For companies, it could come down to people versus profits
Marketplace
Marketplace
4.6 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can we rein in inflation without unemployment surging? Though it’s an open question, one route to avoiding layoffs is for companies to accept lower profit margins and absorb additional costs. But whether they will is a whole ‘nother question. We’ll also unpack Day 1 of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s Capitol Hill testimony, look at the workforce gap left by pandemic-era retirements and visit one of Los Angeles’ newest lesbian bars.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody. It's Kai. It is hard to believe that three years ago, we were thrown into so much uncertainty due to COVID through it. Although |
| 0:06.8 | Marketplace has been here for you, breaking down the impact that this global pandemic has had on the economy and how it affects you. |
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| 0:21.4 | Slash donate. |
| 0:22.2 | Monzo business banking. It just works so you can too join businesses like target tuition by opening a monzo business account. |
| 0:31.2 | What I love about monzo business account is how easy everything is. It can be filtered, it can be tagged. We thought we'd have to manage our business around our bank, but that's not the case for monzo. |
| 0:42.2 | My name is Shun. I am the founder of target trition. |
| 0:45.2 | In minutes at monzo.com slash business to apply you must be a sole trader or director of a limited company UK businesses only terms and conditions apply. |
| 0:55.2 | Drive though he may be. J pal does let you know what he's thinking. |
| 1:01.2 | If a totality of the data were to indicate that faster tightening is warranted, we'd be prepared to increase the pace of rate hikes. |
| 1:08.2 | From American public media. This is marketplace. |
| 1:21.2 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kai. Rizdole is Tuesday. Today is seventh day. March could as always to have you along everybody. You know, twice a year, the chair of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors is required by law to make the trek up Capitol Hill and spend two days, one each in the Senate and the House. |
| 1:37.2 | Answering lawmakers questions about the economy, how the feds managing it and anything else that's on lawmakers minds mostly the past year or so. The questions have been about inflation, how high it is and what exactly the central bank is going to do about it. |
| 1:52.2 | So just quickly at the end of last year, we saw a couple of very promising modest increase modest inflationary readings in November and December. |
| 2:04.2 | Inflation was in fact getting better back then, but earlier this year, those were some of that improvement was revised away. |
| 2:12.2 | Oh, right. In addition, we got a very strong reading on inflation in January, also very strong jobs reading also very strong retail sales to be clear a strong jobs report and strong retail sales while great if you're a regular person in this economy are not great if it's your job to control inflation. |
| 2:31.2 | And so as I pointed out in my testimony, we're looking at a reversal really of what we thought we were seeing to some extent a partial reversal. It's still true, it's still the case that we're seeing progress on inflation progress. Yes, but not as much progress or as fast as the fed would like still though. |
| 2:51.2 | We're seeing goods inflation come as come down significantly. There's improvement in housing inflation in the pipeline that is true. There's not a lot of improvement yet to be seen in the largest sector, which is non housing services. |
| 3:03.2 | So we inflation is running it core inflation is running at 4.7% on the 12 months basis 4.7% over the past year. Remember the fed wants inflation to be at 2%. |
| 3:15.2 | All that palate by plagiarism now, by the way, was one long answer. We just chopped it up a bit to get to the real bottom line of the Fed shares testimony today, which was this the very long end of that very long answer. |
| 3:28.2 | I think nothing about the data suggests to me that we've tightened too much. Indeed, it suggests that we still have work to do still have work to do. One of the big questions about how inflation is going to get tamed is how much the labor market needs to suffer. And in fact, that came up today. |
| 3:43.2 | Whether employment unemployment needs to go up a lot for inflation to come down. We don't actually know yet, but there is a related question here. How much of the income pie in this economy goes to workers? |
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