Marketplace - Inflation trumps wage gains

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

The latest BLS data put real hourly wage gains at -0.3% last month, compared to last year. That’s thanks to inflation running hotter than pay raises. To make up for it, some workers are putting in extra hours or dipping into their savings. In this episode, how much longer can Americans cope with what are effectively inflation-driven pay cuts? Plus: The gender wage gap slows economic productivity, housing starts grow in the Northeast as they fall elsewhere, and we weigh the possible outcomes of next week’s FOMC meeting.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:Last call for Fed rate predictionsInflation has devoured pay gains over the past yearWhy the gender pay gap holds back productivityRetiring at age 37 to give back to the communityHousing starts are down in most of the country. Here's why the Northeast is the exception

In the battle between inflation and our paychecks, guess who's winning from American public media? This is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Sabree Benishore in for Kai Risdahl. It is Friday, September 11th. Good to have you along. So the big news, the big economic news this morning, is that inflation got worse in August. We went from prices increasing by just a tenth of a percent in July to four-tenths percent increase in August. And even if you take gas and food out of the picture,

prices still increased more quickly in August. And now the Federal Reserve has to figure out what it's going to do about it. So let's get into that and the week's other news with Sudeep Reddy, who's at MS now and Kate Davidson, who's at Bloomberg. Hello. Hi, Sabir. Hi. Hello. So I want to just read you with this comment from an inflation analyst I follow Omer Shereef. He says, for the Fed, it is time to put. put up or shut up. You cannot give a speech like you did at Jackson Hole and not support a rate hike at the next meeting. You will either have to back up those words or end up as the boy who cried Wolf. Kate, thoughts.

Yeah, we put that one high up in our story for sure about the implications for the Fed. I think it's, right, it's pretty succinct. I mean, so what did we hear from Kevin Warsh and Jackson Hole? He gave a much more, I guess, decisive speech. Traders, investors were really. looking for him to go a little bit further, not just saying, yeah, we're going to rein in inflation, we're going to get it under control, but really to make clear that they're willing to raise rates. And so he did that. He essentially said that the Fed would have work to do if it couldn't be confident that underlying inflation was moving toward the Fed's goal of 2%. And he also said at sufficient speed. So in other words, they're not going to wait around a long time. They want to see it improving quickly. And so you certainly did not see that in any of the inflation data this week. The Fed is going to meet for two days next week. And they have.

have a decision to make. And so I think we heard from a lot of economists today, and certainly the market reaction seem to agree that it will be difficult to justify holding rates steady next week based on what we've heard from Warsh and others that if inflation doesn't get better, they have to raise rates. If a lot of the inflation that we are seeing is either directly from gas and diesel prices or or indirectly in the sectors that use gas or diesel or fuel, what can raising interest rates do about that kind of inflation, Sudeep? You know, we're in this very strange moment where inflation is obviously elevated.

It's been elevated for many years. It is becoming a credibility problem for the Fed and their credibility problem in markets. There are plenty of investors in the bond market who are wondering whether the Fed is ever going to take action against inflation. So there's a credibility issue at stake here. And I think one reason we saw some surprising market reaction right out of the CPI report this morning, even though we knew it was going to lead to a Fed rate hike, was at least there's some certainty here.

The bond traders are just like us. They want to know what's going to happen next. They want to feel comforted that somebody actually has their hands firmly on the steering wheel. And so there's something to be said there. Obviously, the fact that so much of this is coming, do you. to energy is the core of the argument on the other side. That's certainly what Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, is making and what lots of people in the Trump administration want to make

that just like, wait this out, don't overreact. You're going to constrain demand across the economy. But there's no sign that higher interest rates are actually really holding back the economy at large. Obviously, certain sectors will get hit by it. Yeah. You mentioned bond yields. have been rising, which translation into plain English is, you know, investors are a little more anxious, whether it's about inflation or government's borrowing too much. And we care because bond yields affect the cost of borrowing for the government and for everybody else. How concerned are you about the bond market? Well, I can take that one to agree. I mean, I think that there certainly is a lot

of angst. And I mean, as journalists who follow this, we're keeping a very close eye on it. A big part the conversation now is whether the, you know, the 10-year yield, which does affect and filter through to a lot of, you know, of consumer borrowing costs. Could that hit 5 percent? It's not that 5 percent in and of itself is significant, but it's an important psychological threshold that I think would just add to the worries here. And I think, I think ultimately, we think about what can be done about this, what can the government do about it? Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, has been trying to intervene and keep a lid on things. but he really has limited influence over the kinds of things that are driving up yields right now,

