Marketplace - TPS cuts will tear through the labor market

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

More than 330,000 Haitians lost their ability to legally live and work in the U.S. this week. A recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for refugees from certain countries. In this episode, why the policy change will deliver a swift blow to the healthcare sector. Plus: Economists weigh the Fed’s next interest rate move, businesses report cautious optimism in new survey, and a Baltimore club redistributes wealth to neighbors in need.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:Economists share their Fed expectationsBusinesses report optimism, despite all the economic uncertaintyA new kind of club wants people to share the wealthWhat the end of TPS for Haitians could mean for the labor forceTo reduce their climate impact, airlines target contrailsCircus school balances world-class programs with small town values

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The Federal Reserve meets this week. What are they going to do on interest rates? Yeah, wouldn't you like to know? From American Public Media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Monday, today the 27th day of July. Good, as it always is, to have you along, everybody. Here with Wednesday's news today. At two in the afternoon, two days from now, the Federal Open Market Committee is going to release its announcement on interest rates. Expectations are, based on basically zero evidence, as I'll get into in a minute, that the central bank is going to hold rates steady. We, the Fed watching, members of the business and economic journalism community don't have much evidence because, as you have heard here and elsewhere, Chairman Warsh is a good deal less loquacious than his predecessor.

Most particularly, Warsh has scrapped what's known as forward guidance. The Fed gave me as a hint, a really, really good hint of what it is going to do before it does it. But you know what? Even if the Fed is staying mum on its rate projections, markets get a vote. Marketplace Justin Hull made some calls so we could do some forward guidance of our own. Even though the Fed's probably going to hold rates steady this week, markets are thinking that the Fed will hike rates at its September meeting, says Randy Vogel had a fixed income with Wilmington Trust. If the Fed sees that inflation data moving higher instead of lower,

then the probability that they take action in September, I think, is pretty high. Vogel says at the Fed's last meeting, Chairman Kevin Warsh made it clear that keeping inflation contained is his primary objective. So we put much more focus on inflation than the labor market. But Vogel says the Fed could also hold rates steady. Winnie Caesar, Global Head of Strategy at Credit Sites, says she doesn't expect the Fed to hike rates until at least early next year, because there's too much we don't know about the economy right now.

So long as we have the Middle East conflict going on, new rounds of tariffs, AI disruption, especially as it relates to the labor market, it makes it really difficult to get a clear picture of what appropriate policy should be. Caesar says if the war in the Middle East settles down by next year, inflation could cool off. And that is really what's going to determine

the path of energy prices and then de facto, the path of inflation. There are plenty of other factors that could bring down inflation, says Bernard Yaros, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. A labor market that is not overheating, that's not a source of inflation,

weak inflation on the housing side, so a lot of rent of shul. turric prices, you know, remaining relatively subdued. Eero says he expects the Fed to hold rate steady until September of next year. That's because even if oil prices remain high or go even higher, consumers might cut back. Because you don't have those tax refunds going out the door, you have already a very low savings rate, consumers would just be in a tougher position. And if consumers pull back, the economy would slow down, and the Fed might go from holding

rate steady to cutting them. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. Wall Street today, this being a Monday, you'd be right if you'd have figured there'd been some kind of news over the weekend about a ceasefire, negotiations, and lather rinse, repeat. Oil traders sure bought it. Equity markets less so. Bond traders, they couldn't decide. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. You know how we've been saying for a very long time now that consumers in this economy are displeased. and that businesses, if not displeased, then certainly uneasy about the state of things?

Well, hold that thought because a survey from the National Association for Business Economics this morning says businesses are actually doing better. Compared to the first quarter of the year, businesses said sales improved in Q2, that they are able, on average, to raise their prices, and that generally their operations are more efficient. And I know what you're thinking. There's the war in the Middle East, the seesawing price of fuel and other critical inputs, there's inflation, there is. everything. Marketplace is Kelly Wells unpacks that a little bit. It's not a full steam ahead, rosy picture, more of a tempered optimistic kind of picture. Economist Nick Tremper with the payroll processor Gusto says businesses are cautious, but they're not contracting. He says, yes, revenue is higher,

but so are expenses, so profit margins are staying pretty flat. The real show of confidence, Trempter says, is in the fact that businesses are still hiring people. You don't hire into a recession. They're not seeing things that are making them worry about the future or stop hiring, frankly. That's the biggest bet that somebody can make, and it's something that we're seeing month over month. But this cautiously optimistic picture from businesses came in the same quarter that the University of Michigan reported consumer sentiment at a record low. The sellers feel fine while the buyers are feeling worried. But this has been the landscape for years now.

