The Indicator from Planet Money - Retirement luck, Hassett hassles the Fed, and boneless chicken in ... court?

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

It’s … Indicators of the Week! Our weekly look at some of the most fascinating economic numbers from the news. On today’s episode: Why you better hope you retire at juuuust the right time, why the researchers at the Federal Reserve are being scolded by a White House economic advisor, and taking boneless chicken to court. Related episodes: Chicken meat, Gulf of Mexico lawsuit and Social Security beyond the grave Davos drama, credit card caps and tariff truths What would it take to fix retirement? 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 and Corey Bridges. 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 Waylon Wong. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Adrienne Ma. And today it is, in fact, indicators of the week. This is, of course, the day of the week where we talk about our favorite numbers from the news. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about the blind luck of retirement.

We have the Federal Reserve's worst economic research ever, according to the White House. And perhaps the most important economic question. we've ever asked on this show, what's up with boneless chicken wings? Straight after the break. It's indicators of the week. Daryon Woods, you're up first. My indicator is 2.9.9. As in, you could be 2.9 times richer just because you started saving and retired on a lucky year.

I was born Year of the Rooster. Is that a lucky year? You could argue. And this was all calculated, not so much on the zodiac, but on stock returns by Hazel. Fernandez Villar Verde. Jesus is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And he looked at 80 years of stock market data to make some simulations.

He ran hypothetical people born in different years who all started investing for their retirement at age 22. And then he calculated how much wealth they would have amassed from the S&P 500 at age 68. Okay, so someone who starts saving for retirement in, say, 1970, They would have a different outcome from somebody who started in 1980. Yeah. And we all know that the stock market has good years and bad years. But what was striking to me was just how much those good or bad years matter.

The best cohort of investors retired in the year 2000. So it's like right before the dot-com crash. Yeah, that peak right beforehand they were sitting. Well-timed. Well-timed. And the worst cohort with about two-thirds less wealth retired in 2009. So that was during the Great Recession? Yeah, not recommended to retire into that period.

And it goes to show that what happens to your retirement savings is really driven by what happens with the stock market right before you retire. Yeah, so these are things that are completely out of your control. I think it just goes to show how much of a gamble retirement is. Absolutely. To me, this is shocking. You could have a great strategy, but somebody else does a lot better. a lot worse for random reasons. You know, we do have some control in our lives.

Jesus says you could get substantial benefits from being flexible over your retirement age. Jesus says maybe you could put some of those retirement savings in like a cash reserve so that you don't draw down on those depressed stocks right as you retire. Hazus also points out that we kind of insure each other against these kind of random wins and losses already as a society to some extent. and that's Social Security. Thank you very much, Daryon. Whalen, you want to go next?

Yes. My indicator is 94%. That's how much of the tariff burden fell on U.S. businesses and consumers during the first eight months of the Trump administration. This indicator comes courtesy of the New York Federal Reserve.

It crunched the numbers for a recent blog post on its website. And I'm bringing it up today because White House Economic Advisor, economist Kevin Hassett, went on CNBC to talk about how much he hates this number. It's, I think, the worst paper I've ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system. Is this a Streisand effect where most people would not have

thought about this paper until he highlighted it to the public? I think so. I mean, I saw this blog post because I subscribe to updates for the New York Federal Reserve's economic blog. But I don't know if it's like a very widely read blog outside of economic circles. But yeah, now it's been mentioned on CNBC so everyone can flock to it and check out the analysis for themselves. And I will say this 94% number that has Kevin Hassett so mad is very similar to an indicator we discussed in January, a German Research Institute that focuses on global economics did its own calculations and concluded that Americans pay 96% of the tariffs. And these two analyses use different methodologies, but both are looking at import prices. In other words, what American

importers pay for stuff. And tariffs are attacks on imports, and so these estimates are saying Americans shoulder 90 plus percent of the costs. Yes. Now, foreign exporters are bearing a tiny part of the burden. The way this happens is that they lower their prices in response to tariffs because they don't want to lose out on sales. But for the most part, according to this economic research, American importers end up paying higher prices because of tariffs. Okay, so that is what the researchers say, but why is Kevin Hassett making a big fuss over this? He told CNBC that he doesn't think the numbers reflect how tariffs have helped Americans. He says that tariffs on, for example, China are shifting demand to American-made products,

and he says that drives up wages and makes the American consumer better off. Okay, so wages over the last year are up, even after inflation. How much of that is due to tariffs? Well, if you just look at the timeline, Trump's big announcement on tariffs wasn't until April of 2025. Real wages were going up way before then during the Biden administration. In fact, there's only a few months overlap between, you know, tariffs happening and the wage increases that Hassett is talking about. In his comments, didn't, didn't Hassett also say that the Fed researchers should be more disciplined? He didn't say they should be more disciplined. He said they should be disciplined for their shoddy.

economic work. Nauty researchers. Yeah, so it went even stronger than being like, oh, they should have been more rigorous in their methodology. He was like, they should be disciplined. And I'm like, I don't even know what that means. Did he elaborate? They should stay after school and write on the chalkboard.

I will take into account producer and consumer surplus 85 times. I don't know. I don't know what he wants something to do. The beatings will continue until the numbers improve. Okay. So we have covered two very important topics. We've talked about retirement and talked about the impact of tariffs on consumers and U.S. businesses, but I think we saved the most important topic for last, and that is chicken wings.

Not my favorite part of the chicken, but I know that this is an important snack food for a lot of people. That's right. And a very well-known purveyor of chicken wings is Buffalo Wild Wings, the restaurant chain. Sure you've all heard of it. And the indicator is zero. Zero is the number of chicken wings that you will find in Buffalo Wild Wings's boneless wings entree. But Wings is right there in the name.

It is true. There's no wings in the boneless wings. If you are confused, you're not alone on this. In 2023, there was a man in Illinois who went to a Buffalo Wild Wings, ordered the boneless wings. And he says he was expected to be served chicken wings that were deboned. But come to find out, the meat in the meat in the... that boneless wings were actually made from chicken breast meat.

What? Right? So this made this customer very mad, and he filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that he had been defrauded. And the plaintiff in this case says that Buffalo Wild Wings intentionally tricked him in other customers because chicken wing meat is more expensive than breast meat. And so it's in their interest to trick people into thinking they're eating wings. Oh, so it's like they're tricking customers into thinking they're getting

a fancier kind of chicken than what they're being served. That's right. I'm on the plaintiff's side. I think at first goes the chicken wings, then goes what? Then what did we say? That we're just serving

apple sauce made out of pairs? We've already lost the plot on all process. It's happening. The fact that we're still talking about this, like you could see why there has been confusion in this case, right? This case has dragged out

for the last few years. And only this week, the court issued it. issued a decision saying they're dismissing the lawsuit. And in the judge's words, the plaintiff's case had, quote, no meat on its bones. He must be a dad. That is a dad, Jake.

Just to boil it down, he basically said that, you know, the boneless wing is clearly meant to be fanciful, and that no reasonable customer would be confused by that. And he also said that the menu also includes items like cauliflower wings, which the plaintiff acknowledged, he didn't expect cauliflower rings to have meat in them. So he was kind of like, well, I don't think you have a case. I bet those chickens weren't wild either.

I'm going to start a new case. They were neither buffaloes. They weren't wild and they weren't wings. Yeah, what do you weren't even mean anymore? The whole thing was a facade. This episode was produced by Andrew Carreras with engineering by Jimmy Keely. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juwadas and Corey Bridges. Kaking Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.