which are really, as you said, of the things you mentioned, inflation and the government's growing debt load. So we've heard him talk about this idea that they're going to release some kind of fiscal consolidation plan. And I think the hope was that by talking about that, signaling that he would offer some reassurance to investors. But then we heard his boss, Donald Trump, come out this week and say, actually, if you vote for Republicans in the midterm election, we'll send $5,000 checks to every. everybody. So, I mean, this is a plan that would cost well over a trillion dollars. Investors are not really buying it. They're kind of seeing through this. And I think that they are, they're not, they're not convinced that there is some big plan in the works to rein in debt costs. So until you can really address those underlying factors, yields are going to be, continue to be a problem. And then,

of course, the war in Iran as well, pushing up oil prices or putting pressure on that. Yeah. Okay. I have a question. about the buying back bonds thing that the Treasury's been doing. The Treasury's buying back bonds to try and maybe bring down yields, aka interest rates. Meanwhile, the Fed is poised to maybe raise them. Is it just me or is that not crazy, that one part of the government is trying to lower rates while the other is trying to maybe raise them? I think what we're going to see here is really just a lot of a debate within markets about whether Treasury can accomplish anything in what it's doing. The idea of a Treasury buyback in such a huge market like this when you've got $40 trillion

in debt and $2 trillion in deficits raises a lot of questions. And the staying power here raises lots of questions as well. The Fed is obviously the big player in all of this. And when the Fed decides that it wants to do something, then markets will pay attention. and until that happens, and unless that happens, you're going to see probably a little bit of noise there moving in the direction of some type of intervention, but it's hard for anybody in the markets to take it all that seriously until the Fed really gets involved and makes its intentions known.

So that's the one to watch, and we'll be able to watch it next week. So deep ready at MS Now and Kate Davidson at Bloomberg. Thank you guys so much. Hope you have a great weekend. Thanks. Thank you. Wall Street today, pretty chipper. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

So inflation, it's high and we don't like it. The only way for a regular person to stay ahead of it is unfortunately to make more money. And surprise, the Labor Department says wage gains did not. keep up with inflation over the past 12 months. So if you take inflation into account, the average American's real hourly earnings actually went down by 3 tenths of a percent over the past year. On the bright side, we are still spending, because we have to, which is good for the economy. So at least there's that. Marketplaces Nancy Marshall-Genzor reports on how consumers are managing to do this. Real hourly pay has been on a downward trend for a while.

Brian Williams is chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank. So you have real hourly pay that's either been flat or falling. At this point, about five straight months now from April through now. Some consumers are trying to make up for that by showing up more at work. The Labor Department says the average work week increased 6 tenths percent in the 12 months leading up to August. William says if the extra hours on the job aren't enough, workers have to dip into their safety. to get by. He says at the beginning of last year, the savings rate was around 5%. We're now at 3%. More and more 20-somethings are trying to save by living with mom and dad, says Sarah

Estep, an economist at the Center for American Progress. That number reached nearly 50% this year. Estep is also worried about apps that offer cash advances, kind of like payday loans and the possible fees and fines on these apps. And it's not really clear up front whether or not, if you're late on the payment, how that's going to affect you. Estep says consumers of all ages are borrowing more to get by using Buy Now Pay Later or credit cards. Aditya Bave heads U.S. economics at B of A Global Research. He's been watching credit card payments that are 90 days late or more. This number has been generally trending up since late 2022, so for about four years now.

But Bovey thinks delinquencies have reached their peak and will now stay steady or even fall. He thinks consumers will be okay. They're incredibly resilient, he says. Still, he has his eye on gas prices. If they edge up toward $5 a gallon, he'll be more concerned. I'm Nancy Marshall Ginsburg for Marketplace. So on the one hand, like Nancy was just talking about, we are all out here just trying to break even between our pay and inflation.

But some Americans are trying to break even with each other. And I am talking about the wage gap between men and women. It has been widening since 2023. We'll get the latest numbers on that next week. As Marketplaces, Justin Ho reports, the widening wage gap is making the economy less productive than it could be. The big problem with the gender wage gap, it discourages some women from even being in the labor force.

