The Indicator from Planet Money - EV sales slow, US Treasury yields grow, 'Niu Lai' has impressive box office mojo

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

This week’s indicators: EV sales sputter in North America but flutter internationally; U.S. Treasury Yields … RISE!; a low-budget movie so terrible, it became a box office hit in China. Fact checking by Julia RitcheyYour Next Listen — The story of China and Hollywood's big-screen romanceConnect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s weekly newsletter! — Buy the Planet Money book — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.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 your host, Adrian Ma. I'm your other host, Ricky Mulvey. And joining us from Producer Land is our third host, coolest cucumber, Mr. Cooper Katz, McKim. Hello. Welcome to me.

Thank you for having me. It's time for Indicators of the week. We're here to tell you about the most interesting numbers in the news this week. And on today's show, we've got the ups and downs of EV sales. A movie so terrible, it became. A box office hit. And the U.S. Treasury bonds hovering a little high. That's after the break.

Cooper Katzma Kim, start us off. Okay, so my indicator is 27%. That is how much electric vehicle sales have fallen in North America, year over year since last July, which is interesting because electric vehicle sales, pretty much everywhere else, are very much up. The rest of the world has seen more than 10% year-over-year growth. It's kind of nuts.

This is happening at a lot. time where gas is hovering near what, $4 a gallon right now, Cooper? Yeah, I think everybody else understood the assignment. The U.S. is working on it. I like my large SUV. We all do. Europe is leading the way with new sales in part due to government support. Spain, for example, has its own incentive program, giving buyers up to more than $5,000

if they bought an EV. And I guess the lack of government support is contributing to decline sales here in the U.S. Right. So last September, Trump officially ended the federal EV purchase initiative. But guys, here is where it gets interesting because EV sales is just one part of the story that interested in me. Since 2022, there's been a tsunami of investment into battery manufacturing in the U.S. And in part, that was to serve electric vehicles. So what's a factory to do without that demand? Got to go looking for a new customer if you can find one. Right. So Ford, GM, LG, all these battery making companies. are turning their eye towards grid-scale storage batteries. Those are the things that can hold on to power generated from, like, wind, solar, or whatever it is for later. Exactly.

So Ford had planned this massive facility to focus on EV batteries, but now the factory will be a hub for grid-scale batteries. Its hope is to find a certain kind of customer. Can we guess who I am talking about? Data centers? Yes. You're right. Oh, okay.

The ultimate customer of 2026. We've talked in the show about battery demand increasing with more solar and wind. I mean, data centers are just going to create an insane level of new demand. So it sounds like these battery factories are going to be just fine. I think that's right. I reported this segment, by the way, for the Indicators Weekly newsletter. If you haven't signed up for that, it's at npr.org slash indicator newsletter, or you can find the link in the show notes.

Okay. Ricky Marvie. My indicator this week is 5.3%. That is the yield on a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond. And that's the average return investors now want to lend the government their money. And that is the highest it's been in nearly two decades. I mean, this number is a big deal in the economic world. For sure. And for everyone else, consumer debt, federal government spending, corporate loans all get hit when the yield rises on government debt.

For example, small changes in interest rates means tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars more in federal spending. All right. So why is the cost of U.S. federal government debt so high? It's sort of a storm of economic factors. Number one, it's our national debt. It just surpassed $40 trillion, too much money to even imagine. And some investors are looking at that level of government spending and saying, hmm, you seem a little more risky.

Like, Cooper, I want to borrow $1,000 from you. What would you do if I had no other debt? And by the way, I have a money printer at home. I would say, here you go. Take it. Easy. Now, I have 100 grand in student loans. I have some credit card debt. The money printer, by the way, it's getting a little hotter. I like sending cash to a lot of other people. And recently, I've had some expensive trips to the Middle East. They just, they kind of popped out out of nowhere. And I don't know. You know how budgets get wrecked on vacation. What would you do then?

I would hesitate before lending you too much money. I'm a little more risky. And that's exactly what's going on here. But there's a second factor. Also, data centers. Data centers everywhere. Everything is data centers. All comes back to AI. We spoke to Yuri and Timmer. He's the director of Global Macro at Fidelity Investments for our margin debt episode. And Urien pointed out this issue during our conversation about AI.

The hyperscalers are borrowing so much money in the bond market that you could argue that the treasury market is getting crowded out. In other words, the big tech companies are issuing a lot of debt to build out data centers and buy chips. And, you know, the Treasury is having to compete for those investment dollars now. If I were an investing man, would I have better luck investing in something like Amazon or the U.S. government? And that's the big question. So right now, Amazon's 31-year bonds, they pay investors about a percentage point more than similar federal government debt. It's really close. And it's, do you want to trust the Fed's money printing machine or Amazon Prime spending? Maybe Amazon should just start issuing its own currency. That's not the way.

worst idea. Don't give out free consulting advice. Amazon bucks. Yeah, and by the way, the Treasury just announced a huge bond buyback. This pumps money into the economy and is meant to lower interest rates. At least as we're recording this, market reaction is muted so far. Adrian Ma, what do you have for us? I have a indicator that comes from China, and it is about one of the biggest movies to hit the Chinese box office this summer. An animated coming-of-age film about a cow and a bird called no lie and that roughly translate to something

like the cow arrives let's see can I play you a clip of this right now this is like 1990 someone hastily put together an animation clip of like a bird and a cow that has like disturbingly angular facial features it feels like if like where the wild

things are had a fever dream It is a janky-looking production. If you had to guess, how much do you think this cost to make? $5. I respect that. Some reports have suggested the budget could be somewhere around $200, like the equivalent of $200. That's pretty low. Wow.

Good on them. That is serious budgeting right there. Cost efficient. Well, we haven't independently confirmed this number. honest, I'm not sure I trust it because for one thing, that number supposedly doesn't even count their labor. And this film, according to the South China Morning Post, took about five years to make. It was entirely the work of a mother-son duo who used basic animation software. And they did all the jobs. They like wrote, directed, and voice acted it. This is oddly heartwarming. Like, I love to hear

this. A mother and son working together for five years and they've produced a unquestionable movie hit. good on them. Their labor wasn't counted towards the overall dollar amount because it was a labor of love, Adrian. Nicely done. And when you said it hit, I mean, it's interesting how it all happened because at first when this movie came out a couple of weeks ago, people just panned it. It was like not playing in many places, but the people who did see it went on social media and said, this film is terrible. It's so badly animated. The plot doesn't make sense. It looks terrible. But that something happened, as it sometimes does on the internet. People's hate turned into love, and then people started to love how bad this movie is. According to a Chinese movie tracking website,

it's brought in about 29 million yuan in its first couple of weeks, which is about $4.2 million US. Pretty incredible return on investment if we don't count the labor dollars. Oh, yeah. We were just talking about this earlier, and our editor actually just compared this. to Backrooms, which is like another indie movie that found mainstream success after going viral. And to be fair, I mean, it's a little different because Backrooms is actually like a critically acclaimed movie. It has like an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. And, you know, unclear whether Njolai will see global success. But, you know, China's a big country. It's still early. So maybe in a few weeks so I'll be lining up to see a really janky, low-budget heartwarming film about a young cow.

I would go see it. Yeah, 100%. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Anli Huang. It was fact-checked by Julia Ritchie, Kakin Cannon as the show's editor and the indicators of production of NPR.