Marketplace - Where’s the AI spending payoff?

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

When Big Tech earnings reports come out this week, traders will scrutinize how much was spent on artificial intelligence. The billions of dollars invested haven’t translated into profit — at least not yet — and Wall Street is getting impatient. Also in this episode: We’ll break down the latest job openings data, uncover why housing contract cancellations are rising and hear from a real estate broker about the market in Houston.

Hey everybody, it's Kai. Listen, is it time to upgrade your car? Give it new life by donating it to Marketplace. We'll use the proceeds to bring you more news about finance and the economy and how they affect you. Let us turn your old car into a donation to power the journalism you rely on. Go to marketplace.org slash vehicle

to donate your car today. On this interest rate decision, Eve, more data on the state of the job market from American public media. This is Marketplace. In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdal. It's Tuesday the 30th of July. Good to have you with us. As the Fed met today to talk interest rates, we'll get the decision tomorrow, some new data officials will surely be looking at came in. The latest job openings and labor turnover survey or Joltz report from the Bureau of

Labor Statistics says there were just over 8 million job openings at the end of June, unchanged from the month before. Meanwhile, the turnover part of that report, the number of people who lost or quit jobs or got hired, all little changed. So status quo? Well, if you zoom out a little further, there has been a clear decline in all of the above over the last year. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has the details. This is basically the job market normalizing after the roller coaster of the last few years.

The unemployment rate is low and... The job market is relatively healthy overall. But Daniel Jow, lead economist at Glassdoor, says it doesn't really feel that way to a lot of workers with good reason. We're seeing that employers are not really hiring at the levels that we've seen in the past, and as a result, employees are sitting tight too. Mostly because they aren't seeing many opportunities.

As a result, employees who are currently employed might be in a situation where they're thankful for that job security, but there are also a lot of workers who might feel stuck. And a lot of people who are trying to get into the job market are having trouble because there's so little turnover. Ron Hetrick, senior economist at the

labor market analytics company Lightcast, says all of that contributes to the perception that the economy isn't doing so well. But the reality is, layoffs are incredibly low. Which is always a good sign. Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, says even though workers might prefer a super hot job market… Where they apply for a job, get hired immediately and get a big increase in pay.

The job market we have right now is actually better in many ways, at least for the economy overall. We can remember when we had the great reopening of the economy that supply and demand of workers was wildly out of balance. Lots of people were quitting their jobs, often for new ones with big pay raises, while businesses were struggling to hire and raising wages to compete. And what was happening during that time? You go to a hotel and they weren't capable of serving breakfast, for example. A factory was not capable of producing the things that it needed to produce.

Now he says businesses have a better shot at finding the workers they need and the job market is in better balance. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. We also got some data today from the housing market, courtesy of the S&P CoreLogic Case Schiller Home Price Index. If you've ever wondered about that long name, by the way, we have an explainer on our website. Anyway, prices in the 20 biggest U.S. metro areas reached another record high in May, up three-tenths of a percent from the previous month. Ditto for the broader national index. And as prices have continued to rise, more buyers are backing out of deals. The real estate firm Redfin says last month a larger share of pending home sales fell through than any other June on record. Marketplace's

Sabri Beneshor has that story. Maswari Esmawar is a Houston-based realtor. He works with Compass. He's noticed more deals suddenly going south. There's a couple that I particularly had worked with for a very long time. I think it was a period of seven months. We looked at over about 20 properties. They found the one, they made an offer, it was accepted. However, during the process of getting them the financing that they needed, it fell through. The bank ended up requiring a bigger down payment than the couple were expecting in

order to get an interest rate that they could actually afford. It was out of their reach. So the biggest issues I've seen is interest rates. Daryl Fairweather is chief economist at Redfin. She's noticed these kinds of issues popping up too, not just in Texas. The share of deals that are falling through reached a new high for the year at 15%.

In fact, contract cancellations really seem to have picked up when the Fed started raising interest rates in 2022. Danielle Hale is chief economist with Realtor.com. Home prices are high. Mortgage rates are high, which means buyers are likely buying at the edge of what they can qualify for. So it doesn't take much to get pushed over that edge, like with Esmouar's couple in Texas.

Jonathan Miller is president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers. I don't think the consumers have given enough thought to the higher mortgage rate impact on their affordability. And mortgage rates have been particularly volatile this year. Rates might go up before a buyer locks them in and boom, they have to back out. Or rates might drop and a buyer might have to scrap the deal to get the better rate, says Redfin's Fairweather. But one problem in particular is that there's just not a lot of stuff on the market. And so few homes are coming on the market every week.

