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What is going on in this economy?

Do you know?

From American Public Media. this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdall. It is Monday. Today, this one is the 19th of May. Good as always to have you along, everybody. There are some things swirling around out there in the economic air that we are going to start with today. The dollar is selling off again. U.S. Treasuries, too, government bonds, right? Stocks started the day down. They did end in the green.

And then also, the big picture of finance news from the end of last week talked about this on Friday.

Moody's joining Fitch and S&P, downgrading the credit rating of the biggest economy in the world.

Debt, deficits, political paralysis, and fiscal challenges being the proximate causes.

Nina Ihacker is a professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island. Professor Iahecker,

welcome to the program. Good to have you on again. It's great to be here. Do me a favor, would

you? And I'm going to steal a page from Chair Powell's book here. Look through the downgrade itself,

right, the way the Fed

likes to look through tariffs for inflation. What does it tell you that three out of three

of the big rating agencies have now said, you know what, United States, this is not great.

What does it tell you? It tells me that there is a growing acknowledgement of the political

turmoil, whatever you want to call it in Congress as to actually funding government spending.

So I think what's interesting about this most recent downgrade is that it's not happening

on the heels of a debt ceiling

showdown, but it's sort of predicting that growing disparity between an administration

...