Marketplace - Return to war could fuel inflation

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Inflation that resulted from the U.S. war with Iran had just begun to cool when President Trump called off a shaky ceasefire. Now, as the world turns their attention back to conflict in the Middle East, economists turn their attention to the Federal Reserve. Will the central bank act to tamp down a second round of inflation? Also in this episode, PepsiCo sees tempered sales in North America, women in finance pivot to social media influencing, and taxpayers foot the bill for wild horse managementEvery 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:Return to U.S.-Iran war is likely to change inflation expectationsPepsiCo had a great quarter — except in North AmericaThe women leaving Wall Street for content creationWhen wild horses get rounded up, the taxpayer’s bill growsBaby boomers are un-tying the knot — and it's complicating inheritancesWhat it takes to transform a 600-year-old fixer-upper into a forever home

All right, quick, Doritos and oil prices. What's the connection? From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl, Thursday, today, 9 July. It is always to have you long, everybody. You know, this might, I'm prepared to admit, sound harsh, judgey even, but not fundamentally unfair. The markets, as has been pointed out to time or two,

are an idiot, or at the very least, willfully unaware. You look at the global news cycle the past 24 or 36 hours, and you would quite reasonably say, stocks are going to tank and oil is going to spike. Oh, that markets were indeed rational. Traders looked around today and said, nah, everything's good. But you know what? Consumers, too, get a vote on what happens in this economy. And as marketplaces Elizabeth Trowalvallov reports now to get us going, was, is, and shall remain for a while.

Top O'Mind. Gasoline today may cost less than when it peaked earlier this year. But Mark Finley with Rice University says you need to look back further. There's still significant year-on-year inflation and pressure on prices at the pump. Gas is still up, 70 cents or so from last year. It's the one thing that you have screamed at you from every street corner. And so it has an outsized impact not only on inflation and inflation expectations. but things like consumer confidence.

And while Yelina Shalitjava with the conference board says long-term inflation expectations have been in check thus far. Prices have consumers concerned. So if the conflict drags on, we may see a much more significant reaction from the consumers and that could lead to some unsustainable pickup in inflation expectations. And if inflation expectations go up, then we think we can get all of these propagation effects. That's Andy Glover with the Kansas City Fed.

He says employees start asking for higher wages. Firms start raising their prices because they expect their suppliers to raise prices. And so it can just become embedded and cause, you know, a persistently higher inflation that becomes much more difficult to eliminate using monetary policy. To prevent that inflationary cycle, Christiana Baumeister, with Notre Dame says she thinks the Fed should be raising interest rates. In order to control inflation, you need to basically keep inflation expectations anchored. And the way to do that is to act decisively.

And I think it's high time for the Fed to act. She says all the back and forth piece, no piece, only adds to the risk of an inflation feedback loop that spirals out of control. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Wall Street today, as I said, stocks up, oiled down. We will have the details when we do the numbers. That thing I said a minute ago, consumers get a vote on how things go in this economy. Exhibit A Today, PepsiCo, which reported quarterly profits this morning. The maker of Doritos and Gatorade and Pepsi 2 reported net revenue up more than 6% from the same time a year ago.

There was, though, a noticeable weak spot, North America. The company said food and beverage sales in the United States were tempered as consumers tighten up in response to rising prices. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes reports. Pepsi says its sales in the U.S. were particularly weak this spring at places where people impulsively buy snacks and drinks. Think convenience stores and gas stations. Gas prices are so salient. We're all standing next to our cars staring at that digital. display. Tal Gross is a professor at Boston University who studies household finance. As the U.S. went to war in the

Middle East this spring and gas prices rose, people stared at those numbers ticking up at gas stations, and some decided not to buy a soda or a bag of chips. Psychologists call this mental accounting. If you're typically used to spending $40 at the gas station, if now you have to spend $50, you kind of think about that as one account. And if gas prices are higher than usual, your brain goes, boop, this account has hit its limit. And so you're not willing to spend money on Pepsi products because it somehow is linked to what you're spending on gas. Consumers are resisting the temptation of other gas station treats, too, including energy drinks and beer, says Citibank analyst Felipe Falorni.