You don't know if this home that you're making an offer on is the best that's out there, or if a couple of weeks from now there might be a better home. And if there is, you might back out to get it. One silver lining to this is that if the Fed does indeed lower interest rates in September, mortgage rates should come down too. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshor for Marketplace. Todd Wall Street today, a little up, a little down. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

We tend to talk about the housing market in national terms, but of course real estate is all about location. And while as we just heard home prices are still rising in many parts of the country, in Texas there are signs of slowing. Redfin says the median sale price in Texas fell last month by more than 1% year over year. As sales fell and the supply of homes for sale increased. We figured it was a good time to check in with Letitia Grant. She is the executive managing broker at TASS Realty Group in Houston. Letitia, welcome back to the program. Letitia Grant Thank you. Thank you so much, Amy, for having

me. I'm excited to be here as always. Amy Quinton Well, you folks in Houston have been through a lot. After Hurricane Bareryl hit earlier this month, three million people lost power. First, how are you doing? So I personally am doing just fine. And my family is as well. So we are okay. We just lost a lot of trees. How about your clients? Have you been working with anyone who had damage to their homes that they're trying to sell or maybe had a deal fall through because of the the weight? So you know, with Hurricane Barrel, we didn't have anyone that lost a home because of it. It was the bad weather that we had prior to we had a property that basically blew away.

The framing just blew away. But right now, the biggest barrier to overcome is backyard fence, the trees. I have a client that's looking to sell her home, but her backyard is destroyed. But overall, to be honest, we made it out pretty good compared to what the rest of the city is experiencing. This, of course, isn't the first storm that Houston has dealt with. Do you think these kinds of events and the headlines they get all over the country discourage people from moving to Houston and buying homes? Absolutely not. So crazy.

So, you know, things are happening all over. And I guess people are just kind of awaying it. The job opportunity is still great. Home ownership, even though it's gone up tremendously, it's still more affordable here than other areas. So, that hasn't hit us yet. I'm not going to say that it won't because the people that I am working with that are not from Houston that are

unfamiliar with this type of weather they are extremely afraid and they have communicated that to us on several occasions. Well pulling back a little bit how is the market doing generally? We've seen you know so many struggles to get into the housing market because of the tight supply, the high prices, the still high mortgage rates. Are you seeing any loosening up in Houston? We are. You know, Amy, the last time we spoke, I was saying that I was hopeful that things will change some for our poor buyers, and they have.

In our office, I have not seen us write more than two offers before getting an acceptance. Whereas before, it was writing offer after offer after offer before you were going to get your offer accepted. So it has definitely loosened up for the buyers. So sales have slowed down a little bit and meaning that sellers may be more willing to take an offer from one of your clients. Yeah, absolutely. A more reasonable offer now. So gone are the days that buyers are waving inspections. Gone are the days that buyers are saying, oh, well, we'll just take what you give us. So the good part for many of our buyers is that they are now able to make a reasonable

offer on a property, market value, not above market value, and even ask for some closing costs. Wow, that is quite a change. Well, another big change that's happened since we talked was some more clarity about the big settlement with the National Association of Realtors and the bottom line is is it was supposed to make Commissions come down a little bit at least that was the goal of the people who sued the National Association of Realtors Do you see commissions falling and how will that affect your business? No, I don't see commissions falling.

It's like the cost of bread. Once it goes up, why would it go down? So I think that transparency is probably the piece that was missing, but I do not believe that agents are going to start reducing their commissions. Now, one conversation that I'm hearing is to treat it like a retainer fee. So I am hearing agents charging upfront fees versus waiting until closing to then get paid. Hmm. Interesting. Do you think a lot of this we're just not going to know until after

August 17th when people start realizing what it means if the buyer is on the hook for a commission? Absolutely. Absolutely. That is 100% what I believe. And even, you know, pretty far thereafter. Because we have to wait on the rest of the world to catch up and know that there was a lawsuit first. And then we have to see it play out in a transaction. So yeah, it's gonna take some time for it to catch up. Alright. Letitia Grant is with TAS Realty Group in Houston, Texas. Always good to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I appreciate it as always. Today, Microsoft kicked off a big earnings week for Big Tech, beating Wall Street expectations. Later this week, we'll also hear from Meta, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported last week. These companies, along with Nvidia, have been called the Magnificent Seven because they've driven a hefty chunk of the market's gains recently, until the last few weeks at least,

