Marketplace - "Resilience" is the word of the week

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

The results are in, and despite concerns that the war in Iran would dampen big banks’ earnings, they’re doing just fine, thank you. On earnings calls this week, several banks shouted out consumer “resilience” for keeping everything chugging along. How long might that resilience hold up? Also in this episode: Small business owners slog through tariff refund paperwork, China is well-positioned to ride out this oil price surge, and we’ve got more of Kai’s visit to Vietnam.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.

All right, pick a word to describe this economy. You got it? Okay, now, what are the odds do you think that your word and the word Wall Street banks are using are the same? From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Wednesday, today, 15 April good as it always is to have you along, everybody. We're going back to Vietnam.

our series The Age of Work in just a couple of minutes, but we begin today deep in the heart of American capitalism. The big banks are reporting quarterly profits this week, and the geopolitics of this economy aside, it seems, now that we've heard from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo, and this morning Bank of America, it seems that things are going just fine. All five of them reported healthy growth and painted a picture of an economy that continues to chug along despite everything. Marketplace is Megan McCarty Carino gets us going. Banks can still make money when the rest of the economy goes haywire,

collecting fees as money moves around during a market freakout or helping distressed companies sell assets. But what's notable about this week's earnings is what they say about consumers. And Tom S.A. at Seven's report research says banks are in a good position to know. They're essentially financial supermarkets, and they really have a 360-degree view of most American consumers' financial lives now, whether it's through checking, loans, credit cards. And bank leaders kept using the same word to describe them in earnings calls, J.P. Morgan. Brazil and? Wells Fargo. Brazilian. Bank of America.

Brazil. Despite consumer sentiment falling to an all-time low and rising gas prices, consumers can, continue to spend, at least well-off consumers. If you're on the lower income cohort, you're getting squeezed harder and harder and harder and harder. And that is a problem, but it's not a big enough problem yet to sort of put the whole economy in jeopardy. But it could become a problem as higher energy prices trickle through the economy, says Chris Stanley, a banking strategist at Moody's analytics. The thing that we should keep an eye on here is inflation and inflation expectations. lately, folks are expecting inflation to grow, and that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It could be people worried that prices are going to continue to go up, and they might be pulling some of that spending forward. A spending surge can lead businesses to increase prices even more. But the biggest factor for consumers, according to Gerald Cohen, an economist at UNC Chapel Hill? Jobs, jobs and jobs. If the labor market is strong, consumer spending will be, too. And lately, It's been volatile, fine, but worrying. You might say, resilient. For now. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino for Marketplace.

Wall Street, today, all-time highs. I'm really not sure what else to say. We will have the details when we do the numbers. This next story starts in Southern California. This is a crummy little warehouse, but it's... Well, don't undersell it, Bill. We just got here, man. And it ends in...

Hocci Men City, Vietnam. I like the bird collection to the right. Birds? A couple of dogs. ADP chief economist Neela Richardson and I are doing stories about Vietnam this week and the growing role that workers there are playing in the economy here. It's for

our series The Age of Work, which is about the changing demographics of labor forces around the world and how they're changing how the global economy works. That warehouse that we started with... So if you look on the shelves here... Sure, there it is. Belonging. Belonging to a guy named Bill Webster and his son, Bill Webster.

Hey, Bill. Good to see it. Boy, you guys, father and son. Look at that. Holy cow. Same nose. He's in a pod. Holy geez. They're the co-founders of a company called Garage Celebrations, which sells big, stretchy pieces of fabric. Spandex and polyester. Designed to go on a garage door to make it more festive. So you can have Merry Christmas, Happy Halloween, put American flags up. Costs $150 or so for a one car.

garage door cover 200 and up for a two car? It's like a big pair of Lulu Lemon yoga pants. In case it needs to be said, this is really a product that can only exist in America. The house with the two-car garage is maybe the most American thing on the planet, right? Right, exactly. So if you're wondering what these two guys named Bill selling garage door decorations in California have to do with Vietnam, well, here you go. Would you guys be where you are with, you know, you're just?

It's a small business, but growing, right? A million dollars in revenue, I think I read somewhere, right? Summer, and that's a million two. Right. Would you be where you are without Vietnamese manufacturer? No, I don't think we wouldn't have even been able to start. As we've been saying this week, Vietnam is in a demographic golden age. After the Vietnam War, there was a baby boom, which means there's a huge cohort of people there

right in their prime working years. And that has attracted American investment and helped entrepreneurs like the Webster's turned their ideas into companies. To truly understand that relationship, though, you've got to look at both sides of the Pacific Ocean. So this is Bill's product. This is Bill's product. This is Bill Webster.