Especially at the low income levels, right? Consumers at the higher end are doing a lot better. consumer at the low end, they're really struggling. But Falerni says he expects consumers to go back to their old habits. Whenever you have shocks like this, usually you get a pretty big response initially, and then consumers just kind of adjust. Eventually, we stop being disciplined and go back to our regular chip eating weights. I'm Stephanie Hughes from Marketplace.

Our job on this program is to raise the economic intelligence of this country. We do not, though, have a lock on that gig, and there's a new group trying to get in on it. Former financiers, women in particular, who've left their jobs at big investment banks to become content creators. Gabrielle Ng wrote about the women who've traded Wall Street for social media in Bloomberg the other day. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Kai. So these jobs on Wall Street, as most of our listeners will know, are hard to get. They're extremely time-consuming and competitive. Well compensated, it has to be said. And yet, as you point out, there is a group of women who've decided enough is enough, and they've struck out on their own.

Tell me what they're doing. Yeah, as you said, they kind of reached this point where, interestingly, the finance experience is bringing them more outside of the industry than inside it. And, you know, we're at this interesting point in time where, like you said, finance is still so, so lucrative. But especially for women, there is still this glass ceiling. And for everyone, it's less secure than other. Layoffs are massive throughout the entire industry.

And yet people really want to enter finance, the race to enter it, so heated. And so for these women, they're kind of pulling the curtain back from an industry that traditionally has been very elite, very secretive. And they're showing people how to do what they did and get in it. But they themselves are outside it. Yeah, sort of parallel to it, actually, which is interesting. Two words. Actually, sorry, no, maybe three. Social media and podcasts.

And that's how these women are, number one, getting their audiences and also making some money. Exactly. And like what you said, social media is so scalable. So in that sense, they can reach a much wider audience that they can monetize than in finance where you have a really linear career path. You know, one of the ways that my sources put it in the story is that all her eggs were in one basket and her day job in finance. But now all her eggs are in so many baskets. You know, you have podcasts, you have online consultations, you have brand deals, you have product links, the ways that you can make money from social media, especially from a niche where you're from finance, your followers are young female financial professionals. There are so much

money to be made. Tell me about these two women you start this series with. They were Wall Street, you know, reasonably senior people. And they left to start this podcast, the tagline of which is, and I kind of love this, if Bloomberg and Bravo had a baby. Tell me about them and how they're doing. Yeah, exactly. Like what you said, you know, it's a big tradeoff for them. They worked their way up to vice president positions. They cut their teeth on the trading flaws of Lehman of Morgan Stanley during the great financial crisis. Obviously, they've been through a lot and they have so much experience. And what they're doing is really pulling back the curtain on an industry that traditionally has been so hard to understand there's so much trading jargon. They themselves were never finance majors. One of them came from a stem background. The other one studied English. So their mission was really to break down the bearers to entry to finance. Coming from a place of like, we broke into this industry together. We had no idea how this works until we stepped into the door.

And we kind of want to pull that down for people. Let them know through social media how to get these jobs, what people in these jobs do, what they're looking for. You know, having been in finance, these women, they are no stranger to running a business. They don't make this decision until they're sure that the tradeoff is going to be worth it. And of course, they are the intangibles, like being able to spend time with friends and family, having more creative control. But also, like what you said, it's about just the immense opportunities that they can have from all the different products that you can build

from social media. Right. Scalability, as you said earlier. Gabrielle Eng at Bloomberg. Thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you, Kai. Appreciate it. We direct your attention now to the Wild Free Roaming Horses Act of 1971. that's Public Law 92-195, if you want to look it up. It was the federal government's try at managing the tens of thousands of wild horses, mostly out west, that were free-roaming, I guess, on federal lands. The Bureau of Land Management is the agency responsible for protecting both those iconic symbols of the American West, the horses, and the lands on which they roam.

