Marketplace - Powell's farewell?

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Wednesday marked Jerome Powell’s final FOMC meeting as chair of the Federal Reserve. Central bank leaders held rates steady this week, though with the most dissenting votes in over 30 years. Powell also announced his intent to stay on as a Fed governor — the first chair to do so since 1948. In this episode, we recap Powell’s tenure as head of the Fed and unpack his latest press conference. Plus: Companies issue more corporate debt, Taco Bell outperforms sales expectations, and AI spawns new cybersecurity headaches.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.

Fed Chair Emeritus. Is that a thing? From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Wednesday, today, 29 April good as always, to have you along, everybody. Jay Powell wrapped up his last press conference as Fed Chair this afternoon, eight long years, 64 press conferences, so much water under the economic bridge. So we are going to start with a recap.

Previously on Federal Open Market Committee press conferences, I have a brief statement and then I'll be happy to respond to your questions. In 2018, President Trump appointed then Fed Governor Jerome Powell to replace Janet Yellen as chair. And Powell gave his first ever FOMC press conference. The job market remains strong. The economy continues to expand. Aw, memories. But there were tariffs, political pressure from President Trump to lower interest rates,

And then March 2020. Powell gave an emergency press conference as the Fed acted to stabilize the pandemic. We're really going to use our tools to do what we need to do here, which is restore these important markets to normal function. FOMC meetings were on Zoom for a while. The economy rebounded, and then inflation picked up. We took a step back from transitory. We said expected to be transitory.

Oops. I'd think we have to be humble about our ability to fly. forecast. Inflation hit a 40-year high, which pushed the Fed to hike interest rates 11 times. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn't. President Biden reappointed Powell. And when President Trump got re-elected,

I've held back firing him. I've wanted to fire him. But I hate to be controversial. Tons of threats to Fed independence, which reporters would not stop asking Powell about. I think I did answer that question in this very wrong. I know, as I've said, countless times over the years. No desire to change that answer and have nothing new for you on that today. There were Supreme Court arguments over an attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook,

a DOJ investigation at Powell himself. More tariffs, the biggest energy shock in decades. A new guy is one step closer to Powell's job. And that's what you missed on FMC. J.C. Bold and Maria Hollenhorst to put that one together for us. Lest you think it is all fun in games, though, there was substance today. Not of the interest rate variety so much, no change there, but of the, first of all, personnel variety, just to make sure we don't bury the lead here.

Powell said right at the top of the press conference today, he is going to stay on at the Fed after his term as chair is done on May the 15th. His term on the board of governors doesn't expire until January of 2020. He did not say, Mr. Powell didn't, how long he is going to stay. So there is that. Also, and this is a teeny bit inside baseball, so bear with me. but the vote to hold rates steady was 8 to 4 with some dissent, that is the technical term, over what message the Fed is sending? We had quite a vigorous discussion about that very issue and the guidance,

and is it still appropriate in that kind of thing? Is it still appropriate, that is, to send the message that an interest rate cut might still be in the mix? It's a good question, right? You see inflation has moved up over the interim a bit. Core inflation is 3.2 now, moving, albeit just a little bit, it in the wrong direction. And we know that there will be, you know, that there's headline inflation coming out of the Gulf, and we don't know how much that will be. We just, we're going to need to see. One might even say he wants more data. There's so much uncertainty about the path ahead.

There doesn't need to be any rush to make that decision now, because, you know, what, what happens in the next 30, 60 days, even by the next meeting could really change the picture around that, around that language. So, you know, it was a, it's a close, it's a much closer thing on the committee than it was in March. Anyway, it's going to be, unless something really surprising happens, Kevin Warsh in the big chair the next time the Fed meets, that will be in the middle of June. I won't see you next time. Wall Street today, a little up, a little down, little mic drop there from Chair Powell. Oil, though, we are going to have the details when we do the numbers. The Federal Reserve is holding its short-term interest rates steady, yes, but rates on long-term government debt have been rising ever since the president started his war with Iran.

That's happening partly because investors are worried about all the inflation the war is causing and partly because the war is adding to an already enormous pile of government debt. Either way, those higher treasury yields, the interest rate the government has to pay, are affecting mortgage rates and car loan rates, rates on credit card. and the yields that big corporations are having to pay on the bonds that they issue. What makes that noteworthy is that a lot of companies have been going ahead and borrowing anyway, even though those higher rates are going to cost them. Marketplace of Justin Ho checked on the corporate bond market and how it's handling all the geopolitical turmoil. Corporate bonds tend to pay higher yields than government bonds, because in theory, corporate debt is riskier.

