Marketplace - Job numbers fall short of expectations

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

The latest jobs report showed a loss of 92,000 jobs in February. After months of slightly easing, unemployment crept up too, to 4.4%. Even the health care sector, which reliably grows every month, lost 28,000 positions. In this episode, is it a blip or a sign of more cuts to come? Plus: Eli Lilly announced a new initiative to address the cost of GLP-1s, meteorologists build dedicated followings on social media, and we recap the week’s economic news. 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.

You got your rock, you got your hard place, you got this economy pretty much stuck right in the middle. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Friday today. This one is the 6th of March. Good as always, to have you along, everybody. Just to be completely clear here, the rock is inflation higher than we want and most assuredly going higher in no small part because war is inflation. The hard place is the labor market, which we learned today, well, it's a bit more challenged than we all had probably thought. The economy, well, that's us, and it's where we're going to start today. Sudip Reddy is at MS. Now, Courtney Brown, is it Axios. Hey, you two. Hi, hi, hi.

Courtney, you get to go first. Jobs, we lost 92,000 of them. Unemployment rate ticked up. I would like you to discuss for me in the next 45 seconds what you make of that given oh, everything. Wait, like, we learned earlier in the week from ADP and other private sector data that maybe the labor market was on better footing. I wrote a story that said that momentum was the story of February and then 8.30 this morning hits. And it's like, oh, never mind. Maybe the strong job gains that the government reported in January was a little bit of a head fake. And maybe the story really has been intact the whole time that this labor market has a very soft underbelly. And that's a concern for everyday Americans, for economists, and for the Fed. I love how you started with, wait, and you're like offended at what the data said.

I'm upset. Shedip Reddy. I know. Look, I hear you, man. I hear you. Sudeep, if I use the word stagflation now, because economic growth is happening still. but look, there's a war on and oil prices are up and who knows what's going to happen. And inflation is still too high.

Is stackflation, am I bringing that one out of the barn too early? It's something we should worry about. The overall growth rate in the economy has actually been fine. It's just the job market has been extremely weak. Inflation has been a touch too high. Neither one of these is at disastrous levels or basically at stall speed with the job market. Now, if you look at the trend, we've had, I think, probably half of the last nine months have had negative payroll number. So that's not a good place to be.

That rarely happens when things are just fine. And inflation, we do have to see. It's a week of this 35% surge in oil is worrying. If that sticks around for four weeks or six weeks, then it's going to embed in inflation expectations. They're going to have people kind of starting. to panic, they'll pull back on spending, and yeah, you do then get this deflation scenario. Courtney, let's turn to the geopolitics tax that we're all paying now, and that's not my original phrase. I saw it somewhere on the socials, and I would credit it if I remembered. But Kathamara

Impel, our sometimes colleague here on Fridays, now at the bulwark and MS now, she wrote the other day and said, look, if the president wanted prices to go up, what would he be doing differently? And I I wonder, I mean, look, you're an economics reporter and not a political scientist, but it does seem that that's exactly the result of all of these policies, that these prices are going up because of what the president's doing. Right. And so there's the war, but there's also, you know, in the backdrop, the trade war and tariffs that might be going higher, the president has made it very clear that what the Supreme Court scrapped, he wants to replace. in full. So you have those two forces and many other forces kind of coming together and making the environment look more expensive for consumers who are already very upset about how expensive things are. They don't really care about inflation, right? They care about price level and prices are high and they just don't want to see prices go even higher. Right. So, Sadiab, that gets me to

to the next point I think I want to talk about, which is I've said over the past couple of days, when will the markets hit the president's pain point? And let me flip that on its head and ask you when you think we get to the consumer pain point, right? Because both oil benchmarks are now above 91-ish something dollars. Gas is up, as you said, you know, like 30, 40 cents in the last four days. There's a consumer pain point here. And let's remember consumers have been incredibly resilient. when does that start getting beaten down? Historically, consumer pain builds in the background. It happens first to lower income consumers.

We're seeing some of that. We're seeing it in delinquency rates for certain types of loans. You start to see it. But it's just that in modern times, we have never seen a series of geopolitical shocks to our economy like this. We've never seen tariffs like this. We've never seen immigration to the United States being cut off this way, certainly not so suddenly. We've never seen the Strait of Hormuz being effectively shut down and oil having its fastest increase in 40 years. We haven't seen all of those individually.

