Marketplace - Nvidia's record-breaking stock buyback

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Apple used to be the leader in buying back shares. Now, Nvidia has broken the tech company’s record, announcing Monday that it would add $150 billion to its stock buyback program, on top of $80 billion pledged a few months ago. The chipmaker’s profits have continued to surge, as tech companies pour money into data centers and AI infrastructure. Is this a smart way for Nvidia to spend its money? More on Nvidia today, plus how a volunteer firefighter shortage is affecting a rural Wyoming county, why spending is predicted to soar this holiday season despite the energy crisis, and what economists are watching for in the jobs numbers coming out this week.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:It's a big week for economic data. Here's what labor economists will be looking for.Nvidia's record stock buyback funded by cash from the data center boomThere’s a national volunteer firefighter shortage. It’s on display in WyomingEarly retirement isn't always a choiceAdobe forecasts record U.S. spending online this holiday seasonThe mall isn't dead, yet

Where is this economy going? Oh, wouldn't you like to know? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Monday. Today, this one is the 28th day of September. Good as it always is. To have you along, everybody. The first couple of minutes of the program today are going to be about time, about where the economy might be going and about where it has been. been. It is often said here and elsewhere that if you want to know which way the economy is going, the bond market is where you ought look. And with the caveat that, yes, we have been doing a whole lot of bond stories the past couple of weeks, the story that the bond market is telling us just keeps being reinforced. Business activity is strong. Government debt is high. The geopolitical

narrative is unclear at best. And so today bond yields across the curve. That is, the interest rate the government has to pay on almost all of its notes, bonds, and bills. Those yields were up. Again, in some cases, to 19-year highs. So at the very least, the economy yet to come is going to be more expensive. We are also going to learn some things about the economy that was this week. On Wednesday, we'll get what was once upon a time the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures price index for the month of August. We'll get data on home prices. That's coming from Kay Schiller and a whole bunch of data on the labor market.

The job openings and the labor turnover survey, that's jolts, right? We talk about that all the time. It comes tomorrow. ADP's private sector employment data comes on Wednesday. Weekly first-time claims for unemployment benefits on Thursday, and then Friday, the biggie the September jobs report. So, marketplaces met the fields, ask some economists what they're going to be looking for in all of that data. Last month's jobs report was surprisingly strong.

It showed the economy added more than 162,000 jobs in August, up from just 21,000 in July and 31,000 in June. The big question is, was that a blip or was that the data trying to tell us that things weren't so bad? Justin Wolfer is at the University of Michigan says that's what he'll be looking to see when the September report comes out this week. The most important thing is not to overreact to any one number. There's always volatility in the data, which is why Heidi Shearholz at the Economic Policy Institute says you want to look at the last several months together. What we've seen recently is that the labor market is okay. There's like good news and bad news. The good news is that the unemployment rate is low. It's hovering just above four. percent and has been for a while.

Job growth is solid. Not great, but it's solid. Layoffs are low. So if you have a job, you are no more likely than usual to get laid off. So that is very good news. The not so good news, Shearhold says, is that wage growth is weak and there's not much hiring going on. We are talking now about hiring rates that are roughly where they were in like 2010, 2011, in the just unbelievably weak labor markets right after the Great Recession. You can see that in the growing number of people who are long-term unemployed. That's a number, Breon Williams, at the Groundwork Collaborative, will be paying close attention to this week.

We have right now more than a quarter of our unemployed workers. They have been out of work and looking for work for six months or longer. And I think that that's a troubling sign. A sign of weakness in an otherwise fairly solid job market. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. Wall Street today, sell, sell, and sell again. We will have the details. When do we always have the details?

On a generally grim day for technology stocks, Nvidia did all right for itself, shares up almost a percent and three quarters for the session. Of course, it does help that the company said it's going to spend $150 billion to buy back more of its own stock over the next couple of years. that's on top of an $80 billion buyback already announced, and it does beat Apple's buyback record. Basically, what's happening here?

Invidia is generating just a whole pile of cash that it has to do something with. And as Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino reports, that is a sign of the changing technology landscape. There are a couple ways a company can return cash to shareholders, says Nick Guest, an assistant professor of accounting at Cornell. It could pay a dividend for every share. They tend to be regular and the market tends to build up an expectation for them. So if you pay a dividend this quarter, you're going to pay at least that much in future quarters. Or it can buy shares back from shareholders. Guest says that's seen as more flexible.