And as Marketplaces Caitlin Tan reports, as the herds grow, fulfilling both of those requirements, grows increasingly difficult. Just outside of Lander, Wyoming, Dwayne Oldham is touring me around his ranch in an ATV. In the distance is the towering Wind River Mountain Range, and much closer are fenced grassy pastures and a herd of hundreds of horses. I don't know if I've ever seen this many horses all at once. We've got three pastures like this. Wow. In every color you could think of.

Yeah. He tries to get the horse's attention, and they perk up. They take off running, snorting, and pounding their hoods. These aren't his horses. They're wild ones that were rounded up off public lands where the herds were getting too big. But we have a few that are from Nevada and just a few from Oregon and California, but the majority of them are Wyoming. This is a business deal with the federal government.

Oldham has paid about a quarter million a year to feed, fence in, and get veterinary care for the animals. We had a 10-year contract. We got about three years left on this one. And at that time, we will apply to renew. The federal government makes deals like this all across the country, with about 60,000 wild horses living in either pastures like Oldham's or sometimes cramped corrals. And their care costs around $100 million a year. That's absolutely taxpayer money. That is not done with donations. Rob Godbey is an economist at the University of Wyoming. He says the federal government doesn't just protect wild horses on public land, but competing interests as well. Agricultural producers depend on using that federal land as a source of feed for their cattle.

Ranchers pay for that grass. But Godby says tens of thousands of wild horses still roaming free on that land are also eating that grass. The horses compete with the cattle that we graze. Public land managers also say too many horses can trample native plants and riverbanks, and their herd sizes grow really quickly. So the federal government regularly rounds up and removes some of them, putting them in those corrals and pastures. This year, it'll be 14,000. Every time they do a roundup, there's more horses, which means that we're just making a commitment to continue to spend that much money. Each new wild horse in captivity is roughly $4 a day on the taxpayer's bill.

And Godbey says there's only one way to stop that. You've got to get rid of some. And then the question is how? One solution some people offer up is, hey, why don't we just sell these horses to slaughter, clear out the pens on a mass scale, start fresh from there. Emily Stearns is with the American Horse Council. She says loopholes mean some horses end up across the border in slaughterhouses. but the federal government isn't directly doing that.

It legally can't. It does try to get the public to adopt the horses, but Stern says that too has problems. We are limited by the number of people who have the skills to safely handle these horses. Remember, they're wild animals. Having a random person come in off the street and adopt these horses is just setting everybody up for failure.

Another option is fertility control to reduce the free-roaming wild herd sizes. But that'll take, you guessed it, more money. I mean, I feel like the way this story ends is just that it's complicated and there isn't a solution and it's going to keep costing a lot of money. I wish I really had to punch your exit line for you than that. I very much appreciate that that's not a very exciting way to end it. What is exciting is still seeing a wild horse roaming through the sagebrush in the middle of nowhere. In Lander, Wyoming, I'm Keatlin Tan for Marketplace.

Coming up. I didn't want to end up with bright purple floors and green walls. Yeah, no, me neither. First, though, let's do the numbers. Downdel's up 139 points today. 310%. 52,000, 487. The NASDAQ added 336, 1 in 310%.

26,206. The S&P 500 gained to 60 points. percent 75 and 43. It is a day that ends in Y. So of course, we're talking about AI. Micron Technology climbed four and a half percent. Invidia. Slid six tenths percent. Sandisk surges about seven and six tenths of one percent. Stephanie Hughes was telling us about the war in Iran and PepsiCo. shares of PepsiCo fell three and a quarter percent. Today is National Sugar Cookie Day, also called the Nazareth cookie, the modern version of the sugary buttery confection, was created by German immigrants who settled in Nazareth, Pennsylvania in the 1700s.