We certainly haven't seen them collectively. And so it's really hard to tell what happens when you put all those things together and light a match right there. Something bad usually would be expected to happen. It's just it probably will come in a way that we can't quite see right now. Well, let's crystal ball this. Courtney, what are you looking for? What are you, what's your indicator here of choice as we develop, you know, war and inflation and jobs and all of that? I'm looking at consumer sentiment. And I was at a conference recently and, you know, Chicago Fed President Austin Gouldby was kind of poo-pooing consumer sentiment data saying it's not a good predictor of what consumers actually do. Okay, I get that. It's true. But I do think I'm so curious. that the pain point, if you will, for consumers, if you look at the sentiment data, has been inflation. When do we start seeing, do we start seeing consumers saying, hey, it's not just

prices I'm mad about. I'm actually mad about the labor market too. I'm actually really feeling like there aren't a lot of job opportunities out there. We haven't really seen that side of the equation as much as the inflation side of the equation. So I'm curious to see if those two factors come into balance a little bit more. And then, of course, the hard data. I want to see what is the blip? Is January the blip, the strong jobs report? Or is February the blip? The weak jobs report. So I just, I need more data. Like Fed officials, I need more data. Well, you are true to your beat. Yeah, what, what is the blip is a really good thing? I will say that Raphael Bostek, who used to be at the Atlanta Fed until like a week ago, said the same thing to me

about consumers when I talk to him before he stepped down. He basically said, you know, consumers, whatever, they keep spending. And you're like, all right, sir, but still. Sadipe, same question to you. Be brief, because I got one more thing I need to ask both of you. But what are you looking at? I look at jobless claims. It's the indicator of whether we go from the slow or no hiring economy to the firing economy, and that will be the tell that it's all falling apart if we do see jobless claims go up and we have not, thankfully, for quite a while. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, Brayette. brand new game. It's an oldie but a goodie, just a change in the title. What is Kevin Warsh thinking in five words or less? Because if he gets confirmed in May, this is his very big headache. Courtney, you get to go first. Five words or less.

Hmm. How am I going to wrangle this committee? Because you know, I think that's going to be speaking. That's six, but that was good. That was all right. I mean, as you said, the jobs market is, doesn't look great. And, you know, Warsh has supported the idea of rate cuts based on AI-driven productivity gains. But the job market doesn't look great, but neither do inflation numbers. That's not an environment that you can necessarily cut rates into. You just can't, right? Sudeep, five words. Kevin Warsh's inner dialogue.

Not good. Duck in cover. He's got a jobs problem. He's got a jobs problem. He's got an inflation problem, and he's got the president coming at him the moment. he is confirmed, and that is not going to be a comfortable place to be if you want to be an effective Fed chairman in an environment like this. 99 problems at Lee.

Citibretty at MS now in Washington, Courtney Brown at Axios. Thanks, you too. Thanks, Kai. Have a nice weekend. Wall Street today. I mean, do I really have to tell you? Details numbers when we get there. The labor market headlines we were just talking about, so deep in Courtney and I, but this

morning's jobs report is worth another couple of minutes because the best of the best of big shift this month was in health care, usually a slice of this economy that grows pretty reliably month on month. Last month, though, down 28,000 jobs. Marketplace's Kelly Wells explains what's going on there. We're going to break this down into short, medium, and long-term trends. Let's start with the biggest and most immediate factor here, the Kaiser Permanente strikes. The estimates are that about 31,000 workers were involved with those strikes, and so that does show up in the jobs report. Daniel Zhao is chief economist at Glassdoor. He says that dip is temporary. So we should see a lot of those jobs bounce back in March when those folks come back to

work. But all of that being said, health care jobs growth was still slow even if you do account for those striking workers. Because remember, we went from adding 77,000 health care jobs in January to losing 28,000 in February. 30,000 striking people is a blip and doesn't explain the whole gap. Which brings us to the medium-term trend. Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. If you look at a hospital, you look at doctors' offices, whatever, they're getting much their compensation is coming from government programs.

Medicaid, Medicare, that kind of thing. The government cuts mean less health care funding, even. even for the private sector jobs. When those are cut, that means they have to tighten their belts, and part of that means fewer jobs. So we've got strikes in the short term, funding cuts in the medium term. Both of those mean fewer health care jobs. But...

One month of data, this thing that we're seeing today, it can happen. I wouldn't put too much stock in it. Andy Challenger is chief revenue officer at the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. And he says the long-term outlook for health care jobs is much rosier. When we look at the long-term demographics of the country, we expect health care to be a segment that will grow for a decade. Because as the U.S. population gets older, the demand for health care jobs will keep growing. I'm Kaylee Welles for Marketplace. Way-loss drugs are, as you have perhaps heard, hugely popular.

