always do, deeper into winter. And this year, perhaps, into steeper heating bills. Natural gas futures this week saw their biggest single-day jump in three years. And prices aren't expected to go down anytime soon as the northeast and midwest move into a bone-chilling winter. But it takes more than a cold spell to break a three-year record like that. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells explains what's going on. Even for a three-year high, the most obvious explanation is also having the biggest impact. I mean, natural gas really and truly is driven by weather more than anything else.

Tom Seng teaches energy finance at Texas Christian University. If this becomes a deep-seated, widespread, long-duration cold front, we're going to burn a lot of natural gas, which means we're going to pull a lot of natural gas out of storage. High demand, lower supply, that means higher prices. Also, we can't know just how cold it'll get and how long it'll last. And that uncertainty can lead the market to overreact. But that's not the only uncertainty the market's facing right now.

But you add to that the war in the Middle East, the uncertainty in the Baltic, the war in Ukraine. Geology professor Grant Wach from Dalhousie University says uncertainty makes people nervous. People could just be hedging the next few months to see what happens. Now, Econ 101 says when demand goes up, the way to keep prices stable is to increase supply along with it. Randy Albert leads a consulting firm called Shale Advisory Group, and he says that can't happen quickly. It can take 18 months to bring a new gas well online. When Trump says, well, we'll just drill baby drill, that's great, but we don't have enough

takeaway capacity to get it to market. In other words, we don't have the infrastructure to move the gas from those wells to where it's needed. And the Biden administration hasn't been keen on letting the fossil fuel industry expand. There aren't any signals being sent to producers and people who provide capital for drillers that say, hey, let's go out and drill with Wells and so we are where we are production wise. Long-term forecasts have called for a mild winter in most of the country, so prices could dip once the cold weather moves through. But long-term, Grant Walk of Dalhousie University is also worried about the price spikes that could come during a hot summer later this year. Utilities will

want natural gas to create the electricity to power all of those air conditioners that will be cranked up. I'm Kayley Wells for Marketplace. Wall Street today was closed for the holiday, but that doesn't mean the economy stops moving. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. 2024 was a tough year for Boeing. At the beginning of the year, a door plug blew out of a 737 Max plane mid-flight. The company's CEO stepped down, a new one came aboard. Then in the fall, more than 30,000 workers went on strike, halting production for nearly two months. The company slashed about 17,000 jobs to cut costs. In a message to employees

and shareholders this past October, Boeing's new CEO said the company has had, quote, serious lapses in performance, unquote, and acknowledged that trust in the brand has eroded. Marketplace's Henry Epp reports on how Boeing could correct its course in 2025. on how Boeing could correct its course in 2025. Many of the problems Boeing faced in 2024 did not begin in 2024. David Slotnick, a contributing editor at The Points Guy, says the issues took root over 25 years ago when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. The argument goes that Boeing sort of adopted this accounting first culture that existed at McDonnell Douglas, which similarly hurt that airplane

maker. For years, Boeing leaders prioritized the company's stock price, he says, more than the quality of its aircraft. Now, the company's facing criminal charges over two fatal crashes of its planes, an investigation of the recent crash in South Korea, and months of fallout from that door plug incident. The company's CEO said in October Boeing needs, quote, a fundamental culture change. Richard Abulaffia with Aerodynamic Advisory agrees. They need to restore those connections between people who build the jets and supervise the people who build the jets and the people at the top.

Supply chain delays, he says, have hampered the company's ability to deliver planes. So it also needs to work better with its thousands of suppliers, Abu Lafayr argues. Basically, Boeing needs to go to these companies and say, hey, what will it take to get you to perform? And if we have to give you additional resources, so be it. There's no shortage of demand for Boeing's products from airlines, says Meghna Maharishi, an airlines reporter at Skift. Right now they're seeing a ton of travel demand, a huge boom in travel demand that is continuing

to last and they obviously want more airplanes, but they're just not getting them at a fast enough rate. Because there's really only one other company that makes big commercial jets, Airbus. As Boeing has struggled in recent years, Airbus' backlog of orders has grown. So now Boeing might have an opportunity to make up some ground on its competitor. Again, David Slotnick at the points guy. What really matters is that they're able to just make these planes consistently. After a year full of stops and starts in production, he says, Boeing wants to start delivering