If I'm a woman looking out to the marketplace to find a job, I already know that I'm starting from a lower level. Nicole Servi is an economist with Wells Fargo. She says anyone who wants to enter the workforce has to know they'll earn enough money to make it worth working, enough to pay for child care or elder care. And because we have this gender pay gap already in existence, for a lot of women, if they go out to the market and find a job,

they're not even going to earn enough to cover some of those unpaid responsibilities that they have. So some women decide that getting a job just isn't worth it. That means there is a lot of untapped potential out there. Surrey says from the perspective of an employer that's untapped productivity, skilled workers who could be boosting output, but aren't. And so if you, let's say, can't get a really skilled engineer to help push the frontier, let's say, of something that you're building, then that's just going to slow down your output production in the longer run.

The gender pay gap also has an outsized impact on those care industries I mentioned a few seconds ago. And one thing we know about the care workforce, it is predominantly female. That's Chloe Gibbs, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for employment research. She says care work, surprise, surprise, also tends to be underpaid. And as a result, the care industry sees a lot of churn as workers find better paying jobs or drop out of the workforce. And that undermines the stability of the care provided because you have this sort of constant turnover that is particularly pronounced, and we would expect that in a low-wage industry. Problem is care work is infrastructure that supports the entire economy because it allows people

to go to work and be productive. So when the care industry is unstable because it can't find workers, that kind of undermines everyone else's ability to work, parents' ability to work who have young children. They really rely on the stability of their child care arrangements. And when parents can't find that stability, mothers are more likely than fathers to drop out of the labor force. Essentially, that is lost value from the skills and the talents that that worker would bring to the labor market. The gender pay gap also has an impact on workers' kids. Essentially, it lowers investments in children and therefore long-run productivity growth. That's Stephanie Sagueno, an economics professor at the University of Vermont. She says women tend to spend a much higher

percentage of their income on their kids. So when women earn less than men, children get fewer resources. It could be enrichment activities for their health care, for stable housing, all things that affect children's cognitive development, their creativity and their innovativeness in the long run. That means underpaying women, Cigwino says, limits economic growth for generations. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. Coming up. We can't just find a thousand acres. of farmland. Well, you'd think they'd be easy to spot, right? But first, let's do the numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up, 509 points, which 1% to finish at 52,573. The NASDAQ lifted 1%. The S&P 500 rose 9 tenths of a percent. With average diesel prices passing $6 a gallon, let's check in with some companies involved with electric freight vehicles. Swedish company N-Ride, which provides autonomous electric trucks and services for human-driven electric trucks, slow down 8.5% High Leon Holdings, which makes electrified power trains sped up 2 and 1 tenth percent. Bonds fell. The yield on the 10-year T-note rose to 4.97 percent, almost 5. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Sabri Benishore. About 42 percent of Americans are retiring earlier than they thought they would. This is according to insure Allianz.

Now, most of that is for not great reasons, health or a layoff, but for one in five of those early retirees, it is because they feel financially stable enough to just not have to work anymore, all of which sets up today's installment of our series clocked out. My name is Skip Franklin. I live in Western Michigan, just south of Grand Rapids, and I retired in 2013 at age 37. I graduated from college in 98 and went right to work. I was a computer science math graduate, and if you know anything about the economy at that time, that was right about the time Y2K was a big deal, and like everybody was getting on the internet. I immediately had a job.

I was getting paid a lot of money for the time. I basically did nothing but work. So at the end of that time, I basically kind of looked at it and said, you know, there's a lot more to life than this. You know, I've made good money up to this point. I don't have to work right now if I don't want to, so I decided now is a good time to take a break. And having taken that break, a few years passed, and I'm like, you know, I still kind of like this and just decided not to go back. That first year, I didn't do a whole lot of anything. So, you know, it took me a good year of just kind of laying around and doing nothing to realize that, okay, maybe I want to do a little something. I started working with various, just various volunteer things, just one-off type things.

And then a couple years later, it was 2016, I believe, when I found the refugee education center in West Michigan. So I became their IT guy for a while where I did all their computers and printers and stuff. Eventually, they got big enough that they needed a real IT guy, and so they hired someone, which is great with me because that means I don't have to do it. And now I just help out with the tutoring and that kind of stuff. I've made a lot of life choices that don't involve spending a lot of money. So I live in a small place. I don't have fancy cars. I'm not married. I don't have kids. So that's why I was able to invest and get to the point where I'm fairly comfortable. I mean, I live on probably around $20,000 a year. And that doesn't really impact my investments that much. My primary identity at this point is church and friends and family. Well, I should say church and volunteer work. I mean, those two. things kind of go together for me. I don't feel like a drift without a job. I've heard people say, they're like, oh, well, if I retired, I don't know what I'd do with myself. I have a hard time believing anybody who says, oh, if I didn't have my job, I wouldn't feel right. Well, that means

you're not looking hard enough. There's something else out there for you. Skip Franklin, living the dream, retired south of Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you have quit your 9-25, maybe to take a break, doesn't have to be retirement or to do something else, you can tell us about it. Marketplace.org slash clocked out. The U.S. has a housing shortage. We know that. The country needs millions more homes, by some estimates, and yet the pace of home building has been slowing down. Take your pick of reasons, high mortgage rates, labor shortages, general anxiety. The number of new homes breaking ground so far this year is down about 2% compared to the same period last year, according to the Senate.