So it's become the favored way for companies with excess profits to share them. They said, hey, we don't have that many investment opportunities. We can't use all this cash right now. So we're going to give some of it back to you investors and then you can decide what to do with it. Apple has been the leader in stock buybacks, but Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle also spent heavily to repurchase their own shares, says Eric Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan, at least until this year. We're seeing something I never thought we would see, which is tech companies which formerly

were just bringing in the cash now are spending huge amounts of cash on AI. The company's spending big on data centers have seen the buildout eat and to their free cash flow. Some are selling new stock and most are borrowing to fund construction. Companies are filling the dump trucks with money and sending it to Nvidia to buy their chips. NVIDIA is getting dump trucks of money every day. That's why it can do stock buybacks. Of course, NVIDIA doesn't have to buy back stock with its excess profits. Jacob Bourne, a tech analyst at e-marketer, wonders if the company could spend the money on something else. Why is this the best bet for NVIDIA right now as opposed to, you know, acquiring more AI

startups or investing more in chip development? But NVIDIA is doing those things too, says Daniel Newman, an analyst with Futuram. When you have a balance sheet that looks like NVIDIA, you have the optionality to return to shareholders and you have the optionality to invest in the ecosystem. NVIDIA has committed hundreds of billions to the chip supply chain and invested in, AI companies that turn around and spend their money on more Nvidia chips. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino for Marketplace. Here is a perhaps incompletely understood fact about a very particular slice of the American economy.

More than half, well more than half, of the firefighters in this country are volunteers. And, to boot, the number of those volunteers is falling. We're down 200,000 of them over the past couple of decades, almost every state has a shortage. And even though they're not getting paid, the volunteer of firefighting workforce does have some of the same problems the regular labor force does.

Marketplaces Caitlin Tan takes us to rural western Wyoming. Outside of fire hall in Sublette County, six-season volunteers gather for their semi-monthly training. Instructor Justin Hamilton stands alongside a miniature, unpainted wooden house propped up on saw horses. This is a two-story doll house, essentially like a two-bedroom. Bedrooms are upstairs.

A volunteer in his brown and yellow uniform grabs the nearby torch. I'm going to go ahead and have Eric go ahead and ignite it. And we will let it build up. Smoke billows out. Eric opens and closes the doors to simulate different flows of fire. So with a fire like this,

how many people do we got to have to go inside? Four or five. Five, one on the bottom. Six. Ideally six. You've got four. Can you go inside? No. What can you do? External.

External. Hit it hard from the yard. This is a real scenario they practice for. So has there been times you guys have to change your strategy because you don't have six guns? Every fire. Yeah, pretty much. Partly because it takes a while to get anywhere here. Sublick County is about the size of Connecticut. And sometimes the volunteers are busy with their day job, like Jason Rife, who's a

local rancher. You know, I might not make that call because I'm out doing something. I'm horseback. If I'm horseback, then I'm not making a call. So Rife needs other firefighters to back him up. Ideally, the county needs 100 volunteers. We need a lot of redundancy, which is why the numbers need to be so big. But they're short, about 20. If we don't have volunteers, we're pretty much sunk as a county. There's no one coming if you don't volunteer to do this. And volunteers are the only way the vast majority of fire departments in the country can afford to do their work. That's according to Steve Hirsch, chair of the National Volunteer Fire Council. The volunteer fire service is saving billions.

I'm talking about billions with a B, billions of dollars for the taxpayers of this nation. Nationally, total volunteer firefighter numbers are down, about 25% since 2008. There's just so many demands on people's time that I think that's our problem. These days, many people who might otherwise volunteer are working a couple jobs to make ends meet while trying to keep gas in their cars and afford child care. Plus, volunteers have to make time for mandatory training. Joe Maruka is the retired fire chief in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. He says it was especially hard to recruit young volunteers. The economics and the lifestyle of the 20-something in today's world doesn't allow this.

Dagnant approach. Like requiring strict training schedules. So he had to get flexible to bring more people on board. Maruka remembers it meant keeping odd hours. I'm getting full calls from people. Why is the fire truck driving around town at 8.30 at night? What are you doing? What's the wrong?