planes at a faster clip. And that's obviously helpful if they can do it. But if they can't do that in a consistent way, then it's really going to be all for nothing. Which makes getting its supply chain and workforce culture in order all the more important if Boeing wants to have a better year. I'm Henry App for Marketplace. If you want to learn more about what's driving business news, check out our Econ 101 course that walks you through all the fundamentals in a way that's easy to

follow. Learn more and sign up at marketplace.org slash econ. owning a small business means you gotta be nimble with things like hiring, supply chains, and customer needs. Sometimes though, being nimble means flipping your business on its head. Transforming your work so much, it almost feels like you've made a career pivot. That's where Maddie Gartman's at. She's owner of Gardi Goodies in St. Paul, Minnesota, which started as a home bakery and has grown into something else. Maddie, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. So I think the last time we talked, right, was about a year ago, and you were selling cookies through your business and doing some content creation. What's happened in the last

year? Yeah. So pretty much for the start of 2024, I decided that I was going to go all in on being a content creator. And there were a couple things that sort of inspired that. One is that I was starting to see that I was making more money that route. And another was that I was starting to see that I was making a lot less money by selling cookies. So it seemed like the right time for me to pivot just because I think people just weren't buying custom hand decorated cookies like they used to. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I think it had a really big boom during the pandemic simply because so many people were

on social media and so many people were seeing my business all the time because they were on their phones. And then, you know, I can only speculate, but I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with the economy, the price of ingredients, it continues to go up and to make it worth my time, I have to charge quite a bit for a cookie. And I don't blame people if that's not where they're putting their money, you know, is towards a fancy cookie. So to me, it just made sense to pivot and go a different direction with my business. Yeah. Well, you are teaching them how to make their own cookies, right?

Tell me a little bit more about that and what that transition was like for you because you were a teacher before this. Yeah. So I didn't want to put all of my eggs in one basket of content creation because that's a little bit scary. But I knew I could always fall back on teaching. And luckily, there's always been a market for people that want to learn how to take the classes. There's a market for people that just want a fun activity to do with their friends or with their sisters. And I got to partner with a local gardening center that has a great workshop area

and basically been able to host a cookie class about once a month for this entire year. And they've sold out every single time. So that's been really, really great. Oh, wow. And then tell me more about content creation. How is that going? Because running a cookie business

and being a content creator are very different things. Yeah, that's very true. Originally I got my start on TikTok in 2021 and then I've kind of been able to add the other apps, Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and have been able to improve my content creation game, you know, as far as upping the cameras and the microphones and the editing software. So I just post videos of me decorating cookies along with voiceovers. Sometimes I tell stories.

Sometimes I just talk about my decorating process. And I also often do mystery cookies where people help me figure out different designs for the shape that I'm decorating. And kind of it engages a lot of people and people really enjoy watching it. What are you thinking as we get closer to a potential TikTok ban? Are you worried about how that might affect your business? I'm thinking that I'm really grateful that I have this partnership to teach classes. And this is the entire reason why I never put all my eggs in the content creation basket. I also am very grateful that I took the time in 2024 to learn the other social media apps

too and to grow a pretty decent following on the other apps so that I wasn't just completely relying on TikTok. Just because I think it's always kind of been a whisper. We've gone through this wave a couple times of are they going to ban it? Are they not? This is the first time that it sounds like it's pretty serious. And so I'm just, I'm grateful that I've had other things to fall back on. So before this, you were a high school teacher, right? What did you teach? I taught high school English for eight years. I don't know if that's what you imagined you would do for the rest of your life. Did you

imagine that this is where you'd end up? No, not at all. And I keep saying, I don't know when it's going to end. I don't know if it'll just keep going, but I'm just going to keep riding this train as long as I can. But yeah, I definitely never imagined that I would wind up here. This all started as a way to make a little extra income when we decided to have me stay at home when my son was born. Maddie Gartman is the owner of Gardi Goodies in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mattie, thanks so much for talking again. Mattie Gartman Thank you so much for having me. Coming up…

