"March is ancient history"

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The latest GDP calculations and PCE index tell us the U.S. economy is doing … OK. Importantly, the data doesn’t point to stagflation. But the data was collected from January through March 2025, and at this point, March is old news. Also in this episode: American companies ramp up their spending on computers, Nike’s struggle to move sneaker manufacturing out of Asia is a cautionary tale and Texas becomes the biggest state to send public dollars to private schools through school choice vouchers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sometimes the bad news, while not great, isn't really that bad.
0:09.4	From American public media, this is Marketplace.
0:17.7	I'm Kai Rizdahl, Wednesday, today the 30th of April.
0:25.1	Good as always to have you along, everybody.
0:27.3	On the theory that a little bit of review is always helpful, we are going to begin again today with the formula of the moment.
0:36.4	C plus I plus G plus X minus M equals GDP.
0:42.7	Consumer spending, that's C, plus business spending, I for investment is what they call it in business, plus G, that's government spending, plus net exports, which is X for exports minus M for imports, equals the entire
0:57.6	economy. We review because we got our first look at first quarter GDP today. And as has been
1:03.6	all over your news and social feeds ever since, the economy got smaller January through March.
1:09.7	Not a lot, three-tenths percent, but smaller.
1:12.6	Now, that shrinkage is not good, but it's not terrible because of that formula that you are
1:17.6	probably getting sick and tired of. Consumer spending is fine. Business spending is okay.
1:22.8	Government spending is all right as well. But that net exports component, once again, that's exports,
1:29.7	and this is the important bit, minus imports, skewed the final result. Our example today,
1:35.6	line 11 of table one of the report, non-residential fixed investment in equipment. That's
1:41.5	economists speak for spending by businesses on things like machines and
1:44.6	computer hardware and furniture. And it was up a whopping 22 and a half percent from a quarter
1:50.0	earlier, the biggest quarterly increase in nearly five years. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes
1:55.4	takes it from there. American companies bought a lot of computers in the first quarter. To get specific, business investment in computers and the stuff that goes with them, like monitors and printers, was up nearly 113 percent for the quarter. The last time it was this high was in 1983. Basically, when desktop computers were becoming a thing that companies wanted to buy in the first place.
2:18.3	Carlton College economics professor Ethan Struby says this reflects the needs of the modern American economy.
2:24.3	Most of what we produce in the United States is still services, and service providers need computers to do their jobs.
2:29.7	Think economists, bankers, journalists.
	...

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