Okay. Sunny Lau owns the factory in Ho Chi Men City that makes Bill Webster's garage door covers. Oh, look at that Merry Christmas. There it is, Merry Christmas. Wow. Christmas in, what are we in? March. Usually the production cycle will be in this time,

Six months ahead. Six months ahead of the holidays. Correct. His company is called Saigon printer. It specializes in something called sublimation, which is a way of getting colors onto fabric by heating the ink to almost 400 degrees Fahrenheit. It's so hot.

It's hard. It's so hot. Bill's originally from Singapore, but his career in textiles has taken him all over the world. In my early days, let's say 35 years ago, I was in interns in Singapore with Hong Kong. And then I joined American company, Ralph Florence. Yeah, yeah, we've run for almost 30 years.

So they gave me a chance to travel around the world, different productions, facilities, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, you name it. Why did you choose Vietnam to set up this factory? I think I always kind of like go to a place because I was needed at that place. 2018, Vietnam was already receiving a lot of business orders. why in 2018 was Vietnam getting so many business orders? One of the reason is the trade tensions from China to the US. And Mr. Trump, first terms, we already put in the tariff. And so the brand's already aware that they need to spread out the risk.

So definitely Vietnam is the best choice compared to the rest of the Southeast Asia country. Majority of the people here, the workforce are in their 30s up and down. politically is very stable and it's very near to China geographically because the raw material is still coming from China. Right. Yeah, right. For what it's worth,

the Webster's bill actually tried having their garage door covers made in China, but they couldn't get the big producers there to work with them on the small orders that they wanted to start with. And manufacturing in the United States costs double what they can get from Asia, even with tariffs.

So, like a lot of companies, just starting out, the Webster's turned to Vietnam. Can you show us around? So anyway, let's take a look. Yes, let's. Sonny showed us a bunch of the parts of the printing process. Two big printers right away, right up front. They were around the size of a small car.

Sunny said they cost $50,000 U.S. apiece. Computer driven, right? So people need to have the skills to be good. Yeah, yeah. So let's say over here. All right. Oh, here we go. So this is the graphic teams.

A couple of people on computers doing design work. So this young man, how old is he? Can we talk to him for a minute? Yeah, please. Through our translator, Andy, we learned he'd only been working there for about a month. So he's freshly graduated, and this is his first job. He studied design in college, and he's getting more training here.

For the specific textile design that they're doing here, He is learning when he's... Learning as he goes. The layman term. Lamanstrom, right. He's a chef. He learned how to cook, but now he comes to Sagan printer,

he needs to cook the dish that we're cooking. That's very good. That's very good. I like that. I'm going to use that. That is the way. That is the way. Semi, is it hard to find workers like this?

Traditionally. Traditionally. Most of the printers, they were higher technicians from overseas. as a Chinese technician who comes here because they have been doing for many years in the initial year when I started I do have Chinese technician

and once a foundation is there I have the Vietnam who are the senior who already got the skill set and then continue we do localize that is the way I run the company Sunny I wonder if you could connect a dot for me how important is this new class of Vietnamese worker to the US consumer

very important because in this industry my principle is that we are in a meticulous industry. Meticulous. And the major contributor in this business is the human being. Even you have AI, you have robotic stuff coming out. If the human being is not there to worry work for it, that product will never come out. In a conference room nearby, where there were finished products on display, quality printed,

nice hockey jersey, and certification. on the wall for sustainability and worker safety that lets them work with big American retailers. We met one of Sonny's right-hand people, his sousheft, to keep running with that analogy. Would you tell me your name, please? Yeah, my name, E. Chang. I'm a lead of trading of Saigon printer. I'm handled the Galat Cover person and the development also. Development also. How long have you worked here? Yeah, I have been in Saigon printer for three years already.

Three years? Yes. What did you do before this? Yeah, I'm just graduated from my, you know. and I come directly here. I'm stuck from the zero. So you're very young. Yeah, I'm 20. 28. Miss Trang is another one of those prime age workers we've been talking about. She studied both English and Chinese at university.

For English part, I communicate with my customer. Because my customer is from U.S., Australia, and some from Europe also. And for the Chinese, I'm using for my material sourcing. Sorry, material sourcing. So you're Chinese suppliers. Chinese supplier and some partner I'm working in Vietnam with Chinese also. Have you ever been to the United States? Yes, I've been in the US and the Magic Show.