sweet day, though, for General Mills, owner of cookie maker Pillsbury, down one and a third percent on the day you're listening to Marketplace. This Marketplace podcast is presented by Tomorrow's Cure. If our health care coverage leaves you wanting to learn more about the innovations shaping medicine, tomorrow's cure is for you. It's the chart-topping 2025 Amby Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic. Back for a brand new season with new host award-winning journalist Lindsay Severt, Tomorrow's Cure explores the innovations changing the health care landscape. Featuring Conversation, with leading physicians, researchers, and medical experts, the new season examines everything from AI-powered diagnostics and cutting-edge cancer therapies to surgical technologies improving patient care today. Not sure where to start? Listen to the season premiere featuring MD Anderson Radiation Physicist Dr. Page Taylor

and Mayo Clinic Radiation Oncologist Dr. Adam Holtzman. They discuss why carbon ion therapy is generating excitement in the medical community and what it could mean for the future of precision cancer treatment. So go ahead. Follow tomorrow's cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal. Kristen Schwab did a story for us a couple of days ago about all of the small businesses

that baby boomers are going to be passing down to their kids and maybe their grandkids over the next five or ten years. That's just one slice of the trillions of dollars in assets that are going to be coming down the pike as boomers age. Complicating that, though, are divorces, which are on the rise among the post-war generation. Emily Stewart wrote about it in Business Insider the other day. Emily, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. All right, so divorces are generally down, right? But not so much with older folks. What's going on? Yeah, so older people still get divorced at lower rates than younger people, but we are seeing the rate of divorce go up among them. So since 1990, the divorce rate

for people over 50 has doubled, and for people over 65, it has tripled. So older people are getting divorced a lot more than they used to. Divorce is always hard. It gets harder the later in your married life you are, right? Untangling finances and property and all of that. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, for younger people, you know, a lot of the time the issue is your kids, your house, and maybe But a lot of people feel like, you know, they're early enough in their careers, that if it is a financial hit for them, they can kind of make that money back for retirement, et cetera, et cetera. For older people, you know, these people have really kind of built a lifetime together, right? It's not just the house.

It might be multiple houses. It's probably their retirement accounts, their 401Ks. And that can be a lot to unwind. And people kind of, you know, don't realize necessarily going into it how complex it's going to be. Because, again, like, you really do build a lot. life together. That's pretty big and unwinding that is hard. Let's talk about some of the trickle-down effects, I guess you could call it. Number one, sometimes these older people, and they get divorced, wind up re-entering the workforce, too, yes? Yeah, I mean, that can definitely

happen. And it can be a little bit harder because, again, people are kind of farther along in their earning years. They don't have as much time to kind of make up money. I think for women, especially, it can be complicated as much as women are working more than they use. to, many of them are still stay-at-home moms, or maybe they just took some time out of the workforce. And so they're a little bit farther behind and getting back in can be pretty tough, especially if you've been out for a long time for maybe decades. Also, and this is kind of random, but you're married for a long time, you get papers, you squirrel them away, you put them into this, you put them into that. And then time comes to dissolve this marriage, and you literally don't

know where like the deed of your house is and the title to the cars and all of this stuff. Yeah, I was talking to an attorney who does divorces here in New York, and that was one thing she brought up. You know, people will say, well, I inherited this property just for me. Okay, well, where is that will from your uncle who died 20 years ago? You know, was there a pre-nup? Probably not, but even so, who has it? And so that's the kind of stuff where, you know, if it was 20, 30 years ago, you just don't have that stuff sitting around anymore. Do kids get a vote?

I mean, one assumes that these would be grown-up children of these boomers who are divorcing? Yeah, I mean, that's what. that I did hear from some of the attorneys I talked to is that adult kids will kind of meddle a little bit more. You know, if you're 10 and your parents are getting divorced, you don't really have anything to say about it. But if you're 30, 40, you might be more involved. And I think that's especially more complicated and like blended families where maybe this is a second divorce that's happening. And that is really when people wind up in court. Not to put salt in the wound on what could be a nice way to, you know, end this story. But sometimes these folks are get divorced, then get remarried later. And it also gets complicated with kids and all of the rest of that.

