The Indicator from Planet Money - Tech layoffs, recession pop and more listener questions answered

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

We are back with another edition of listener questions! In this round, we tackle recession pop, why the job market feels so crummy for IT grads, and whether President Trump saying that Walmart "eat the tariffs" is a form of price control. Related episodes:Hits of the Dips: Songs of recessions past (Apple / Spotify)The beef over price controlsPrice Controls, Black Markets, and Skimpflation: The WWII Battle Against InflationFor 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. Well, well, well, look who the cat dragged in. Claw marks all over me and you don't have any sympathy? You're looking a little worse for where. It's me, Darying Woods. And me, Adrian Ma. And also me, Waylon Wong. This is the indicator from Planet Money and we are here to answer listener questions.

That's right. All the time we get really great questions from listeners about the economic and financial things happening in their So today on the show, is it considered a price control for the president to tell businesses to eat the tariffs? Why does the market for tech jobs feel so lousy? And what is recession pop? You ask, we answer after the break. So let's start with our first listener question. It comes from Tim Madison out of Houston, Texas.

Waylon, take us away. All right. So before we hear from Tim, you need a little background here for the question. In May, Walmart's chief financial officer said price increases from tariffs were too high for the company to absorb entirely. He warned that some prices would be going up, and then President Trump posted on Truth Social saying Walmart should partially eat the tariffs and that he would be watching. So Tim's question is, By attempting to intimidate private businesses into eating the tariffs, is the president effectively, if not tech, Technically, imposing price controls.

Mm, juicy topic. Okay, so let's start with what the term price controls typically means. A price control is when the government dictates in some way what private companies charge their customers. So you have a minimum level that's called a price floor. Then there's a price ceiling that's a maximum level. Like rent control would be an example of this. Exactly. So rent control is probably the example that people are familiar with, especially if you live in a

But price controls aren't that common in the U.S. We mostly rely on the market to set prices. There have been some notable historical experiments with price controls, though. World War II is one example. Yeah, the federal government created an entire office that set price ceilings for staples like coffee and meat. There was this whole rationing system that people had to follow. Right. Then President Nixon put in price controls during the oil crisis in the 70s.

And so during those periods, the World War II era, in the 70s, price controls were official government policy. We haven't seen anything so formal from the Trump administration. What we have is a true social post from the president. And so back to our listener's question, is this effectively a price control? Yeah, for it to be effectively a price control, it has to be effective, right? And so that's kind of the open question. You have the president calling for a kind of price control.

He's saying to Walmart, don't raise their prices. I'm watching you. But it's not clear. whether he plans to enforce this. It's also not clear if Walmart executives believe there will be any consequences from the administration for raising prices. So maybe this is like a who blinks first kind of situation. Another game of chicken, yes. Okay, so our next question comes from May Chan, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It feels like for those of us living in the Bay Area, perhaps due to the threat of AI, unemployment is higher for the tech industry. college students and new grads are having a tough time finding internships and jobs. Are they factored into the unemployment rate? So May is actually asking a couple of questions here. So let's tackle the first one. Is unemployment higher for the tech sector right now? To get some answers, we reached out to Svanya Goodell,

who's chief economist for the job site indeed. And Svenia says that the job market for tech jobs really has declined in the past couple of years. And it's quite drastic, actually. If you look at, for example, jobs for software developers or information design and documentation, IT ops and help desk type jobs, they all saw this incredible run-up during the pandemic. Yeah, remember how suddenly a lot more people during the pandemic were super online. They were working remotely, shopping online, and so tech companies went on a hiring spree. But then, as the pandemic faded, that hiring spree kind of went into reverse. On top of that, in recent years, tech companies have also had to deal with high interest rates, kind of like the rest of us.

And those high interest rates have also weighed on the industry. So tech hiring right now, as a result of all this, is actually slower than it was before the pandemic. And in addition to that, not only is it fewer tech jobs in general, we're seeing fewer tech internships being offered. That's not good for the new grads. No, it is not. And that gets us to May's second question, which is whether, this reduction in entry-level jobs and internships is reflected in the unemployment rate. Svenya says that depends. The unemployment rate does not count people who are only looking for internships, but it does

count someone who would also be looking for a job and still can't find one. But then May also asked whether AI could be hurting tech employment, right? So then what did Svanya say about that? Well, yes. I mean, Svanya says AI could be part of the story right now, as companies. Companies are embracing AI as a way to kind of replace workers. That could also be slowing down a potential recovery in tech jobs. Okay, thank you, Adrian.

Our next question is for you, Daryan. It comes from Alana Benson in Lander, Wyoming. I've been hearing a lot about recession pop lately. Spotify literally has a playlist for it. Plus, Keshah is releasing new music, and it seems like the club beats from that era are having a resurgence, too. So I just have to know more. Well, Alana, you are in life.

We covered recession pop a few years ago when a paper came out quantifying all the songs we love to listen to when unemployment is high. We talked to economist Marco Palameke. I was thinking that when the situation is bad, people will search for music that express their feelings. But they found the opposite. So Diana Ross ain't no mountain high enough. This was number one in the singles charts in the 1970 recession. You also had step by step by new kids on the block. This was a single during the 1990 recession.

Janet Jackson, all for you in 2001. And all of these singles are upbeat, positive songs. Dancing through the pain. Rhythm Nation. Typically, we are not in a recession right now. But, you know, how do we really know that until we check the pop charts? And so in the Billboard, Hot 100, as of this recording, is a song by the name of Ordinary by Alex Warren. This song definitely gives me an emo vibe.

Yeah, it's kind of mid-tempo ballad. And that is actually perhaps one good indicator for the economy. We're not so sad that we're going 180 degrees in our music going full electro-pop. And that brings me to this latest trend about the whole recession pop thing as a genre. It is related, but it is slightly different. It's a revival of the specific pop musicians that were playing on the orcs cable in the last long recession.

So that's where Kesha comes in. The song, TikTok, was a hit in 2009. I'm talking pedicure on our toes, toes, trying on all our clothes, clothes, boys blowing up our bones, bones. Cut it all. This really brings me back. Whaling on the dance floor, cutting some nerves. You know, this is back when the unemployment rate

more than double what it is today. And that whole crew of Great Recession pop artists like Katie Perry and Lady Gaga will now forever be known as Recession Pop, music to forget the economy crumbling around you. Abricadabra, there's no recession. The only thing unemployed right now is Adrian not dancing with us on the dance floor. Come on. I'm busy making my new music plan for a compilation CD called, now that's what I call Recession Indicator Tunes.

This episode was produced by Cooper Katzvakim and engineered by Neil Rauch. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Julia Ritchie edited this episode. Kagan Cannon is our editor and the indicators of production of NPR.