when their share prices have been falling. The question for investors this week won't just be how much money these companies are making in their core businesses, but how much they're spending on artificial intelligence, as Marketplace's Henry Epp reports. The tech firms reporting financial results this week will probably show solid revenues in the areas they've dominated for years, says Jacob Bourne, an analyst at the market

research company eMarketer. Sales of smartphones, cloud services, ads will probably be good, he says. But I think what we're seeing here is that good is not good enough. That's because investors want to see the billions of dollars companies are pouring into artificial intelligence start to pay off. But so far, that's not happening. Sarah Kunst is managing director of Clio Capital. Most Wall Street investors aren't very patient and they don't want to wait too many quarters

to see that long term. But the long term of AI is exactly what big tech companies are investing in buying semiconductors, building data centers. That stuff takes a lot of money and time. Brent Thill at Jeffreys likens it to setting up for a day of surfing. You got to get stuff there and lug the coolers, lug the boards and everything else you got to set up and you're getting no value. You haven't even gotten on the wave yet. And when or if that wave shows up is anyone's guess. But for now, that setup, lugging the boards or spending money on semiconductors and data centers is boosting the companies that make the chips and build the centers.

Financial reports this week will help investors determine what all that investment might end up doing for the big tech companies doing the spending, says Sarah Kunst. Is AI going to turn these, you know, $2 trillion companies into $10 trillion companies, or are they going to shrink down to, you know, merely $1 trillion companies? The answer could still be a long way off. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace. Coming up... We're saving paper, not having phone books. Remember phone books? But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 203 points, half a percent, to finish a 40,743. The NASDAQ subtracted 222 points, almost one in three

tenths percent to close at 17,147. And the S&P 500 lost 27 points, half a percent to end at 5436. So how did the magnificent seven big tech companies Henry Epp was just telling us about do on Wall Street today? Microsoft issued a positive earnings report after the bell, but beforehand it slipped nine-tenths percent. Meta platforms, which reports tomorrow, shrank half a percent. Thursday's crop includes Apple, which grew one-quarter percent, and Amazon.com, which gave back eight-tenths percent. Alphabet accumulated more than four-tenths percent. Tesla slowed down 4 and 1 tenth percent. And the seventh, NVIDIA, which doesn't report for another month, slid 7 percent.

You're listening to Marketplace. Hey everyone, it's Rima Grace, host of This Is Uncomfortable, here to let you all know about our summer book club. Every other week, we're going to recommend a book that our team loves that gets at some uncomfortable topic around money, class, our relationship to work. We'll feature a wide range of recs, including classics like E.M. Forrester's A Passage to India, page-turning novels like Naomi Alderman's The Future, and personal finance books like Paco de Leon's

Finance for the People. Join This Is Uncomfortable's Book Club by signing up for our newsletter. Be sure to sign up today at marketplace.org. Book Club. This is Marketplace. I'm Amy Scott. Gold is having a moment. The price is up more than 15% this year so far, currently hovering around $2,400 an ounce. The precious metal tends to increase in value as interest rates fall, and traders are expecting that to happen soon-ish. Some central banks have also been buying more gold as they try to reduce their reliance on the US dollar. But the story you're about to hear is not about gold today, it's about the 19th

century. In 1860, when the price was around $19 an ounce, gold helped kick off an economic boom in the area now known as Colorado. The thing is, booms come with certain costs, and Coloradans are still paying today. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has that story. I'm hiking near a mountain bike trail 35 miles west of Denver with Jeremy Renneke. He's with the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety. He points to various abandoned mines and prospect pits. And then this one is about 15 to 16 feet deep with vertical walls so you wouldn't have an easy time getting out of it.

Renneke oversees the closure of mines and pits like this one where miners looked for gold in the 1800s. We're feet away from the trail where bikers whizz by. You can see how close it is to the trail. If a biker decided to take off and do a little miss a corner or just decide they want to go off trail, you could get on this really fast. We're standing at the edge of a pit near what once was considered

the richest square mile on Earth. In this particular spot, probably chased it down, dug down in it and didn't really find much of anything and there's literally thousands and thousands of these that are unmapped because they they never played out soon.

