The Indicator from Planet Money - How's ... everybody doing?

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

What's one word you'd use to describe the 2025 economy? That's the question we fanned out across the U.S. with microphones and open ears. From street parties in the South to an L.A. bookstore to a boardroom in Denver, we listen for financial signals in today's economy. Related episodes: How many times can you say uncertainty in one economic report? (Apple / Spotify) The stock market is down, but you don't need to be (Apple / Spotify) The highs and lows of US rent (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 Woods. We're at this uncertain moment for the economy. And even Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week, we're going to have to see how things actually work out. In other words, when looking at the near future, even he doesn't know where things are headed.

Here at the indicator, we of course have been scrutinizing all the economic numbers, but these indicators don't always capture the depth of how people are thinking and reacting. So, from coast to coast, we did something a little different for our show today. We undertook some unscientific polling by interviewing as many people as we could. We wanted to hear the human voices describing how today's economy feels. Unsettled. Getting better.

Evolving. From street parties in the south to an L.A. bookstore to a boardroom in Denver. Today we listen for financial signals. It's an audio photo album of economic snapshots from this moment. So to piece together this kind of economic audio photo album, we needed to go out into the world. Oh, sorry, you're in the middle of a phone call? No, no, no, I'll finish.

You're finished. Our producers live all over the country, so we fanned out, Denver, D.C., New York, Savannah, and L.A. You run the finances at your house. Yeah, I do. We stopped people on the street. Yeah, I live right over there on the high rises. Nice.

We also asked you, indicator listeners, to send in voice memos. This is Philip Gonzalez from Grand Prix, Texas. And we zoomed into offices from east to west. Oh, good to see you. We learned about people's decisions to spend or save. We dug into business sales, the stock market, and the jobs market. But what we heard again and again was people starting off talking about high prices. Everything is going up instead of being level.

So high every week. It's like ridiculous. Everything's so expensive. Because the cost of living doesn't meet up with their economy. A lot of those prices are from past inflation over the last few years. Prices went up and never came down. Now, inflation as it actually stands right now is fairly low. It increased only 2.8% from a year ago. Inflation is getting really close to where.

the Federal Reserve wants it at 2%. That said, when you look at surveys of how much people are expecting prices to rise in the future, those have jumped really sharply since January. And it's partly because of those fears for the future that have people adjusting their spending and savings decisions, from North Carolina to the Mountain West. I've just been starting to think about where my money goes. I don't own a car because cars are expensive. We're choosing, you know, not.

go on the big trips planned a year ago. Definitely spending less right now. So far this year, Americans are now saving a little more, which tends to happen when they're feeling nervous about the future. Savings are close to five bucks for every $100 in income. And that's a jump from the end of last year. I learned more about this by meeting ISIS Benson on the streets of Brooklyn. I'm in a good headspace because I'm living well below my means right now.

ISIS works in sales for hiring platform greenhouse software. I'm saving like maybe anywhere between like $4 and $600 a month. I'm aggressively saving. All that saving means less spending. And many businesses are feeling the hit. Rob Carpenter runs a home cleaning business in Colorado. You know, we're down probably 30% on the year. Rob says this pullback really varies by where a customer sits on the income ladder.

We're interestingly not seeing much pricing pressure with the high household net incomes, but we do really, we see a lot of pain in that kind of upper middle class market. But the business story isn't all doom and gloom. Seven out of ten small business owners surveyed by Goldman Sachs in February felt optimistic about 2025. Daniel Harberger's company, Woof, is known for its toys that dispensed dog treats. It's looking very, very strong, but that's not. not to say that there aren't challenges and new stresses that have been introduced by, you know, all of the macro issues that are popping up. The big one, tariffs, especially on China, which he

used to rely on. Daniel's now getting his dog devices made in Vietnam, Colombia, and the US. And he is still getting some supply from China, too. As many eggs and as many baskets as possible. He says the tariffs making China costlier have unexpected side effects. When he was just getting started, he couldn't afford to do small prototype batches of his dog feeder toys in the US, but he could in China. We are not only taking away manufacturing markets, but we're also taking away a really valuable tool for innovation. Daniel says he's going to take the tariff hit on existing products, but raise prices for new

ones. And so given those increased tariffs, along with other sweeping actions from the Trump administration, we wanted to know how those were affecting people's investment decisions. I did liquidate everything from stocks and crypto probably a month ago. Nathan Gabbard is a lawyer and bookstore owner in L.A., and he's feeling good about selling before the roughly 10% drop in the stock market from its peak in February. I was just like, I feel like I want that as cash instead of sitting in the market. Now, one person's loss can be another person's,

buying opportunity. I try to lean in when everyone else is scared. That's Barb Bruhys in Denver. He's been buying up shares in property. I am in the midst of buying a house right now, and I feel like I got a really good deal on it. Barr's attitude stands in pretty stark contrast to Monique Wallace in Brooklyn. I'm really worried about it. Monique works in support at Amazon, and she says the declining stock market and lacklusted job

opportunities have already changed her decisions. I was planning to go overseas a long time ago. I was like, oh, I'll just quit Amazon and I'll go, you know, work off the book somewhere in France. But like now I'm kind of like leaning back because I don't know how it's going to be in a year or so. So I just want, you know, make sure I save a little bit more money. Which brings us to our final piece of our economic puzzle, the labor market. We asked people about their work. Yeah, I'm happy with my job.

I'm a general manager for a software company. I feel pretty lucky. I'm lucky. I'm fine. I'm an accountant. I just got a job off of. I feel pretty job secure. So from our straw polling, at least, people are feeling pretty good about their jobs,

which does check out in the national numbers. The unemployment rate is only 4.1%. But that lowish unemployment rate obscures some labor market pains. Job openings aren't what they used to be. Aaron Fredericks and Brooklyn knows this firsthand. I was previously working. within consulting and within the healthcare space.

So recently unemployed as of October of last year. So right now, not too great. We also heard from people who are working part-time, but would prefer to work full-time. People like Priya Skelly. I have three jobs. Feeling underpaid for the most part and looking to make some more money than I usually have been.

This audio photo album has some pretty pictures and some ugly scenes. And what we learned was kind of a paradox. We learned that people are frustrated at high prices and they're tightening their purse strings and that is harming some businesses. But aside from policy turbulence, many companies feel good about their own prospects this year.

The stock market is down, but not extraordinarily so. Unemployment is low, but hiring isn't booming. So overall, what do we make of this? We asked the people we spoke with to summarize the economy in one phrase. Anxious. Uncern. Cautious. I think it's working.

Unfair. Turbulent. Bad. Yeah, bad. Hardbreaking. Trauma. Dreyful. Surprising.

And happy. Blessed. Sucks. Economic hardship. Oh, that's two words. Absolutely not good. Terrible. questionable, precarious.

Difficult. Crazy. Yeah, crazy. This episode was produced by Julia Richie, Cooper Katzmikim, Angel Correllas, and Lily Kieros. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Kuizi Lee. It was fact-acted by Sierra Juarez. Taking Canon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.