And when the war started, corporate bond yields rose. Not massively, but enough to make a measurable. difference. That's Guy Labar with Jenny Montgomery Scott. He says that's partly because bond markets were slightly more worried about risk because of the war. But another reason, he says, is because corporations have actually been issuing a lot of bonds this year. So if there's a lot of corporate bonds being issued, their yields move up higher than government bond yields might move. That's because when companies dump a boatload of new bonds into the market, they have to pay more interest to attract borrowers. And LaBah says companies have been issuing record amounts of corporate debt this

year, in large part to finance AI projects. He says even though interest rates have risen, those companies are going to keep issuing debt because they think those projects are going to generate huge returns of the long run. And whether you're borrowing money at five or five and a quarter percent to finance those long run returns, it doesn't have a huge effect. There's also a lot of demand for corporate debt. Drew Pascarlla at Cornell University says that's because the economy and corporate profits are in pretty good shape. question that is on the mind of a lender, am I going to get paid back? You know, the answer seems to be pretty positive here, notwithstanding the backdrop of the war. But another reason why companies are

issuing debt is because they think rates could rise more in the future, says Cooper Howard with Charles Schwab, a marketplace underwriter. So that's one of the other reasons why you're seeing issuers come to market now is to remove some of that uncertainty. Howard says interest rates could rise further if inflation keeps picking up, and if the war drags on. If gas prices remain elevated for an extended period of time, that begins to choke off lower-income consumers and begins to constrain growth going forward. And Howard says a slower economy with less spending makes corporate bonds seem riskier. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace. Yum Brands reported earnings this morning better than expected, thanks mostly to its leading brand, Taco Bell.

An 8% increase in same store sales, one of those key indicators that restaurants use to measure how healthy they are. are. The company says diners are focused on its value menu and specialty items. But there is something else Taco Bell's been serving up that's resonating with consumers. Dare we call it culture? Marketplace's Kristen Schwab has that one. A couple months ago, Taco Bell held its annual Live Moss Live event in L.A. A variety show of sorts streamed on Peacock. There was a purple carpet. Rapper Vince Staples hosted, basically a menu launch event for the influencer crowd. Content creator Luke Foods was there and posted about one item. It is a fire queso packet. You pour onto a taco and yes, you can eat the packet, guys. The packet was made of fried dough. CB Bottacharya, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who's consulted for Taco Bell, says the slogan,

Live Moss isn't just about indulging in fun food. It's a lifestyle. And Taco Bell is trying to become a lifestyle brand. They're trying to build a. relationship with their customers that goes beyond the product. Yeah, people eat at Taco Bell because it's affordable and has vegetarian-friendly options. But Bottagaria says it's built a bit of a cult following. I mean, you know, who would have thought that Taco Bell could sell merchandise,

but that's the proof that they have broken through. The chain sells hoodies and sweatpants. It recently launched a collaboration with Hollister. John Quinn at the Ohio State University used to work in Market. at Yum brands. Not every brand can kind of pull it off. It has to be authentic. Authentically Taco Bell, if not authentically Mexican,

it's always kind of been the kooky cousin to all the chicken and burger chains. Maybe not the place you go for dinner, but the place you go after the bars close. A fourth meal. So that late night meal. That kind of snacking skews younger. Peter Chun is a partner at Lippincott and worked on a Taco Bell rebrand. We were just there like two weeks ago. my son and I. My son is crazy about the Doritos Locos.

A taco with a shell that's a big nacho cheese chip. Chun says Taco Bell doesn't take itself too seriously. Using sort of humor and tone of voice to bring in that connection that we're not just setting tacos or burritos, but really we're setting a personality or relationship or brand. It's layered in everything the chain does, down to its beefy, five-layered burrito. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. I don't know if you saw the reports a couple of weeks ago. The Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chair Powell had gathered the heads of the big Wall Street banks

and told them to make sure they have their cybersecurity houses in order because Anthropics' newest artificial intelligence platform mythos, it's called, is so dangerously powerful. And in fact, the company's worried about it, too. It has only shared a preview version of Mythos with a handful of big tech and finance firms so that they can get a head start on patching whatever security holes that Mythos find. OpenAI's latest model is raising concerns as well. So Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino said about finding out how organizations are trying to catch up. Stephen Weber has never laid eyes on mythos or OpenAI's GPT 5.4 cyber model. But he's long worried about how AI might empower malicious hackers.

It was inevitable. Weber is a retired professor at UC Berkeley who led the Center for Long-Term cybersecurity. And he says if there's one thing we know today's large language models are really good at, it's coding. So the idea that the models we're going to discover bugs in code, it doesn't really surprise me. Anthropic and OpenAI claim their new models are significantly more capable at detecting unknown bugs in the code that underlies everything from operating systems to web browsers. These so-called zero-day exploits allow bad actors to access systems through backdoors nobody. knew were there. No patch exists to lock them. Zero-day exploits are the nuclear weapons of the cybersecurity world. And like nuclear weapons, they had been the domain of sophisticated state-level actors.