This pit will be covered by a metal grate so trail goers can't fall in. It's critical public safety work, especially as new hike and bike paths are built in former mining areas, says Jeff Graves, who runs the state's inactive mine reclamation program. There have been instances of fatalities in Colorado associated with folks in abandoned mines. The child fell into a mine shaft just outside of Central City and so that prioritized a lot of the work here within Gilpin County. That was in 1989. The program has closed up around 13,500 mine features so far and Graves says it has at least the same number left to do. Their capacity is about 300 a year. Just down the road I learn more about the

region's mining history at the Gilpin History Museum. Without the mining, Gilpin County would not exist. Probably Colorado as we know it would not exist. Curator David Forsythe says it's hard to understate the importance of mining to the area after a vein of gold was discovered in 1859 after a worldwide economic crisis. The country was still really recovering from the panic of 1857 and so a lot of people were still really hurting financially. And easy gold, hey, I can go out to Gregory Diggings in Colorado and get rich. Lacey Hildesby Few actually got rich, but there were jobs.

Forsyth says miners earned around $2 to $3 a day. Houses, stores, schools, and theaters were built in the decades after the gold discovery. But by the early 20th century, mining activity slowed significantly and halted during World Wars I and II. It was not a wartime necessity and it never really came back after that. A lot of people who had mines up here just parked their equipment inside, shut the doors, said we'll be back when the war is over, and then they weren't. Until folks from the inactive mine reclamation

program came around many decades later, welding closures on mines, some with old equipment still inside. Director Jeff Graves again. It's I guess reminiscent of what the miners were doing to some extent, trying to find that original gold. We're trying to find what they were looking for and what they caused, what they left in their wake. And not just in Colorado. The Government Accountability Office estimates there are some 140,000 known abandoned hard rock mining features on federal lands and there could be hundreds of thousands more. I think it's certainly underfunded. Graves says Colorado's program benefits from both state and federal funds.

And some additional money from the bipartisan infrastructure law will help by freeing up state funds previously used for coal mines. Even so, when you look at the magnitude of the problem even in Colorado, it would take us decades to address the problem at the current funding rates. Cleanup from 19th century gold diggers will cost the state and federal governments well into the 21st century. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. We started the show with Samantha Fields talking about the June Joltz report and how jobs in

today's labor market have changed. So we thought we'd wrap up the program with a story about how jobs have changed, not over the last month or even the last year, but over the last half a century. Here's the latest from our series, My Analog Life. My name is Lilith. I live in Ventura, California. I worked as an information operator from 1963 to 1968. I lived in Culver City, California and was attending Los Angeles City College. I needed a part-time job, and so I applied for Pacific Telephone Telegraph. And so I applied for Pacific Telephone Telegraph. As an information operator, you sit in a little cubicle type place with a set of headphones on and you have telephone books in front of you.

People dial 411, you answer and you say, information, what city are you called? And you would find the appropriate phone book and then you would ask them the name of the party they were calling. Most of the time people were calling for doctors, their friends, they somehow didn't have their best friend's phone number in their house. Anybody they might want to call that they did not have their phone number for. The shifts started at six o'clock in the morning and I believe went to two o'clock in the morning. And so during some of the shifts, some of the times, it was very quiet.

On New Year's Eve, people wanted to know the exact time it was midnight, right? So somehow people would get the idea that information could give them the exact time, and they would call us. And we had a clock on the wall. We had no idea what the exact time was, but we'd have all these people calling, looking to the information operator to know everything about everything. For a long time, even when you could look most things up on the internet, I still made it a point of keeping phone books around. Now I've gotten used to being able to pretty much do the same thing on my computer.

It is a different world and saves paper. We're saving paper, not having phone books. That was Lilith in Ventura, California. You can tell us about your analog job. Go to marketplace.org slash my analog life. This final note on the way out today, U.S. consumers are feeling better about the economy. That's according to the conference board, which said today an index measuring the outlook for the next six months reached its highest level since January. The group's Dana Peterson said, quote, even though consumers remain relatively positive about the labor market, they still

appear to be concerned about elevated prices and interest rates. Reminder, we'll hear more on that tomorrow. Our digital and on-demand team includes Carrie Barber, Jordan Mangy, Dylan Mietinen, Janet Nguyen, Olga Oxman, Ellen Rolfus Virginia Kay Smith and Tony Wagner Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital and on demand and I'm Amy Scott will be back tomorrow. This is APM.

Hey everyone, it's Rima Grace, host of This Is Uncomfortable, here to let you all know about our summer book club. Every other week, we're going to recommend a book that our team loves that gets at some uncomfortable topic around money, class, our relationship to work. We'll feature a wide range of recs, including classics like E.M. Forrester's A Passage to India, page-turning novels like Naomi Alderman's The Future, and personal finance books like Paco de Leon's Finance for the People. Join This Is Uncomfortable's Book Club by signing up for our newsletter. Be sure to sign up today at marketplace.org slash book club.