The Magic Show, that's a big convention. It's a trade show. Yeah. I feel that it's so special for me for the change to practice English. Your English is pretty good. Did you go shopping for any of the products that you made? Did you go to stores and buy your products? Yes, of course.

You can see here. She grabbed two pink and blue kids bathing suits up off the table. We print for Target. Sorry, you went to Target. Yeah, we bought this. Yeah, and we go there, and we see a lot of products print by Earth, and we are so proud of it. The fabric for those swimsuits, which is printed here,

at this factory in Vietnam. It's sewn together by workers in South Korea before being shipped to the United States where Trang bought them at a target. Was it surprising to you how much of the products and the stores were made here in Vietnam? Yeah, I was surprised.

I would not think, I didn't think that in Vietnam will become strong like that. Why do you think they wanted to make products in Vietnam? What is it that you guys have? This is not my thinking. This is my thinking.

My listening from my customer, they come quick-Urd, and they say that product made from Vietnam is a good quality. When they go to sleep and they can sleep well. Yeah. Yeah. I have the phone. Sorry, I have the phone. Of course you have a car.

I completely understand. Because service is a very important part of this business. So, sure, you can't get more American than a two-car garage, especially one decorated for the 4th of July. But we couldn't have those or all the kids bathing suits at Target or so many of the products Americans buy every single day without people doing the work halfway around the world. Coming up tomorrow on the program, the Vietnamese high-tech economy. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's up down, rather, 72 points, 2 tenths of 1%, 48,463.

The NASDAQ added 376 points. That is 1 in 610%. closed at 24,016, the S&P 500 up 55, 8 tenths of 1%. 7,022. Did I mention all-time highs? All right, we've been talking about Vietnam and a major destination for U.S. manufacturing. Intel has made a huge investment there, a billion and a half dollars over the past 20 years. Today, Intel up 1 and 8 tenth percent.

Boeing, which relies on Vietnamese plants to build certain airplane parts, increased a 10th percent. Apple, which, of course, makes some Apple watches, AirPods, and iPads there, climbed 2 and 9 tenths of 1 percent on. the day. Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year, Treasury note rose 4.28% on the 10-year. You're listening to Marketplace. Wanting to Internet?

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velocity of data, mobile, is reduced after 20 gigas a month. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizzol. It's tax day today, as you hopefully know,

any balance due is due by midnight, unless you got a refund coming. And speaking of refunds, there's news of money of a different kind coming back. The federal government

is set to start processing tariff refunds next week for companies that pay the presidency, import duties that the Supreme Court struck down in February. All told, the government owes some $160 billion in change, but hoops will have to be jumped through to get those payments. The biggies, your Walmarts, and your FedEx's, they've got the resources, the lawyers, the

accountants, smaller companies, not necessarily as Marketplace's Nova Saffo reports. Here's the good news. The refund process that Customs and Border Protection has set up looks relatively simple. Businesses just need to upload an Excel document to a new online tool with a list of tariffs they want repaid. Dan Anthony heads, We Pay the Tariffs, a small business coalition. It's a lot easier than what could have been required in terms of hiring lawyers or filing individual cases. Still, there are hurdles. Take the experience of Beth Benicki, founder of Busy Baby. I have a line of silicone baby products all designed to keep toys with and reaching off the floor. at home and on the go. Benicki makes her products in China. Her orders are too small for U.S.

manufacturers. She's been trying to get set up online to get $50,000 in tariffs back from customs enforcement. I've been calling and submitting tickets to which they tell me, here's the instructions on how to create the account. I tell them I am at creating the account. I'm getting an error message. She's determined to see this process through, but says she can understand how other small businesses don't have the time or expertise. Casey Wright of Houghton Horns, a musical instrument retailer, hadn't even heard that the refund process was about to begin. Awesome.

No, last I heard that they were working on it. Houten Horns is owed about $100,000, but there is a complication. Most of those tariffs were paid through intermediaries. So UPS, FedEx, they're going to go have to get the refunds and then find some process to pass that on to us. And we have heard nothing from them so far. FedEx has promised refunds eventually. UPS has urged companies to prepare paperwork.

Pete Mento at the advisory firm Baker-Tilly says all companies should file for refunds, even if it's just to get the hang of doing so. So our current tariff burden of 10% on practically everything we're importing from anywhere, probably in 8 to 10 months from now, we're going to go through all of this all over again. because Mento expects those tariffs to be overturned as well. I'm Navasopho for Marketplace. Crude oil today, higher, obviously, than it was a month and a half ago, but unchanged on the day load of mid-90s a barrel for both benchmarks.

