We'll do wages and prices.

We'll do companies you probably didn't know or actually companies anymore.

And why would you cut up a perfectly good house and truck it all the way across town?

From American Public Media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Monday. Today, this one is the 8th of June. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody.

We're going to start today right at the intersection of where consumers are feeling the pain in this economy right now. We'll get an

inflation update on Wednesday morning. It will be the Consumer Price Index for May. The CPI, as you

well know, has been trending up since the president started his war with Iran.

It was 3.8% in April. That is year-on-year data. And the May update is going to come with some

important context. Last Friday, in the May unemployment report, average hourly earnings,

that's labor economists speak, for how much we're all making. It rose 3.4% year on year.

And that difference is going to be a problem for workers and for policymakers at the Federal Reserve.

Marketplaces Henry Ep gets us going. If the prices we pay for groceries and gas and rent rise

faster than our wages, We're losing purchasing power.

Christina Sargent is an associate professor of economics at Middlebury College.

A 3.4% raise sounds great until you notice that what you buy is increasing at 4%.

So that's not a pay bump. That's a pay cut.

And no one likes a pay cut, or at least most people. But then there are economists,

says Catherine Ann Edwards, who is an economist. This is one of the economists do something really

horrible, like say how badly people are doing and then go, and that's good. But it's not good

for workers. But it is kind of good for the Federal Reserve, which wants to keep inflation from climbing even higher.

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