Bureau. Every region of the country has seen a slowdown, except one, the Northeast. There, housing starts are up 12 percent. Marketplaces Henry Epp reports. Eventually, there will be 32 homes nestled into the new Dogwood Circle development in Milton, Vermont. But right now, it's a work in progress. Seven homes are finished. The owners are already living in them. Three more are under construction. Workers are screwing in drywall. The rest of the lots are still patches of dirt, but that'll change soon, says developer Colin Frisbee of Sterling Homes, standing in the basement of one of the under-construction units. We're going to begin digging tomorrow a duplex next door to this.

The new neighborhood is a short walk to the town's rec field and library, and by New England standards, it's a fairly dense development, 32 units on six acres. The more homes we can fit on a piece of land, the more we're able to divide out all those costs, the land cost, the infrastructure cost, the development cost, the permitting cost. Lowering prices for buyers. Still, the cheapest home here, half a duplex, will set you back $480,000. That's actually a good bit below the median sale price in Vermont. And units are selling, Frisbee says.

But despite a persistent housing shortage in the state, his business is kind of just chugging along. It's a reasonable rational market at the moment. And that's a good thing. markets tend to ebb and flow or closer to an ab. But it's staying afloat, thanks in part to the region's demographics, says Robert Deetz, chief economist with the National Association of Home Builders. Who has benefited from the run-up in not just home prices, but stock prices? Well, it's older households.

And there are a lot of those in the Northeast, he says. And so it's those households that have seen an increase in their net worth that have relatively greater spending power for the housing market. Which is pushing up demand for new homes, and that's helping the Northeast look a bit better than the rest of the country, says Paul Willen, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. You're basically seeing us doing okay relative to where we were a few years ago, whereas, I think, in other parts of the country, they've seen a big fall off.

Coming out of the pandemic, home building boomed across the south and west, but as borrowing rates for builders and buyers rose, that boom came to a halt. Meanwhile, says Willen, We didn't see that construction boom in New England and in the Northeast. So in a sense, I guess you could say we're playing catch-up. That catch-up is slow going for a few reasons. Borrowing rates, for one, and particularly high construction costs in the northeast, Willen says. Plus, compared to other regions, there's just not as much space up here.

We can't just find 1,000 acres of farmland and just go in and, you know, dig sewer lines and build streets and build hundreds of new homes. And even smaller developments like Dogwood Circle face another headwind that developers say make building in the Northeast especially hard, state and local permitting processes. Developer Colin Frisbee says it took two and a half years to get permits for his new neighborhood. And that was a lightning speed compared to some other projects he has in the works. The conservative approach to how some of these regulations are being interpreted make it much more

difficult to provide that housing that is more affordable to more people. Frisbee sites, for example, local rules around setbacks that make it harder to build at the density required to keep prices in check. For Julie Maslack, the increased density at Dogwood Circle came with tradeoffs. She bought one of the new homes here after living for years on a large rural lot in a nearby town. There's not nearly as much space to garden, and for now she's surrounded by construction, but... I also thought about things as I age, you know, like, okay, what if I can't drive? I could walk to the library. I could walk to the rec fields. I could walk to trails, dog park, get my food, all of that. And she's planning to spruce up her new yard.

I put in flowers. I'm going to put in a fence, and then I'll build a little paradise in the backyard. And watch as the rest of the neighborhood builds up around her. In Milton, Vermont, I'm Henry App for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, I was going to say something about how Campbells, McCormick, and other food makers are warning there are sharp price hikes coming. But you know what? I have had just about enough of inflation for today. So instead, libraries. Ohio, Utah, and Washington lead the country in the number of public library checkouts per person, 11 per person in 2024. Almost double the national average. This is via Axios. U.S. public library checkouts are recovering from a pandemic era. drop in part thanks to a boom in digital borrowing. Our theme music was composed by B.J. Leaterman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargolly.

Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer. Neil Scarbro is the vice president and general manager. And I'm Sabree Benishore. Have a great weekend. We'll be back on Monday. This is APM.