An American manufacturing road trip
Marketplace
American Public Media
4.6 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Several regional Fed offices reported soft or stagnant manufacturing activity this spring. Tariffs, immigration policy and other uncertainties are driving pullbacks across the sector. In this episode, we take a cross-country trip to learn more. Plus: Farms struggle to staff up for harvest season as ICE raid fears persist, young college grads struggle to find work and Zillow changes its listing policy for homes that were already listed privately.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On the program today, a couple of different slices of this economy, no particular order. |
| 0:06.6 | Manufacturing, housing, and AI. |
| 0:10.4 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. |
| 0:19.9 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. |
| 0:24.8 | It is Monday, today, June 30. |
| 0:27.3 | Good as always to have you along, everybody. |
| 0:29.5 | We are going to start on this Monday with a road trip of sorts, beginning in the great state of Texas. |
| 0:34.3 | Dallas, specifically, where the regional Federal Reserve Bank there released its |
| 0:38.3 | survey of manufacturing today. Texas being Texas, oil and gas figure prominently. Long |
| 0:44.5 | story short, production was flat. But there is more to the American manufacturing economy than |
| 0:49.6 | just Texas and petroleum. So marketplaces Elizabeth Rovald took to the road, as it were. |
| 0:56.3 | Our trip across the U.S. manufacturing sector starts with Courtney Cowley, with the Kansas City Fed, |
| 1:02.4 | who I catch up with while she's in the car, driving across her district. |
| 1:07.8 | So I'm just on my way to Enid, Oklahoma. |
| 1:13.5 | Home to steel manufacturing. The district also does a lot of food and petroleum-related production. In this June survey, Cowley says activity and |
| 1:19.5 | employment is down. And then we're also continuing to see prices for both inputs and |
| 1:25.6 | produce products or outputs increase. |
| 1:29.0 | Crossing state lines into Texas, the Dallas feds Emily Kerr reminds me that a lot more |
| 1:34.4 | than petroleum products are made here. |
| 1:36.8 | So we have a lot of high-tech manufacturing, quite a bit of food manufacturing. |
| 1:41.2 | You know, we're the top cattle state. |
| 1:43.6 | In June survey, Kerr says, though demand continues to fall, hiring actually picked up. |
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