All inflation is local
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2024
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The national inflation rate doesn’t give a full picture of rising prices. Some places have it better than others. In this episode, housing costs have driven inflation down in some places, and kept rates above the average in others. Plus: Will China have to pay its fair share in the clean energy transition? Are Americans in better shape to pay off debt than before the pandemic? And, does anyone really need an AI shopping assistant?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That last mile on inflation? Yeah, we're not there yet. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. |
| 0:14.6 | In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdahl. It's Wednesday, November 13th. Good to have you with us. |
| 0:25.9 | The latest inflation news is pretty much as expected, stuck. The Labor Department said consumer |
| 0:31.7 | prices rose 2.6% in October compared to the same time a year ago. The monthly increase was 0.2% for the fourth month in a row. One reason for the stalled progress, the price of shelter, which was up 5% year over year. And while that sounds like a big increase, rent inflation has actually been slowing down. Marketplace's |
| 0:56.0 | Justin Ho is on the cold comfort beat today. The thing about the CPI report and the way it tallies |
| 1:01.8 | up shelter costs is that it tends to reflect leases that were signed a while ago. Michael |
| 1:06.4 | Puglesi, senior economist at Wells Fargo, says other private sector data show that today's rents have slowed down even further. |
| 1:13.7 | Look at, say, the Zillow indicators as just an example. Year over year, they're about what they were pre-pandemic, 3, 4, 5%. |
| 1:21.9 | Puglisi says the slowdown in rent inflation reflects the cooling in the broader economy. There's less turnover in the labor |
| 1:28.4 | market than a year ago. Earnings growth has come down. And it makes sense that that would then |
| 1:33.1 | over time kind of be reflected in, you're not going to sustain these 10% or even higher rent |
| 1:39.5 | numbers that you were seeing a couple years ago. Rent growth is still up quite a bit in the northeast and the Midwest. |
| 1:46.2 | But in southern states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, rents have eased up a lot. |
| 1:51.3 | Darrell Fairweather, chief economist at the real estate website Redfin says that's because of new supply coming online. |
| 1:57.5 | Especially of zero to one bedroom units. |
| 2:00.1 | So that's bringing down the national rent figure because there are considerable |
| 2:04.4 | rent cuts going on in some of those southern metros. |
| 2:07.8 | Fairweather says more rental units are hitting the market next year, which should cause |
| 2:11.9 | rent inflation to slow further. |
| 2:13.8 | But new construction projects have been slowing down, thanks in large part to elevated interest rates. |
| 2:19.2 | Odetta Cushi, Deputy Chief Economist at First American, says if that continues... |
| 2:23.9 | Then after this current batch of completed and under-construction apartments come to market, |
... |
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