They're also very expensive and not universally covered by employees. employer health insurance. Only about half of big companies do far, far fewer small and mid-sized companies. So Eli Lilly, purveyor of Zepbound, is trying something new as Marketplace's Nova Saffo reports. Many companies have been reluctant to include GLP1 weight loss drugs in their health benefits. For one, they cost a lot and a lot of people want to take them. Matthew Ray, with a nonpartisan health policy research from KFF, has been surveying companies about the issue and says that those that do pay for the drugs have found themselves in a pickle. Many employers were ending spending much more money than they were anticipating.

So we get big chunks of employers in our survey and through discussions with employers who told us that they blew the budget. That's led to a serious math problem, says Luca Mayini of Harvard Medical School. Premiums have gone up this year for a variety of reasons, and I think GLP-1s have contributed to about 30% of that increase. Some companies have even dropped coverage of them altogether. Overall, only one in five employer-sponsored health plans cover the drugs for weight loss. Eli Lilly has announced a new initiative trying to address these problems.

Senior Vice President Kevin Hearn says they're offering one transparent price, $450 a month for Zepbound, so that companies can budget better. We hope that the ability to see a discreet and clear net cost can help employers understand, And could they make this work and potentially access a new class of medicines for their employees? Eli Lilly is also partnering with telehealth providers to help companies administer the drugs. And then the employer can choose, do they want telehealth services? Do they want to wrap around obesity management, lifestyle program, and point solution? And so we're really trying to provide choice for the employers.

In order to get more of them to conclude that paying for the drugs is cheaper in the long run, than the costs associated with obesity. I'm Nova Sopho for Marketplace. Coming up. You know, we've had our sewer backup before that trivia money came in really, really handy. Honestly, I don't even know what to do with that. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's down 453, about 1%.

47,501. The NASDAQ off 361. That is 1.6%, 22,037. S&P 500 down 90 points, one and a third percent, 6740. The Wawa's indeed. However, comma, for the week, the five days gone by, the Dow gave up three percent. The NASDAQ down one and a quarter percent. S&P 500 slipped two percent.

Clothing retailers shared the pain today. Winter quarter at the gap wasn't so great. That includes their brand's old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. The gap tanked 14 and 4 tenths of 1 percent today. Rival Abercrombie and Fitch declined third. and eight tenths percent. Novo was just talking about Eli Lilly. Both Lilly and its rival No-Nor Nordisk have been cutting prices of their GLP-1 drugs

or for customers who pay out of pocket. Indiana-based Eli Lilly inched up seven-tenths percent. The Danish Norvo Nordisk contracted one and a quarter percent. Bond prices should you be curious and you should be. They fell. The yield on the tenure T-note rose to 4.14%. Do I really have to explain why you should be curious? I feel like we do that story all the time.

You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. As everybody back east is pretty much aware, this has been the coldest, snowiest winter they've had in years. Record breaking in point of fact. Increasingly, it seems people are getting their forecasts and their storm coverage from independent meteorologists on social media and YouTube versus plain old TV. It has become so common, actually, that the American Meteorological Society has started offering something called a digital meteorologist. certification to help people suss out which accounts they can trust. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more on that. Almost all day, Sunday and Monday, during that recent East Coast snowstorm, Ryan Hall was live on YouTube. The blizzard of 2026 is well underway. We've got an incredible snow band parked from Boston all the way down to New York City. Hall runs one of the most popular weather accounts on social media and YouTube, where he has more than 3 million subscribers. It started as a hobby early in the pandemic.

I didn't think it was going to turn into anything, and here we are. About five years after that, we took off insanely. Paul has been into meteorology since he was a kid. He thought he'd get a degree in it and do weather on TV, but when he got a job at a local station in college, he realized he didn't like the constraints of TV. So he quit and did other things for a while before starting the YouTube channel. One of our first streams for severe weather was the Mayfield, Kentucky tornado, which is like one of the deadliest and worst tornadoes

that the United States has seen in a very long time. And we were live for that while a lot of other networks weren't because it was like in the middle of the night. And we helped a lot of people that night. It was after that in 2021 that Ryan Hall y'all exploded and he started doing it full time. These days, he says the channel generates millions of dollars a year through ads, sponsorships, and merch

and employees about 30 people, both full time and contract. I say I took a non-traditional path into meteorology, and I think it's opened up a door where this is a real career path now for people who want to get into, you know, doing the weather, not on TV. Hall is an outlier, though. Most people running their own online weather accounts are not making that kind of money. But increasingly, many are making a name and a living doing forecasting online. I always say we're at the golden age of meteorology because so much data is at your fingertips and so much opportunities are at your fingertips.