Holly Wade is executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business Research Center. She says the biggest impact to a business is its sales. Consumers are still out there spending and businesses are still investing. And that's what drives, you know, business conditions. And the reason both can be true at the same time is basically because inflation. I mean, inflation impacts consumers and businesses simultaneously. Lester Jones is a survey research economist with the National Association for Business Economics, which put out the survey. He says inflation makes the labor market tight.

You know, unemployment numbers are down. We know that wages continue to rise. And as wages rise, consumers can buy more stuff, but that also makes inflation worse. We're in a little bit of a dance right now between consumers, between businesses, between these global economic events that are kind of moving things forward. And Jones says for now, it looks like businesses and consumers will keep on dancing, because businesses in the survey also said, they expect sales and profits on average to keep rising. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. President Trump, well, more specifically, Elon Musk and his operatives,

fired, give or take, 300,000 people from the federal workforce last year. geography being what it is Maryland took a huge hit losing nearly 25,000 federal jobs more than any other state. That's a lot of people losing their livelihoods with all the very real financial and emotional stresses that that brings. So a group in Baltimore has been trying to create some economic certainty with a project inspired by universal basic income but on a hyper-local scale. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has that one. You've got your book clubs, you've got your movie clubs, and then you've got your clubs that are about redistributing money. Yeah, you heard that right. You want to come to a social for the community guaranteed income club?

Have I ever told you about this? I can't believe you can't remember me. That's so great. Alex Zhu is hosting a potluck and movie screening in Baltimore. He's handing out flyers about the group that he started. We have 54 people. We've been running for over a year. It has helped redistribute over $25,000. Zhu got the idea last year when a bunch of his friends who worked for the federal government lost their jobs. Everyone who joins self-reports their monthly income, and the club uses a

formula to figure out the redistribution. We calculate the average, the people who make above the average, send money to people who make below the average. Right now, the person in the club with the highest income makes $10,000 a month post-tax. That member is sending out $700, split between multiple people. There are a few members who have no money coming in. They're each getting about $200 a month. That's the amount Samantha Sussing contributes. She works in health care and sees a lot of people who could use this. I'm like, what this family needs is money. She says the program also acts as a kind of safety net if she ever leaves her job.

This is something that stays in the back of my mind as like, okay, I would have access to this. That access ended up mattering to Jenny Kessler. When she first joined the club, she was working as a brand strategist and usually gave $20 to $30 each month. You know, some people tithe. This felt like a way that I could give back and directly impact someone in my community. Then earlier this year, Kessler lost her job. She still has income from teaching improv classes, but she turned from giving money through the club to getting it.

It's only about $10 to $15 a month, but it's still meaningful. You see a chill up in your Venmo and you're like, wow, somebody is looking out for me in a small way. I know, like, some people say that doesn't seem like a lot, but it's like it's a lot when you don't have much. Tamar Smith lost his job with the federal government last spring. He received up to $140 a month through the club while he was looking for work. He put it towards things like the electric bill.

I was always thankful. And it really reassured me that there's some decent human beings out there in the world. This kind of club can serve as a proof of concept of universal basic income, says philosopher and economist Carl Weiderquist. He's been studying UBI since the late 1900s. But he says there are limits to what a small group. can accomplish. I don't think that a private charity of any kind is going to substitute for what the government needs to be doing. A study of one UBI project in Stockton, California shows that people

who received $500 a month for two years, had less mental distress and more time and energy to look for new jobs than people who didn't get the money. Still, Widerquist says there are potential pitfalls to this kind of club. People could sign up when they're net beneficiaries and then quit the club, when they're going to be net contributors. That's the economist worry that people will be selfish. No one in the Baltimore Club has done that, though they are trying to attract people who make more money, and there's a wait list for people who make below the average. Club founder Alex Zhu hopes would be net givers see there's a benefit to helping your neighbor. When our community is thriving, our lives are better because the people around you are living happier lives.

They're making more art. They're throwing more potlucks and parties. Zhu wants more people at the party. He'd like the club to triple in size by the end of the year. In Baltimore, I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace. Coming up. We needed to raise money in order to build what we call the trapezeum. If you build it, they will come.

But first, let's do the numbers. Now, Industrial's added 260. 52 points today, about a half percent, 52, 210, the NASDAQ down 43 points, 2 tenths percent, 24,932, the S&P 500, basically flat 74 and 13. Cracker Barrel announced today its CEO is stepping down. The leadership change comes after a year or so after the company faced heavy backlash over a proposed change to its logo. Thank you, social media.