Right. Yeah. And a lot of people just kind of don't realize like how wills work, how different laws work. You know, a lot of the time, two people don't realize that not every change kind of happens in the will. So let's say you get divorced and you change your will saying your ex-spouse doesn't get anything or whoever gets anything. And they don't realize that they didn't change the beneficiaries on things like their life insurance. They're for a one. hey, they're pensioning. For this story, I heard about one, you know, woman who, like, her husband had died and all of a sudden they find a life insurance policy and realized that it was still in the name of his ex who got hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. Wow. Emily Stewart, Business Insider, Boomer divorces. Emily, thanks a lot. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Take care. You've had this thought, haven't you? You're on vacation, unplugged and blissfully relaxed, and you get to wondering what it might be like. if you never came back. I mean, sure, it wouldn't be vacation all the time, but it'd be pretty nice.

The Association of Americans Resident Overseas estimates that five and a half million Americans live abroad. How they got there is one story. How they are managing to live there is another. Here's today's installment of our series Adventures in Housing. My name is Kiki Lee, and in 2024, I purchased a historic home in a medieval village called Musa Mousomali, Sicily. Buying a house in a foreign country seemed like very much a far-off dream. For me, it didn't really seem like something that was realistic, certainly not at my age. But then one day I had a house come across my feed.

I was scrolling on TikTok, and I saw a video of a home that was 25,000 euros. And within a week, I booked a ticket, and I flew there to this town that I had never heard of called Musumeli. And I was off to the races. saw about 20 or 30 homes when I was there, and I ended up putting an offer on one and got it for 27,000 euros. So the first order of business was to learn in Italian construction terms. So I learned how to say tiles and windows and drywall and plaster and paint. I didn't want to end up with bright purple floors and green walls that weren't supposed to be. So it was definitely out of necessity. It's fascinating how much you can learn when you really need to. Some of my favorite

quirks to the home are definitely the seven addresses. So I have four front doors in the front and then three in the back. And it's very interesting. I don't, I haven't ordered mail there yet. So that's something that I'll have to discover later on. I'm hoping to officially move in at the end of this summer. With an old 600-year-old home, there's always something that comes up, something new to do, something that you find under a tile or behind a wall. Being able to work remotely has greatly helped me in this whole renovation process and be able to spend all of this time in Italy and not have to worry about if I can get the PTO or if I can take a leave of absence. That was never something that I had to worry about.

The month after my offer on the house was accepted, I came back to Los Angeles and I was talking to my best friend. And he kind of toyed around with the idea, maybe I should buy a house there too. And I thought, yeah, I'm just here to plant the seed. He came and visited me for the first time and he ended up leaving having bought the house next door. So now we get to be neighbors and not just best friends. I mean, come on, sign me up, right? Man, Kiki Lee, first time homeowner, the mailing address is Muzumeli-Sissly by the end of the summer. Whether you are moving overseas or back to your hometown, tell us about it, would you?

Marketplace.org slash Adventures in Housing. This final note on the way out today in which Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh has made his first real moves to put his mark on the central bank. He has named the co-chairs of the five task forces he announced in his first press conference. That was a couple of weeks ago. It's a mix of academic economists, former leaders of other central banks, and business leaders too, including former Walmart CEO Doug McMillan, and of note, venture capitalist Mark Andresen. Also, and not really related at all, but worth a mention, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has been named to Anthropics Oversight Board. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbyn, Mika Ellison, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McKenry, and Sophia Lorenzio.

Will Story is the supervising senior producer. And I'm Kyle Rizdal-We-Will's. See you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. I'm Rima Grace, and this week on This Is Uncomfortable, we're talking about the sandwich generation, what it means to care for aging parents while also raising young children of your own. I chat with author Nicole Chung about what it was like to support her parents through serious illness. And how grief, caregiving, and the failures of the U.S. healthcare system all collided with the demands of her own life.

I just remember so many times thinking, like, I'm just remember so many times thinking, like, I am literally scheduling my grief because today is a day we talk to three doctors and a social worker. Be sure to listen to This Is Uncomfortable on your favorite podcast app.