Stephen D. Martino is a meteorologist who started his own account, focused on New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania weather back in 2007. When, like, YouTube was like cat videos and Twitter had, like, five people on it. He's always had other jobs, too. But today, he has tens of thousands of followers on social media and says he could do this full-time now. It's kind of like a 20-year overnight success type thing. I always tell young meteorologists, look, build this, but also have other income to

supplement, it takes time because what you're doing is you have to build trust. Trust is key in a world where anyone can post a forecast online. Social media is like kind of a choose-your-own adventure during weather events. Matt Lanza is one of the meteorologists behind the popular Space City weather account in Houston. He's also still a full-time forecaster for the energy industry. He says, you can tell if a weather account is legit if the person running it has a degree in meteorology or a certification. And if they don't, look at their track record. If every weather event to them ends up being the biggest, the worst, the most extreme,

all the writing is in all caps with lots of exclamation points, they're probably just trying to hook you. And get you to engage so they can monetize their account. At Space City weather, Lanza says they do the opposite. Most of the time we want to be kind of boring. But when the stuff gets a little crazy, you're going to notice us really ramp things up. So that people really pay attention when it matters, like during Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston in 2017. After that storm, many rode into Space City Weather to thank them. One in particular struck me was someone that saying, like, you know, I trust you guys, I read you guys every day. When you started writing the way you did ahead of the storm, I took

stuff that they had on the ground floor of their house and moved it up to the second floor. The first floor of their house flooded, but they'd been in a lot of their house flooded, but they'd been able to save things that mattered. That's the goal, right? The goal is not, it is to get that engagement. It is to get ways to monetize it. But that's not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal, Lanzah says, is to get people good information so they can protect their stuff and themselves from extreme weather. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. We were talking jobs up top. You dig a little deeper into that report we got this morning. You will see data on the percentage of people in the economy holding down more than one job. It was down just a bit last month, but since the pandemic,

the share of multiple job holders has been trending up. And that gets us to today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Andrew Anderson. I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I do bar trivia one and a half times a week. So I started hosting about two and a half years ago, and I initially came to it because I had gone to trivia at my local bar, and a friend of mine asked me if I'd like to take over. The very first time I hosted, we had a tie, and I did not really have a tie breaker, so I had to come up with something very quickly.

I was asking about the, Great Wall of China. I believe I asked about the actual length. I had to Google the answer because I certainly didn't know that off the top of my head. And ever since then, I have always had at least one tiebreaker question. My primary source of income is as a university professor. I teach in the French department at Capitol University. When I started this job with trivia, I initially envisioned it as a very much a part-time sort of side hustle. And now I really do think of it much more as a second job. We make $100 a week. My wife and I do this together. It's really nice to have that sort of income together. And the money that we've gotten has really helped with a lot of the

little expenses that you don't expect. Car stuff, stuff with the house. You know, We've had our sewer backup before that trivia money came in really, really handy. It's great to have a little source of income that sort of takes the pressure off of the little everyday things. I think what's kept us going with this is that it's a lot of fun. It's also really nice because I get to continue to be a teacher, but I got an engaged classroom at a bar, which is kind of ridiculous. Kind of is ridiculous, but it's great, right? Andrew Anderson, hosting bar trivia in Columbus, Ohio.

Whatever your tiebreaker question is, tell us how your economy is doing. What you're at Marketplace.org is where you can do that. This final note on the way out today, in which I will note the date one more time, March the 6th, 2026, 100 years ago today, Herbert and Rose Greenspan. Welcome to Bouncing Baby Boy into the world. named him Alan, and today his four times removed successor as the chairman of the Federal Reserve

sent along his best wishes. We here at the Fed are rationally exuberant to celebrate your 100th birthday with you. Rationally exuberant. Get it? Powell made a funny. Little known facts, by the way, Greenspan didn't get his Ph.D. until he was 52 years old. Our theme music was composed by B.J. Leaterman, Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargolly.

Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer. Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager. I'm Kai Rizda. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody. We will see you back here on Monday, all right? This is APM. Hey, everyone, it's Rima Grace. And this week on my podcast, this is uncomfortable.

I'm talking with someone a lot of us to grow up watching. Steve Burns from Blues Clues. Steve opens up about stumbling into the job in his early 20s and suddenly becoming a household name. But behind the scenes, things were more complicated, especially when it came to money and figuring out who he was outside the show. People knew Steve, the green stripy Steve. And I felt like green stripy Steve sort of ate Steve Burns. And there was no Steve Burns anymore.

Be sure to catch my conversation with Steve on This Is Uncomfortable, wherever you get your podcasts.