Cracker Barrel, old country store, shares down 2.4% on the day. Today marks the first official appearance of Bugs Bunny of Warner Brothers owned Looney Tunes fame in the 1940 animated short, a wild hair. How many times have you seen it? Probably like a zillion times. Bugs started more than 160 shorts from 1940 to 1964. Sadly, though, Bugs, on your special day, Warner Brothers Discovery, down one and nine tenths of one percent. Bond prices went up. Thanks for asking. That means the yield on the 10-year T-note went down. That's the way it works.

4.64% on the 10-year. 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 Ambi Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic. Back for a brand new season with new host award-winning journalist Lindsay Sievert, tomorrow's cure explores the innovations changing the health care landscape.

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This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Whatever else the immigration debate is a proxy for, it is, in absolute terms, a labor market story. I bring that up with an eye toward the headlines. Absent a last-minute court order, more than 300,000 Haitians are going to lose their temporary protected status today. And with it, the ability to both live and work in the United States. And as Marketplaces Samantha Fields reports, even in a labor market as big as this one is, that's going to be noticed both micro, and macroeconomically. Many of the Haitians who are losing TPS have been living and working here for 16 years, ever since the devastating 2010 earthquake. It's very hard to predict what's going to happen.

We are in uncharted territory. Alex Arnon at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School says about 70% of people who have TPS work, which means the labor market is about to lose more than 200,000 people all at once. It's important to note that temporary protected status population is very concentrated both geographically and in terms of the industries they work in. So, you know, it is really a challenge for particular industries in particular places.

Florida is one of those places and health care is one of those industries. Many Haitians with TPS work as home health aides. I think it's going to be very hard for the people to whom they give care to suddenly lose their caregiver. And it's going to be hard for their employers to replace them. Madeline Zavodny at the University of North Florida says to attract new workers, companies often need to raise wages. But this is an industry where wages are largely set by Medicaid or Medicare. And so I think that employers have somewhat limited ability to raise wages. But as big as the loss of these workers will be for certain industries and communities,

Julia Gillette at the Migration Policy Institute says 200,000 is a relatively small number for the 160 million worker U.S. economy. That said, most of the growth in our workforce is coming from immigration, taking together these moves on TPS and on other pathways to the United States and ramped up deportations. That could really threaten the growth of our workforce. And our economy overall. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. Flying, fun though it may be, the getting wherever you're going part, not the cramped and crowded flight

itself part. It's just not great for the planet. Aviation accounts for about 4% of human-caused global warming. And we've talked a bit about one, albeit very small solution, sustainable aviation fuels. But here's the thing. Not all aviation-related warming of the planet comes directly from the carbon emissions that happen when jet engines do their thing. Marketplaces Amy Scott, the host of our climate podcast, How We Survive, explains. I'm outside Denver International Airport. watching jet after jet take off for San Jose, Chicago, and Casper, Wyoming, each one spewing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But that's not all.

We only get about half the picture of aviation's impact if we only focus on the CO2. Tyler Robarge is a retired Air Force test pilot, who now works for the nonprofit contrails.org, a group focused on reducing the climate. impact of condensation trails. Robar says when the jets we're watching get up to cruising altitudes and the hot, humid exhaust from their engines hits cold air, ice crystals can form around the soot and other particles, creating those white plumes we see in the sky.

Typically, con trails dissipate quickly, but in especially humid conditions, they can persist for hours, spreading into a layer of artificial cirrus clouds that can trap heat. The good news is that contrails can be avoided. Fundamentally, what you need to do is be able to predict where they're going to form and then intelligently route around them. Today, Robarge runs trials with commercial airlines using AI-driven forecasts. The areas in the atmosphere where long-lasting contrails tend to form are sort of pancake-shaped, broad but thin, so pilots can adjust their altitude by just a few thousand feet to avoid them.

Passengers may not even notice. These are deviations on the order of what pilots do every day on every flight to avoid turbulence, to get better tailwinds, to avoid traffic conflicts, and so forth. Last year, American Airlines Airlines teamed up with Contrails.org and Google for a trial involving hundreds of flights from the U.S. to Europe. Jill Blickstein is American's chief sustainability officer. We have a treatment group and a control group, and we ask the pilots if they were presented with the Contrails Avoidance Plan to fly it.

Using satellite imagery, researchers found that the flights that followed a Contrail avoidance plan had a 62% reduction in Contrails compared to the control group with an estimated 69% reduction in warming. Eventually, researchers plan to expand testing to all airlines. flying in an aerospace. Blikstein says a big question they need to answer is how much more fuel this might take. If, say, a pilot flies a little lower to avoid contrails and then climbs back up? We will be burning a little more jet fuel. We will be emitting a little bit more CO2. Not enough, researchers say, to offset the climate benefits.

