Is recession risk rising?

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A growing number of young American consumers say they’re opting out of the economy entirely or pulling back from spending at certain stores over their political views. We’ll explain how this trend could collide with other economic shifts, creating the perfect recipe for a recession. Plus, by popular demand, we unpack a recent feat of nature: beavers successfully taking on civil engineering!

Here’s everything we talked about:

“Kremlin Message to Trump: There’s Money to Be Made in Russia” from The New York Times

“A quarter of US shoppers have dumped favorite stores over political stances” by The Guardian

“NAACP calls for consumers to leverage their purchasing power as some companies pull back from DEI policies” from Marketplace

“Black faith leaders call for Target boycott over D E I rollback” from The Hill

“Czech Dam Project Was Stalled by Bureaucracy. Beavers Built Their Own.” from The New York Times

Got a question or comment for the hosts? Email makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, I'm Kai Rosdahl.
0:07.7	Welcome back to Make Me Smart.
0:08.9	Where we make today, makes sense.
0:11.8	And I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:13.1	Thank you for joining us on this Wednesday, February the 19th.
0:16.5	It is a news and a smiles kind of day, so let us get into it.
0:20.4	What you got, Kai?
0:21.7	This one is, let's see, it's a little bit, know your audience, it's a little bit corporate.
0:30.7	Green might be too strong, but only a little bit.
0:33.0	And a little bit, hmm, this is where we're going now.
0:35.6	Peace in the New York Times today, the headline of which is Kremlin message to Trump.
0:38.9	There is money to be made in Russia.
0:41.9	So it is obviously, as anybody following this podcast knows, these are salad days for President
0:48.4	Trump and President Putin.
0:49.6	They're getting along just famously.
0:51.5	Russian officials, though, are still under sanction.
0:54.0	The economy's in very bad
0:55.3	shape, and so they're doing what they can to get their economy going again, seeing the new
0:58.9	attitude, shall we say, in the White House. And they are pointing out that American companies,
1:03.3	number one, lost a lot of money when they pulled out three years ago in the wake of the invasion.
1:08.5	And number two, there is money to be made
1:11.2	if they get back into the market.
	...

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