That is good news, relatively speaking, for oil-consuming economies, which is all of them. This oil shock, as you know, is being felt especially hard in Asia. And when you hear that China imports 70% of its crude, give or take, you'd imagine it's pretty exposed. But as Marketplace Elizabeth Troval reports, while it is far from immune, China's actually better position than you might think. You'll remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper? The grasshopper plays all summer while the ant works hard to store food for winter. Well, guess which insect China is? China has been really deliberate about preparing for these types of shopping.

Conway Irwin with S&P Global Energy says, while things were getting tense last year with the U.S. and oil exporters like Iran and Venezuela, China focused on growing its already massive oil reserves. Adding to that reserve was a really smart hedge against the potential for future price volatility. And that's especially true because at the time, China was getting discounted barrels from Iran and Russia because of sanctions. So the rain has come, and China, fortunately, for China, has the biggest umbrella. Colin Hendricks is with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. China entered the conflict with these crude inventories, estimated between 1.1 and 1.4 billion barrels, which is enough to cover about 120 days of imports. China also has been intentional about finding oil outside the Middle East.

The Chinese sourcing approach is very diversified. That's Rice University's Gabriel Collins, who says it's not just the oil supply that's diversified. It's the whole energy system. Much of the world still operates on petro state principles in terms of being very oil-centric. The Chinese are working to become an electro-state. And while China's big bet on electrification isn't a silver bullet, Columbia's Erica Downs says it is helping the country weather this crisis. The conflict itself is almost certainly going to make China double down on its push to electrify its entire economy. This basically proves China's strategy correct, which includes pivoting to renewables, says Gong He with City University of New York. It shows the benefits to accelerate our energy transition towards more renewable and clean energy. That could be a lesson other countries learn the hard way. I'm Elizabeth

Troval for Marketplace. We got the latest beige book today. That's the Fed's anecdotal snapshot of economic conditions across its 12 districts. The thing is published eight times a year. The words Middle East appeared 59 times with the war cited as a major source of uncertainty complicating kind of everything. In New York, an indoor golf place, put a pause. But a pause on its capital improvements and its hiring. In Richmond, a motorcycle dealer cut production to six days a week to cut costs. And in that spirit

of the beige book, we did a survey of one of our small business regulars. Johanna Dominguez owns Put a Plant on it in Buffalo, New York. Business is touch and go right now. We still have been pretty cold up here. I mean, today it's a little bit warmer for the first time.

But the weekends have been really good. During the week, it's a little bit slower. but it's hit or miss. We are looking forward to whenever spring will actually come here. We are hoping it's maybe this week that it will actually start being spring. We did get our first large shipment in this week. So that's kind of our start of spring is whenever we get our large shipment from Florida. It's a little scary in some respect.

So this last order I did with our broker. So we either get plants from the broker or we basically act as a broker and get plants from a lot of different nurseries. And right now, it's considered the nursery busy season. So there is a surcharge for the busy season. And then our regular trucker also added a surcharge for the tariffs and the fuel issues as well. So there's like a double surcharge. And so that's part of the reason why I went with the broker.

instead because we wouldn't have had such a high shipping costs. So that is definitely something that we're concerned about. I know I've talked to other businesses and a lot of friends who are artists because we carry all local artists in the store. And even they have said that they notice that a lot of people are kind of holding their breaths and their wallets and that it's been a little bit slow for them. We're starting to see a little bit of that. Our weekends are still pretty good and solid and we do have the large accounts that are coming through. But I would say I definitely have noticed a little decrease in sales because everyone is just so tense and nervous about what's going to happen. Yeah, I get that. Johanna Domingo is there, Buffalo, New York,

put a plant on it is her store. This final note on the way out today in which, first of all, you remember a couple of weeks ago I kept pointing out that the markets are an idiot? Definitely still that. And second of all, I can die now because I have definitely seen everything. Have you heard of all birds, a once white hot but now quite struggling shoe retailer? The company announced this morning, and I am truly not making this up, that it's going to pivot to artificial intelligence. It's going to make AI infrastructure, computers, and hardware and such. Again, not making this up. All bird shares on the day up $5802. percent. You guys, come on, man. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Foki, Montana Johnson, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, and Charlton Thorpe. Alex Simpson is the manager of media production. And I'm Kai Rizdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.

Headlines shift overnight, and then again in the afternoon and again in the evening. You see where I'm going with this. Hello, I'm David Brancaccio, special correspondent for Market We'll redeliver economic news designed to keep you both sane and informed. One of my favorite ways to make sense of it all is with the Marketplace newsletter. Every weekday, our team curates must-read stories from the week and delivers explainers. Write 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.