There was asbestos, there was a rat infestation, I had a tree growing out the front bay. Ah, the joys of home ownership. But first, let's do the numbers. The markets were closed today for New Year's Day, so let's look back on some entertainment business numbers for the year that just ended. The top-earning films of the last year, according to box office Mojo, Despicable Me 4 grabbed the bronze medal with a gross of just under a billion dollars worldwide, Deadpool and Wolverine took silver at a little over $1.3 billion, and the top-grossing film of the year was Inside Out 2, which took in just shy of $1.7 billion at the box office. How about the top-eossing film of the year was Inside Out 2, which took in just shy of $1.7

billion at the box office. How about the top-earning concert tours, according to data compiled by Polestar? In third place, Pink's Summer Carnival Tour grossed almost $370 million. In second, Coldplay's Music of the Spheres Tour raked in just over $420 million. And no surprise in this reveal, the top grossing concert tour of the year was Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, just over $1 billion. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristin Schwab. One of the big shifts happening in the American economy over this decade is that the

share of financial assets held by women is growing. According to data from McKinsey, women are expected to control $34 trillion or 38% of investable assets by the year 2030. For comparison, that figure $34 trillion was $7 trillion a decade ago. And that transfer of wealth, it'll change the economy. Most immediately, this piece of it, the financial field. Here to chat with us about what this means is Claire Ballentine, a reporter for Bloomberg. Claire, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So what's behind the expectation that women will increasingly hold a larger share of American

wealth? There's a couple of factors going on here. So as we know, women are working more now than ever before. They're making more money. The wage gap is still there, but it's closing. But one of the really big factors is this demographic trend. The baby boomer generation in the US and around the world has a large chunk of wealth right now. And women typically outlive men by five years on average. So there's this transfer of wealth, not just from one generation to the next, but intergenerationally from men to women. And you write in your story about women coming into wealth. It affects many different industries

because, I mean, generally speaking, women spend money differently or have different attitudes towards it. Can you start off by talking about how that works with investments? Yes, definitely. So, you know, we're seeing their gender differences in investing. Obviously, these are very high level, each person has their own opinions on how they're going to invest. But we definitely see more women, a bit more conservative in their investments. So you know, women work really hard to make money and to save it, but they're sort of hesitant to risk it. As we know in investing, there's a balance there. You want to take a certain amount of risk, at the same time, you don't want it to be

too risky and put it all in crypto or something like that. But we are seeing women reporting that they're having more stockholding. So Fidelity does this great study and they found that in the 2024 study, 71% of women had stockholding. That's up from only 44% in 2018, which is pretty massive. Nicole Soule One thing I thought was really interesting was women's attitudes in philanthropy. Can you talk about how that industry is sort of taking on the change of how women donate money?

Yeah. So that's what I think is one of the most exciting sort of aspects of this trend. And one of the real world effects of it is that women across all income levels and all generations are more likely to donate money to charity than their male counterparts. So there's a lot of research that's done on the motivations for why different people give and one study has shown that women tend to give based on empathy. It varies also based on how old the women are, millennial women care about causes like social justice and climate change.

Older women sort of skew more towards religious organizations, those focus on reducing poverty. But across the board, women in general are more inclined to give to charity than men. Well, I'd imagine that these changes might shape these two industries a bit, investing in philanthropy. How are these industries preparing? Yeah. So, this should be a big change. I mean, just seeing more women having more money, more power, coming to the table more, especially when you look at sort of how the wealth management industry is going to have to adapt to it. So a big focus is hiring more women. You know, the wealth management industry is very traditionally male, so they're stepping up efforts to that. And there's also been studies done that

show women really want a relationship with their financial advisors. They don't want someone just to come in and tell them what to do. They want to have a conversation, think about their life goals, their values, and sort of how investing can align with that. How much do you think this helps close the wealth gap and what work is there left to do? I think this is obviously a really huge positive trend. It's putting more money in the hands of women. The stat from McKinsey and Co. is that women will control $34 trillion by 2030, which is close to double last year's total. So that's huge. It's more money in the hands of women, and that's a great thing. Where there's more work to be done, I think, is that there's still only 12% of C-suite

positions in the US are occupied by women. There's only 41 out of all the CEOs at S&P 500 companies are women. So it's a positive sign and really great trend, but it really does highlight that there's more work to be done. Claire Ballentine is a reporter at Bloomberg and she recently wrote about the impact of this money changing hands. Claire, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. What if you had the chance to buy a house for a dollar? You heard me right, a home of your own for one single George Washington. There's a catch though, because isn't there always.