I said nothing. They're just practicing. Over a couple decades, Maruka doubled the size of his team. There's other recruiting ideas out there. New laws in Wyoming pay state employees for 24 hours of leave to fight fire and give all volunteers access to state health insurance. And in Sublette County, after a focus on recruiting, they're still short but no longer declining. The newest recruit, Luke Nagel. How old are you? 16. Wow. Nagle is part of their cadet program. He's two months in.

It's not too hard because I can't make it to most of the calls because of like school and stuff. And then some of the calls, I'm just not allowed to go on. When he completes his training and his 18, he'll be fighting fire with the rest of the crew. In Sublette County, Wyoming, I'm Caitlin Tan for Marketplace. Retirement is usually something you prepare for over decades. 401Ks and pensions and saving plans of the whole smash in order to set yourself up for life after work. Sometimes, though, the decision to stop working comes earlier than expected, and it happens for reasons well outside your control. Here's today's installment of our series clocked out.

I'm Emily Vasilio. I just turned 60, and I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I am currently not working. I won't say retired. A year ago, I was living in Chicago for 27 years, and just life was going very smoothly. Until the end of September-ish, my dad was diagnosed with dementia. We found an apartment site unseen, and by mid-December, I was here in St. Paul. At that point, I was working for an organization that had been remote, fully remote, for six years.

So I didn't realize my job was on the line until into the spring where there was an announcement that everybody would need to come back to the office, RTO, two times a week. And then I was told that because I could not meet that requirement, I would not be able to stay there. So I was terminated. So there was a lot of upset and a lot of concern about what I was going to do financially. I was the main breadwinner. So we had several calls with our financial planner just to like say, okay, we're switching years here. I know we were planning for retirement. We did not expect it to happen this soon.

I was 59 at the time. but in the end, I think it was really a gift. When the bottom drops out like that and you weren't really planning on it, it's terrifying. You know, your whole life is built around productivity, right? So there's a lot to sort out and for me to like figure out who I am again, returning to a place I haven't lived in in 40 years. I'm taking Italian, so I'm trying to keep the brain alive. I get out and I walk every day.

We're doing old Minnesota things, like going to the state fair and reacquaining myself with my people. I know that there's more ahead for me. I have more to contribute. And I will figure that out once I figure the city out and where I fit in it again. Emily Vassilio.

She's in St. Paul, Minnesota. Share your story, would you? Of leaving the labor force voluntarily or otherwise at Marketplace, That way. Coming up. Some malls that are dying and will be dead. Rest in peace? First, though, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial's down 347 points today. That's two-thirds and one percent. Finished at 51,481. The NASDAQ subtracted 248 points. That's 9 tenths percent there. 26,820. S&P 500 down 59 points. A little bit more than three quarters of 1 percent.

7683 there. In video we talked about its competitors fared from bad to worse. Broadcom subtracted 9 tenths percent. Advanced microdevices AMD deleted three and six tenths of one percent on the day. The Trump administration has rolled back fuel efficiency rules for new cars. The old rule required carmakers to add a little bit better than 50 miles a gallon by 2031. Now, just a little bit under 35 MPG. General motors slipped two and four tenth percent. Ford motor down 2.6% on the day. Bond prices down yield on the 10-year T-note. Hang on to your hats people.

5.23%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. We begin this part of the program with another look at the calendar and also the observation in which I am completely certain I'm not alone that it is way, and I do mean way too early to even start thinking about holiday shopping. The cold hard truth, though, is that businesses have an annual time table, and that timetable says the time is right now to really start digging in on the holidays.

Adobe released its online holiday spending predictions today. Online sales in this country, Adobe figures are going to hit $275 billion this year. That's up almost 7% from a year ago. But and however, to get that $275 billion worth of $1,000,000. stuff to us the humble consumer is going to take a whole lot of diesel. You see where this is going? Marketplaces Elizabeth Trowall sure does. American consumers are not in the jolliest of spirits as we approach the holiday spending season. Sophia Beg is with morning consult.

As gas prices remain elevated, consumer sentiment continues to drop or stay fairly depressed because it just makes people feel really bad about the economy. Consumers are cranky, but that doesn't mean they've stopped spending. John O. Chaconne is with the Richmond Fed. Discretionary categories still remain strong. The thing that's really surprising is how resilient spending has been in categories that should be really sensitive to high fuel prices. He says consumers are still splurging on things like foreign travel, vehicles, and eating out, and that bodes well for holiday spending. Though Sophia Begg says the caveat is for low-income consumers whose budgets are getting tighter. There's some household finances pressures that's going on, and that, in addition to gas prices, I think, could impact holiday spending going forward.

