The Indicator from Planet Money - Three beefs: U.S. and Brazil, Taco Bell and liability, Waymo and trial lawyers

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

It’s Indicators of the Week! Today on the show: Brazil’s fast payments system that’s got the Trump administration huffy, why Taco Bell might be liable for their role in cyclospora infections and why some lawyers are lobbying against driverless cars. Fact checking by Emma Ferrara and Corey Bridges. Your Next Listen — Can I get my tariff money back now? Connect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s brand new newsletter — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ 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 Daryan Woods. And I'm Adrian Ma. And joining us today, the very vital, very vivacious Vito Emanuel. Welcome. Thank you for having me, the daring Darian and Amazing Adrian. I love how you yes to end that alliteration.

I'm a child with improv. You're here because we're doing Indicators of the Week. This is, of course, the day when we talk about our favorite numbers from the news on today's show. We've got the U.S.'s beef with Brazil, which is partly about a payment system. The outbreak of litigation in the wake of an outbreak of cyclosporiasis. And who would oppose safe driving cars? All that after the break. Indicators of the week, Darien Woods, you go.

My indicator is 25% which is the amount of tariffs. that the US is slapping on most Brazilian products this week. It's an increase from the blanket 10% temporary tariffs. Darren, what about my Brazilian flip-flops? I'm sorry. They'll likely be tariffed. Sorry to say. Well, they aren't yours yet if you haven't bought them.

This shirt I'm wearing, actually, is also Brazilian. It happens to be. I got it before the tariffs. Well, you look like a Brazilian bucks, Darian. That's good. I'm simultaneously smiling and shaking my head. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the US government justified these tariffs with something up our alley at the indicator.

It was about Brazil's electronic payment system called Pix. So is that like PayPal or Venmo? It's like a better zel. You've got instant payments between bank account to bank account. You don't even really need to use a credit card or a debit card in many places in Brazil now. PICS is extremely popular. It's almost taken the place of cash in many areas of Brazil. It's run by the Brazilian Central Bank.

And the U.S. government does not like that the central bank is both regulating financial services in general and running PICS, which could be argued as a competitor to other financial products. Right. So I'm guessing MasterCard Visa, they're not very happy about this. Yeah, funny is say that. There is a trade group called the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents Visa, Maskar, but also Meta, among others.

And it has complained that Brazil's central bank mandated that the retail banks have to use and promote picks. And it's also annoyed that after WhatsApp launched a way to transfer money a few years ago on the app, Brazil's Central Bank immediately changed regulation that forced Meta to suspend that service. Okay, so the idea is that if Brazil is making regulation that can stifle competitors, that would be bad for competition. Yeah. But at a news conference, the head of the Brazilian central bank said it would be kind of like saying

that creating basic sanitation hurt the revenue of those who own water trucks. He thought the whole thing was ridiculous. A trade group for payment companies that's actually inside Brazil is very pro-pix. And Picks has been so successful that other countries are looking to Brazil to use the system elsewhere.

It's a Brazilian PICS. success story. Very interesting. Thank you, Darien. My indicator of the week is 4,173, which, as of this recording, is the number of confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, according to the CDC. Yeah, that is not a great number to hear. So in case you missed the PSA, cyclosporiasis is a foodborne illness that's caused by a parasite called cyclospora chyatenensis. I think I'm pronouncing that right. And it makes people very sick if you eat or drink it. How sick? I think a lot of people have heard them.

They include nausea, fatigue, cramping, and also explosive diarrhea. Now, the exact source of this outbreak is still unknown, but federal health officials, they've been investigating whether this may have come from contaminated lettuce from Taylor Farms that was served at Taco Bell. And as you might expect, in the days after they made, this announcement, there has been an outbreak of litigation, of lawsuits against Taco Bell, arguing that Taco Bell is responsible for making people sick. And one of the legal theories that they're doing this under is a theory called strict liability, which means that they don't

actually have to prove that Taco Bell was negligent in this case. They only have to prove that the product, i.e., their food, was defective and dangerous, and they got hurt by it. So even if Taco Bell did everything right, it could still be liable if somebody gets sick from food it served? Right. Even if they were wearing hazmat suits while handling the lettuce, right? Potentially. And there are a few reasons why strict liability is this legal principle that judges often apply to cases where products end up injuring people. The first one being that it just seems fairer for a company to bear the cost of, of this kind of injury rather than an individual. And secondly, this is a situation where economists might say there's an information asymmetry. The company is in a better position to inspect products for safety hazards than the general public. Finally, holding companies responsible in this way incentivizes them to really prioritize safety and kind of beyond it.

I've got some lawsuit stuff. My indicator this week is 40,000, and that's roughly, how many Americans die in car crashes every year. Okay, it's just brutal statistics about Americans' health this week. But carry on. Yeah, and I actually read a blog post this week by Alex Tabarach. He's an economist we actually interviewed on another episode earlier this week. His post was about how Waymo, the self-driving car company,

it released a huge tranche of safety data on its self-driving cars. It claims that if you're in a self-driving car, you are 94. percent less likely to be seriously injured or worse in a car crash. Notch one win for the robots. To be fair, it is Waymo's own data, and it was also limited to a small number of cities. But there's all this proposed legislation kicking around Congress right now to encourage more cities to allow self-driving cars. It's all built on the idea that these cars are, in fact, safer. Still, though, there is some opposition.

Okay, from... Well, okay, let's think about it. Who makes a ton of money on car crashes? Who really wants to take home a slice of the around $200 billion car crash payout pie? Who really... What 800? You've been injured on this highway. Call us now.

Ding, ding, ding, ding. That's right. Trial lawyers have been lobbying against legislation like this for years. And a skeptic might conclude they're worried that fewer accidents means fewer lawsuits means maybe a lot. less money from one of their biggest profit engines. But they also point out that big settlement costs motivate manufacturers to up their safety standards. For example, there's this General Motors litigation from a little over a decade ago over bad ignition switches. Right. So the lawyers sued General Motors and what, did General Motors improve their product after that? Yeah, the ignition switches had

caused over 100 deaths and 30 million cars to be recalled. And afterwards, General Motors took all those cards off the road. But Alex, the person who wrote that blog post from earlier, he says lawsuit outcomes can also kind of be pretty random. Things like what state you got teaboned in and who's on the jury can have a much bigger impact on the outcome than the accident itself or whether an ignition switch was or wasn't defective. So if there are fewer crashes in a world with robotic cars, who would actually be doing the motivating to make cars safer? If it it weren't these lawsuits. Alex basically thinks it would be the insurance companies that would be doing this.

His idea is to borrow from this 2018 law in the UK, which made all self-driving carmakers by their own insurance. And then if there's an accident, you just let the insurance company and the manufacturers duke it out. Maybe you couldn't automate that as well. All right. Well, that's it for indicators of the week. Thanks everybody for listening.

Thank you, Vito, for joining. Thank you for having me. Let's do this again. And people take care of yourselves. Maybe wash your lettuce real good before you eat it. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Quicey Lee. It was fact-checked by Corey Bridges and Emma Ferrara. Kankan Canada edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.