But AI is changing that. Attacks that once took a team of specialized hackers months to research and days to execute can be done by one person in an afternoon, says John Henley, who runs offensive testing at cybersecurity firm Coalfire. With internal AI tools less capable than the top frontier models, he says they've breached systems in less than 10 minutes. And what we can do in a lab environment today, a professional cybercrime group will be able to do to a real bank or other piece of critical infrastructure within 18 months. Already Anthropics says it's investigating unauthorized users who gained access to the secret mythos preview. And Henley expects open source models, many buildings, many built in China will catch up in the near future.

If you're like a board member at a bank or a hospital system, you should be asking one question this quarter. And it's what do we need to do to detect and contain an attack that unfolds in an hour? They'll be expecting an answer from folks like Joshua Brown. He's been the chief information security officer at H&R Block, Omnicom, a now Spectrum Labs. Never an easy job. The old joke is that they sleep like babies. They wake up every two hours crying. And now every two hours is not going to cut it.

Brown says the same AI tools the bad guys use will help organizations detect and patch vulnerabilities. So you can find stuff faster. Now the pressure shifts to the other side of the equation, which is are businesses equipped to handle that remediation and containment activity faster? I think the obvious answer immediately is no. Most companies have chronically underinvested in cybersecurity, according to Frank Ford, a partner at the consulting firm Baining Company.

People that look at cybersecurity as a form of insurance. So no one likes necessarily paying insurance premiums. It's offsetting the chance of something bad happening, which seems quite remote. He says companies spend on average less than 1% of revenues on cybersecurity, and many will need to double those resources. It's not a simple risk like a fire. You put a fire alarm in place. You can be comfortable. You've done the right things. Cyber isn't like that. It needs constant change and focus. In the cat and mouse game of cybersecurity, AI is helping both sides do more, but the mouse only has to get lucky once. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino for Marketplace.

Coming up, this is. is more sustained and it's more, you know, long-running. Not all parts of the labor market are created equal. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is down 280 points today. 610% finished at 48,861 did the blue chips. And Azdak added nine points. We're going to call that flat 24,000, rather, 673.

The SP500 flat as well, 71 and 35. Megan McCarty Carino was talking about concerns over cybersecurity and anthropic and mythos and all that. The cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike Holdings fell six-tenth of one percent. Fortinette gained a half percent. Palo Alto Networks slid up three-tenths of one percent on the day. Brent crude oil. I mentioned oil just a little while ago up at the top of the show. Topped $120 a barrel. I saw $120.12 a barrel today. Gas, as you know, $4.23 a gallon. Bonds down, yield on the tenure T-note 4.42%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizzo.

If you happen to have been listening a couple of days ago, you might have heard a quick permer on the supply demand curve and what that does to prices. That particular story was about housing. Today's is about trucking and how some of the biggies Old Dominion today reporting better than expected results, J.B. Hunt the same a couple of weeks ago. They are saying their pricing power is improving because trucking capacity is declining. Why is capacity down, you ask? Well, here's where I remind you that immigration is a labor market story.

Marketplace, a Nova Saffo, takes it from there. The trucking industry is in a turnaround after three years or so of excess capacity that depressed pricing power. There's no question that in both spot and contract rates, particularly the spot rates, which are a good leading indicator, that rates are up. Noel Perry's chief economist for Truckstop.com. He says he's seen prices rising as much as 20 percent. It's not a COVID-era-level spike, but still significant. The demand side has not shown any strength. And so the first conclusion we take about this increase is that this is a supply-side-driven, capacity-driven event.

Meaning, there are fewer drivers. The Trump administration's policies are the cause, he says, tightening requirements that immigrant truck drivers be fluent in English, and as of February, barring all but a few types of visa holder. Satish Jendal, president of logistics firm's ship matrix, is seeing the effects as well. Most of these drivers were working for smaller carrier, and they are filing bankruptcy, they're shutting down, and that is reducing the capacity. But the Trump administration's limits are expansive, far beyond what's necessary for safety, says Michael Belzer, a meritorist professor in transportation economics at Wayne State. He points to the limits on DACA recipients.