To get the deal, you have to commit to renovations, and you have to live in the house after no renting or selling. There are programs like this in the US. The city of Baltimore relaunched an initiative like this last year. Meanwhile, decades ago, overseas in northern England, the city of Liverpool launched its own version of this project aimed at regenerating downtrodden areas. The BBC's Leanna Byrne takes stock of how it's all worked out. For some people in Liverpool, having the chance to buy a home for the knockdown price of just one pound or about one dollar twenty-five cents was irresistible. But the successful

applicants to Liverpool's low-cost property sales were buying more of a wreck than a house. Steve Ingley was one of them. There was a huge hole in the roof above the bay window on the first floor collapsed while we were actually working on it. Another buyer, Maxine Sharples, also found herself having to take on heavy renovations. There was asbestos, there was a rat infestation, I had a tree growing out the front bay. There wasn't much apart from crumbling bricks.

Liverpool City Council offered people the chance to own a house for just over $1 in 2013 and 2015. It was part of a regeneration policy to bring abandoned properties back into use. With the average house price in Liverpool between $160,000 and $170,000 at the time, the prospect of owning a home for a fraction of that caught people's attention. Tony Mose-Dale from Liverpool City Council was behind the initiative.

We started off with a small pilot scheme of 20 properties and we got something like 750 enquiries and then we rolled out the full scheme and had 2,500 applications. Liverpool is one of the UK's biggest cities with almost half a million residents but in recent decades industrial decline has hit the economy, increasing poverty and leading to some areas falling into disrepair. There were other challenges. Here's Steve Ingley again on the house he bought. In total, 120 homes were sold in 2013 and 2015 and anyone buying had to fund the repairs themselves and agreed to live there for five years. Victoria Brennan, a student in Liverpool at the time, was one of the first people to secure a house through the programme.

I've been watching the house renovation shows and obviously it looks so easy. I learnt so much looking back but at the time it was absolutely stressful. I remember being in the midst of it and thinking, is it worth it? The scheme was a much needed step onto the housing ladder for Victoria, but after a few years she decided to leave. We'd get random kids banging on the window and for me I just accepted it as part and parcel of the area whereas my partner, it did upset him more. I think that was a factor into us moving.

While the initiative to sell the homes at low cost did lessen some of the challenges that blighted the city's streets, Tony Mosdell from Liverpool City Council admits those problems haven't gone away. I would say those incidents are not as frequent as they used to be. There is still a way to go. I think in some ways regeneration never finishes, does it? There's always more to do. The council says it's got no plans to revisit the £1 Home Initiative, but it has now moved into offering commercial premises for the same amount.

The home buyers like Steve Ingle and Maxine Sharples have spent tens of thousands more renovating their homes than that headline figure. But Sharples says that despite all the challenges, it's been worth it. Having the security of your own home that no one can take away from you means that it opens up my life to other possibilities. Ingle says it's been transformational. We absolutely love living here, the people in the neighbourhood, because we've all been through the same thing. It's a really nice place to be.

We all look out for each other. Liverpool still faces challenges of blight and some of its urban residential areas, but the initiative has increased home occupation in the areas where it operated. And residents say it's succeeded in rebuilding some of the sense of community lost in the city. I'm the BBC's Leanna Byrne from Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, saw this in the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been taking credit for hefty judgements against people running

scams like Ponzi schemes that it'll likely never be able to collect on. The journal reports that over the past 10 years, the SEC has written off a whopping $10 billion in fines. Write-offs happen when penalties go unpaid for two years, its collections office uses tactics like garnishing wages to collect fines, a tactic that doesn't work so well when a defendant has the means to pick up and move to a Caribbean island. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Jessen Duller, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Torado, and Becca Weinman. Jeff Peters is the manager of media production, and I'm Kristin Schwab. We'll be back here tomorrow. This is APM.