Who could say no to tariff stories looking at either chocolate or blueberries?

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First, real estate, in about a quarter of the country's 100 largest metropolitan areas, the price and square footage of new homes, are going down.

That's some of a report this morning from Realtor.com. Marketplaces Stephanie Hughes takes a look.

A lot of these cheaper, smaller new homes are being built in metro areas in the American South.

We're seeing a lot of new communities developing kind of on the outskirts of a lot of these southern cities.

Economist Joel Berner wrote thereelter.com report. He says it's cheaper to build farther from

the city centers. Also, in the sunbelt, he says there's more available land and more permissive

zoning than in, say, the northeast. In the south, you can kind of do whatever you want. And builders

are reading the room in terms of what people want to buy,

says civil engineer and developer Thomas Brett. He's based in Nashville, one of the areas where

new home price and size dropped. The target right now is people that are just entering the

homeownership market, which is a smaller home, a more affordable home. But economist Joel

Berner is keeping an eye on tariffs on Canadian lumber.

He says if they go up this fall is planned, that'll make new homes in the U.S. more expensive to build.

I'm Stephanie Hughes from Marketplace.

The Federal Reserve left interest rates alone to continue waiting to see if tariffs and uncertainty surrounding policies cut into economic growth, jobs, and or boost inflation.

By one count, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, used the word wait or its synonyms 22 times in his briefing yesterday.

Bonds are down this morning with the 10-year interest rate up at 4.31%.

And here's one more number, a range really, minus 30 to 40%. That's the drop in shipping container volumes running between the U.S. and China, as calculated by the cargo company Maersk. Still, Maersk of Denmark is sticking to its profit forecast for this year, with shipping rates elevated because of attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.

When President Trump halted his big jump in tariffs just over four weeks ago now, it left in place a tariff hike of 10% that was essentially universal.

The fourth largest island in the world, Madagascar, is still adjusting to the idea of 47% tariffs if and when Trump's pause runs out two months from now.

Beyond Good is a company that would have a tough time sourcing somewhere cheaper because Madagascar is a key part of the artisanal appeal of its Madagascar vanilla chocolate.

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