The supply chain behind your Valentine’s Day bouquet
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
This week, millions of fresh-cut flowers are arriving in the U.S., mostly from South America. Imports account for more than 80% of flowers sold here, and it’s a $2 billion industry. We’ll draw back the curtain on the supply chain for those dozen red roses for your sweetheart. Also: the latest consumer price index reading, tensions in the B Corps world and the foreign aid freeze’s impact on U.S. farmers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We call it foreign aid, but it also helps Americans like farmers. |
| 0:06.1 | I'm David Brancaccio in New York. First, there's news now that the consumer price index came in slightly hotter than expected today. |
| 0:13.6 | That's for the month of January. Prices were up half a percent, which means the consumer price index is up 3 percent in a year. |
| 0:20.7 | Jeffrey Cleveland is chief economist at the investment firm, Payden and Regal, based in Los Angeles. |
| 0:25.2 | Welcome. |
| 0:26.1 | Good morning, David. |
| 0:27.6 | This is not blazing hot, but a little hotter than many would have wanted to see. |
| 0:31.8 | Yeah, disappointing, David. |
| 0:32.9 | We wanted to see more progress on inflation, particularly on core inflation, X food, X energy. On a |
| 0:40.4 | year-on-year basis, that's at 3.3% right now. It actually ticked up on the month. We want to see |
| 0:47.7 | that progressing back under 3% and headed towards, let's say, 2.5. So the progress is really |
| 0:53.5 | stalled. Well, it's not like companies that a half. So the progress is really stalled. |
| 0:58.5 | Well, it's not like companies that sell things are helping here. I mean, motor vehicle insurance, |
| 1:04.4 | up, used cars and trucks, up, medical care, airline fares, up. I mean, it's hard to battle inflation when that's happening. And rents as well. I think shelter, big contributor to the |
| 1:10.4 | increase in inflation over the month. So some of that, |
| 1:13.6 | David, could be maybe a January effect. There's been some talk of that. The last couple of years, |
| 1:18.0 | we've seen hot inflation readings in January. So I don't want to overreact to any one report. |
| 1:24.2 | But I think certainly this is disappointment for consumers, but also for policymakers who are |
| 1:28.4 | looking for additional progress, so more cooling before they make their next interest rate move. |
| 1:34.6 | Jeffrey Cleveland, Chief economist, Peyden & Regal. Thank you very much. |
| 1:38.0 | Have a good week. In fact, the Fed Chair, Jay Powell, will be testifying on Capitol Hill for a |
| 1:42.9 | second day shortly. Some of the food the U.S. distributes to help people in other countries comes from U.S. farmers. According to archived U.S. AID data, the agency bought more than a million metric tons of food from U.S. producers in fiscal 2023. It's market U.S. growers depend on income now unpredictable given the Trump |
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