But that does have a financial impact on the airline. Enough of an impact that American paused its trials this year after President Trump's war in Iran sent jet fuel prices soaring. But as climate solutions go, contrail management could be relatively affordable, says Andrew Chen with the Clean Energy Research Group RMI. He says sustainable aviation fuel can cost between $200 and $400 per ton of carbon abated. The equivalent impact of contrail avoidance is much cheaper. There are some other costs around scheduling, maintenance, those sorts of things. But when you even it all out, you're now talking about a mitigation that could come out to something like $5 U.S. per ton of carbon abated.

Airlines may have other incentives to manage contrails. Last year, the European Union began requiring airlines to monitor and report their non-CO2 climate impacts, laying the groundwork for potential future regulations. In Denver, I'm Amy Scott for Mark. place. There's lots more of the climate reporting that Amy and the crew did on the latest season of How We Survive. You can subscribe wherever you choose to get your podcasts. If you were out this weekend taking in the performing arts, Broadway, community theater, live

music, what have you. Thanks, because you are helping to revive a big business. According to data from research and markets, which is just like it sounds, a market research firm, ticket sales for live events in North America are back to 93% of what they were in 2019. And it turns out that what falls into that performing arts category, it's a range. Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Serenity Smith, Fortune. My name is Elsie Smith, and I am the co-founder.

and director of programming. And I am the co-founder and producing director of the New England Center for Circus Arts. My twin sister and I founded it 20 years ago. We performed as aerialists for over 30 years and then made Brattleboro, Vermont, our home. The way we got into circus was sort of by accident. We needed a summer job. And we ended up getting hired to teach circus at a summer camp. It was basically an apprenticeship.

They taught us how to teach fire eating, trick roller skating, tight wire, flying trapeze. And then about two weeks later, all the kids showed up and we were teaching. We had maybe about a 15-year career touring the world, performing with companies such as Ringling Brothers and Cirque de Soleil was the last big touring contract. And then I wanted to start a family with my husband at the time. And so it made sense for us to settle down in Brattleboro, which is the big town of 12,000 that's right next to the small town that our dad lives in. But then the local community just kind of said, hey, can you teach us to do that stuff too? We knew that we needed to raise money in order to build what we call the

trapezeum. I don't remember the exact number, but it was somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 million. Because circus is actually not recognized as an art form in the traditional funding streams, we have to operate with a bottom line where we're not relying as heavily on donations as other arts organizations might. We were able to buy a three-acre parcel right on the edge of downtown, We did move into the building carrying a higher debt than we planned to carry, but it has been so worth it. Right now we have summer camp happening. We have a silver circus program for anyone who identifies as silver. We might be doing adaptive work with someone who is a double amputee, and we might be creating an audition reel for someone who is auditioning for a circus festival in Russia.

We have become very aware of the fact that the economic impact that we have on the town is noticed by everyone in the town. We're doing a Vermont circus festival. Our second year is this year in November 1st through 8th. And we specifically chose those dates because the local community had noticed that that was pretty much a very, very slow time for them after the fall foliage. And it's been an interesting balance to make sure that. that we can satisfy these big needs on the international stage and yet still make sure that we pay attention to the needs of our small town. Elsie Smith and her identical twin Serenity Smith Fortune.

They're the co-founders of the New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont. You know, whether you are bringing big business to a small town or doing some small business in a big city, let us know. Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, a glimpse at the petroleum ticker tape on the way out. Both crude benchmarks. Actually, I should say the two most commonly cited crude benchmarks, because there's a bunch of them. I'm talking Brent North Sea and West Texas down nine or so percent apiece today.

Think about what I said up at the top. Lather, rinse, repeat, rumors, all that jazz. Gas, meanwhile, says AAA, $4.11 a gallon. is the national average. Amir Babawi, Caitlin Esh, John Gordon, Oya Carr, Steve Mollis, and Stephanie Seek are the Marketplace editing staff.

Kelly Silvera is the news director. And I'm Kai Rizdal. Wee Will. See you tomorrow, everybody. This is 8 p.m. I'm Rie Maechreys, host of the weekly Marketplace podcast. This is Uncomfortable. And this week on the show, Marketplace Correspondence,

Kristen Schwab and Sabri Benashore, help me give advice about your workplace drama. Everything from pushy coworkers to the politics of getting ahead. Relationships at jobs matter. And people who are schmoozy with the boss. It makes a difference. Makes a difference.

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