Retailers may feel the pinch this holiday season. That's because of high diesel prices. Debnell Chowdhury is with S&P Global Energy. The cost of goods and shipping is higher, and the issue is retailers. will have to decide, do they pass those costs onto the consumers? If they're selling something that's extremely price competitive, it's harder for them to do that. And the holiday shopping season is highly competitive for retailers, says Vivek Pandia with Adobe. There's lots of pressure to bring prices down. The stakes are very high for these retailers to capitalize on these holiday season sales,

to take advantage of this stronger purchase propensity on the part of the consumer. What we're really thinking is that the pricing piece, the shipping piece, all that is going to be very important for the consumer. Bandia says he expects retailers to offer discounts of up to 30% online. And retailers will have to manage those price cuts as they also deal with higher diesel-induced shipping costs. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Consider for just a moment, American shopping mall. Historically, the site of countless teenage hangouts, last second holiday shopping runs, and chaotic Black Friday bargain hunting. And it turns out a real estate category

with way more than nine lives. Mall values, the Wall Street Journal reports, are beating all 10 commercial property categories, offices, multifamily properties, you name it. Six years after the pandemic, very nearly did them in, malls are back from the dead. Kate King wrote about the resurrection in the journal Kate, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. We have reported, I know you have reported many times in the past that the American Mall was dead. Turns out not so dead.

Not yet, not yet. So what's going on? Well, investors are increasingly becoming convinced that malls might be here to stay. And this is first and foremost because malls are simply doing the job of being malls. People are continuing to go to malls. Retailers are opening stores in malls and making money. And as a result, mall values are increasing, and people are more willing to buy malls or invest in stakes in malls. Who is going to malls, first of all?

It runs the gamut. We see the most success at the really high-end malls. These are properties that have luxury stores, maybe really popular restaurants with long, wait list in usually affluent areas and where the owners have invested a lot of money in keeping up the property. It's not a tired-looking mall. It still looks fancy. Right, right. And also, as you point out in this piece, the retailers that they're choosing to have in those malls are not generally susceptible to online shopping. Right. Malls, a few years ago, definitely did go through a crisis. mall owners will tell you it was more a crisis of perception than actual real true crisis.

But nevertheless, online retail did force closures among many retailers. So malls like all retail are certainly looking to insulate themselves as much as possible from online shopping. So they need to offer experiences that people can't get online. So that's where you see a lot more restaurants, entertainment, the types of shopping experience. like buying a Rolex that people prefer to do in person. Yeah, I mean, you know, there are malls here in Los Angeles that have like trolleys and water features and all kinds of stuff. So it's a thing where, you know, when I go to these malls, young families, like they're out there with the strollers and the kids and all this jazz. It's like an event.

Oh, absolutely. Mall owners have really had to up their game. And that includes, like you say, events. You know, some malls have farmers markets. entertainment like bands, the performances even. Influencers will come to malls and partner with retailers or do just kind of meet and greets in malls. So it's a whole other ballgame now. It has to be said, we are not back to the heyday of the American mall.

Numbers are still down. Right. Mall values are still far off their peaks that we saw about a decade ago. One of the reasons that the malls that remain today are doing so well is because there have been about 200 mall closures. So that, of course, strengthens the remaining operators when there's less competition. Let me get you back to where we started and your first answer, which was they're not dead yet. Discuss. Sure. Well, there are definitely some malls that are dying and will be dead. These are malls that are older, where their owners have not invested in

renovating them. And also, sometimes it's just a function of the demographics of the area changed. And so there's just not that customer base to support it anymore. So there are going to still be mall closures moving forward. And there aren't going to be very many mall openings. No one's building big, enclosed malls anymore. Right. Right. For sure. Are you a mall person or no? I am kind of a mall person. I do go to the mall when I need to. But it's not an everyday thing. Fair enough. I hear that. Kate King at the Wall Street Journal. Kate, thanks a lot. I appreciate you.

Oh, thank you. This final note on the way out today in which we started with the cost of money, bond yields, right? Thus, we will also end with the cost of money. Mortgage News Daily has the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage at 7.5%. Seven and a half percent. Amir Babawi, Caitlin. John Gordon-Koya Carr, Steve Mullis, and Stephanie Seek are the Marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director, and I'm Kai Rizzdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.