If they're DACA, they probably grew up here as children. That's the whole point. And they're therefore sufficiently fluent in English to drive a truck. Belser says those drivers should remain because such a large chunk of the labor pool would be difficult to replace. I'm Navasophe for Marketplace. There was, as you would expect, no small amount of conversation about the labor market in Cher Powell's press conference today. We are not getting in an update, the April jobs report, until Friday next. but it is not out of line to say that things are

tepid right now, low higher, low fire, as you've heard. And for some parts of the American job-seeking public, things are distinctly weak. Exhibit A, the unemployment rate for black workers in this economy is 7.1%. Double the rate for white workers and trending

up the past couple of years. Benga Jolori is the chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he studies, among other things, how economic policy affects black households. Bang it's good to have you back on the program. Thank you very much. What do you make of the elevated and some months, depending on how things go, rising black unemployment rate? So one of the things that I've noticed is that the black unemployment rate has always exceeded other

groups. That's never been anything new. But what's different is that there's a bigger jump and this is more sustained and it's more long running. Okay, why? The biggest reason has to do with what's happening with Doge last year and the loss of employment from the federal workforce. You know, federal employment has always been the key to the middle class and upper middle class for black households. And the targeting of the federal workforce has had a measurable impact on black households. You know, from 2025 to 2024, we saw a nearly full percentage point jump in a black unemployment rate. And we've seen this across the country, too. And so that's the biggest thing. But another part is that the tariff regime actually,

also had an impact on black unemployment. We've seen in one of the larger concentrations of, especially for black men, is the transportation and warehousing industry. And so there's been a lot of losses jobs there manufacturing too. And so we could tack on the tariff regime on top of the targeting the federal workforce. So do me a favor and step back for a second and give me the canary in the coal mine here, what we can learn from this, what it'll tell us about everything. So as I mentioned before, black unemployment is always higher than other groups. And the other thing is that when there's a loss of jobs and as we head towards a recession, sometimes what we see is that black unemployment goes first so that when people start to lose their jobs, black households are the ones to lose their jobs and then other groups later. And so seeing what's happening with the federal workforce, seeing what's happening with tariff regimes, that if we do head towards a recession, what's going to happen is that this kind of tells us a,

signal that's something kind of a warning sign or as you mentioned the canary in the coal mine. This labor market, of course, has been called low hire, low fire. We're going to get the next unemployment rate a week from this coming Friday. What are you looking for? What are the telltale signs that that something might be amiss or stabilizing if you believe that to be the case? That's a very good question. And one of the things that I look at is basically what's happening with people who've been unemployed for a long time for like over 27 weeks. What's happening there? or people who are marginally attached to the workforce, part-time for economic reasons, things like that. In addition to the black unemployment rate, those are the things I'm looking at as are people able to be reattached to the labor market?

Because the other thing we've been noticing is a decrease in participation rate. Explain participation rate then, if you would. So these are people who are part of the labor force. They may be working. They may not be working. And so as that starts to drop out, people, you think of these people as discouraged workers. Like, they don't feel good about the economy. You don't feel good about the labor market, so they're not even participating in doing something else.

They're trying to find other ways to make ends meet. Can we talk about black women for a minute? Because we've had through the years many economists on here, black women economists and other economists who have said black women are the driving force economically in their families. When black women suffer, the entire black economy suffers, and thus the entire economy suffers. What, I mean, thoughts on that? So you have to go historically. I go back to even antebellum period, right? Where black women have always been part of the household in terms of making things work.

So raising other people's kids, cleaning houses, you know, even go to the 50s where people have this nostalgia for it and like, oh, the Leave it to Beaver kind of households. Well, it was black women who were the ones that made that possible. And so then you go through the 80s and 90s as black women start doing well. This goes back to Janelle Jones, you know. You mentioned before, a black economist, black women best, that when they, black women do well, everyone else does well. Now we're seeing the flip side of that. Black women have done poorly in 2025.

You know, people talk about the case-shaped economy. Black women are not doing well. Our economy is not doing well. Benga Jolori, he's a chief economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Bega, thanks for your time, sir. I appreciate it. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me again.

This final note on the way out today, I think it's important to hear from Chair Powell, why he is going to stay at the Fed after his tenure as chair is done. You know, my concern is really about the series of legal attacks on the Fed, which threaten our ability to conduct monetary policy without considering political factors. And I want to note here, this has nothing whatever to do with verbal criticism by elected officials. I've never suggested that such verbal criticism is a problem and neither has anyone else here. But these legal actions by the administration are unprecedented.

incident and our 113 year history, and there are ongoing threats of additional such actions. That thing I say all the time, that the institutions of this economy depend on the institutions of this democracy. This is that. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Foki, Montana Johnson, Drew Jostet, Gary O'Keefe, and Charleston Fork. Alex Simpson is the manager of media production, and I'm Kai Rizdaal. We will. See you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. The economy moves fast, and when headlines turn on a dime, it is essential that you feel informed rather than overwhelmed. Hey, I'm David Brancaccio's special correspondent for Marketplace and an avid reader of the Marketplace newsletter, not that I'm partial.

Every Friday Marketplace curates must read stories from the week and delivers explainers right to your inbox. So if you want the latest from me and our team of award-winning journalists, head. over to marketplace.org slash newsletters and sign up today.