The Indicator from Planet Money - Brain-controlled iPhones, a Japanese asset buy-a-thon, and Trump tax cut debt

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

It's ... Indicators of the Week! Our weekly look at some of the most fascinating economic numbers from the news. On today's episode: Japanese asset buyers make it rain, an iPhone ... powered by the brain?! And, how are we going to pay for these Trump tax cuts? We explain! Related episodes:What's going to happen to the Trump tax cuts? (Apple / Spotify) Slender Starbucks, Medicaid at risk, and the gold card visa (Apple / Spotify)For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darien Boards here with the wondrous Waylon Wong. Wondrous Whelan Wong? Wow, what a Friday treat. Hi, Darian. We also have the ginomous intellect of Jeff Guo from Planet Money. Welcome.

That is the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. Oh, wow. I feel so affirmed. We just log off. We have work today. Oh, no. It's indicators of the week. Yay.

We are here, as always, to bring you the most fascinating snapshots from the week of economic news. And on today's show, Japanese asset buyers make it rain. iPhone powered by the brain. And how in the world are we going to pay for Donald Trump's tax cuts? We will explain. It's indicators of the week. Whalen, your first. Okay, my indicator is 8.2 trillion yen.

That's about 56 billion. billion U.S. dollars, and that is the net amount of Japanese stocks and bonds purchased by foreign investors in the month of April. Now, according to the Financial Times, this was the biggest shopping spree by foreigners for Japanese assets since the government started tracking this data in 2005. Okay, I'm thinking April was notable because... Well, to jog your memory, at the beginning of the month, President Trump made this huge tariff announcement. This then kicked off a bit of a freak out in financial markets, you might recall.

And something really weird happened with U.S. Treasuries. I talked about this in yesterday's episode. Prices for U.S. government bonds went down. That means investors were selling treasuries. Right. And that's like super weird because treasuries are supposed to be this safe haven that everyone buys when they think stuff is in trouble. Exactly. They're considered the safe choice even when the bad news or the uncertain news is coming from the U.S. We're still the safest place to park your money. In April, something different happened. The markets reacted so badly to the tariff announcement that investors ran away from treasuries. They didn't want anything to do with U.S. assets, and they looked at buying stuff in other countries instead, including Japan.

And so as of this recording, the markets have calmed somewhat, right? Kind of. It was a bit of a rocky week for treasuries, I will say. Bond prices went down again midweek. They've come back, but the markets are still showing concerns over the budget deficit. And of course, we've got this huge budget showdown looming in Congress, which brings us to your indicator, Jeff. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Okay. So my indicator of the week is $3.8 trillion, U.S. dollars. Now, that's a real indicator. That is how much it'll cost over the next 10 years to pay for all of the tax cuts that President Trump promised during his campaign. You're a mere $380 billion a year on average?

Something like that, yeah. And so the big fight in Congress right now is how are we going to pay for all of that? And when it comes to the federal budget, there's really only a few big ticket items. There's Social Security, that's the biggest. Then there's health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and then there's defense. Oh, so we're cutting defense? That's funny one, Waylon. Yeah, no, not defense.

So it's really just Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pick your poison. And, okay, for a long time, there has been this one universal ironclad rule in Washington, which is you don't touch Social Security and you don't touch Medicare. These things are sacrosanct, right? They're like the third rails of American politics. Yeah, like as a politician, you don't want to mess with people's retirements. You don't want to mess with health care for the elderly. or like your political career is over, which leaves Medicaid,

which, you know, provides health care for low-income people, especially children and pregnant women. And so for many decades, budget-minded politicians, mostly Republicans, have been clamoring to cut Medicaid. It's this big, juicy target. But this week when Republicans in the House came out with their budget proposal, it was surprisingly less catastrophic for Medicaid than expected. So the cuts have.

not been as deep as some people who are advocates for Medicaid were worried about. Yeah, I mean, these are still serious cuts. Millions of people could lose their health care. But what's surprising now is that you're seeing Republican senators like Josh Hawley come out and defend Medicaid saying Medicaid is important that you can't touch it, that touching it would be political suicide. Okay. What's happening in the Republican Party?

Yeah, well, the backstory to all of this is that over the past decade or so, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, most states have... expanded Medicaid. So now around 21 million more people have health insurance. A lot of those people benefiting from Medicaid live in red states. So those are all the people that stand to get really angry if their health coverage gets cut. Yeah. Like the reason that politicians are afraid to cut Social Security or Medicare in the first place is because too many people rely on it. And something similar is maybe happening to Medicaid right now. It is turning into the new third rail in politics because it helps a lot of people. It makes their lives better. And when a government program is helping a lot of people, it becomes really hard to cut it.

When you're on the train lines of making policy, you do not want to touch the third rail. All right, Darien, you're next. What's your indicator? My indicator is 100 million. That's how many people around the world have some form of paralysis or movement impairment. But there may be technology around the corner that could make their lives easier. Apple is working with a brain implants company. Whoa. Is this like the new frontier of wearables? Basically, yes. Apple is working with Synchrod, which develops these devices that are kind of like thin needles that get implanted into your brain with wires running through your body that send signals to your device. Oh my gosh.

You can just think left or right and click. And the message is passed onto a tablet or a phone or a virtual reality headset. Whoa. So how far along is this? Are you talking like proof of concept, prototype? They're actually. making these already? It already exists. It's not in the mass market, but it is being tested. Wall Street Journal this week reported about a man with ALS, Mark Jackson. He was one of these test subjects. So the company Synchron installed the implant in Mark's brain, and then he put on a VR headset showing this virtual world in the Swiss Alps, and he could control where he looked and digitally walked around. Whoa, so he is already living in the future. Yeah. And And of course, to actually sell to the public a company like Synchron or Elon Musk's NeurLink

needs approval from the FDA before they go around poking at customers' brains with electronic implants. And I should mention, there's been federal investigations into Neurrelink's animal welfare practices when it comes to testing. The jury's still out on some of those allegations. But, you know, monkeys have died. Oh, no. Anyway, back to Synchron.

The CEO of that company thinks they'll get government approval to sell their devices before 2030, so less than five years away. Okay, so you mentioned there's like 100 million people around the world with problems with movement that could benefit from this potentially. But don't the techno-optimist crowd like Elon Musk at all, don't they want this technology even for people who have full movements of their limbs? Elon Musk has talked about a world in which hundreds of millions more people have these kind of implants.

They'll have superhuman vision backed up by computer memory. What he calls a Fitbit in your skull. Hmm. Are you guys tempted? If I shoved a Fitbit up my nose when I got the same result. Extraordinary senses of smell. That's for the next product development. If you couldn't tell, I'm not a techno-optimist.

I'm a techno-pessimist. Where do you fit on the techno-optimist to pessimist scale, Jeff? Yeah, I just don't want to be a part of this meat space anymore. Well, thanks for being here, Jeff. It's been great, guys. We'll see you later if we survive the robot apocalypse. This episode was produced by Angel Carreros for the engineering by Quacey Lee. It was fact-acted by Sarah Juarez.

Cake and Canon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR. And a very special thank you to the producer, Lily Keros. She lent a helping hand over for a morning edition. She was a wonderful addition to our team here at The Indicator for the past few months. Thank you, Lily.