Whaddya wanna know about inflation?

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Marketplace

Business, News

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’ve got mail! And, lots of questions about inflation from listeners. Today, we’ll explain why interest rates cuts may be on the horizon even amid a booming economy; the relationship between the minimum wage and inflation; and what leap day means for your paycheck. Plus, Kai and Kimberly get a special delivery!

Here’s everything we talked about today:

- “Why Cut Interest Rates in an Economy This Strong? A Big Question Confronts the Fed” from The New York Times

- “Personal Income and Outlays, January 2024” from Bureau of Economic Analysis

- “Fed’s Preferred Inflation Metric Increases by Most in a Year” from Bloomberg

- “Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2020” from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

- “Wage increases haven’t really boosted inflation, new Fed research says” from Marketplace

- “How does leap year affect your paycheck?” from Marketplace

- “It’s leap day, an extra workday. Here’s what that means for your paycheck” from CNN

Get ready for Economics on Tap and subscribe to our newsletter to get a copy of our new cocktails zine. The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, okay, let's go.
0:02.0	Hmm.
0:04.0	Hmm.
0:05.0	Hmm.
0:07.0	Hey everybody I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:10.0	Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.
0:13.8	I'm Kai Risdahl Thursday 29 February Leep Day, which hadn't really heard to me until like a week ago.
0:20.1	Anyway.
0:21.1	Really?
0:22.1	Yeah, truly. Truly. Do you know any of the people born on sleep day at all? I do not. I do not. I don't think I know anybody either. Well anyway, happy birthday to I guess they're called Leeplings out there, but yeah, who knew? There's a word for everything.
0:38.0	Today we are going to do something unusual because it's an unusual day, leave day, but we are going to answer
0:45.2	listener questions. I guess it's not that unusual. Anyhow, if you have a question that you'd
0:49.6	like us to answer in a future episode, whether it be about a topic in the news or just something
0:56.0	you're wondering about. You can leave us a voicemail, 508, you be smart, or email us at
1:00.5	Make Me Smart at Marketplace.org.
1:03.5	So to get to our very first question, which comes from David in Maryland, who writes,
1:09.8	with all the discussions of the market's anxiety over when the Fed will finally lower
1:15.0	interest rates, I've yet to hear a reasonable explanation of why they should do so.
1:20.4	It's not like the economy needs stimulus the traditional rationale for cuts so why
1:25.7	should they go back down kai so Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago and many other things, very famous, and
1:36.7	depending on who you talk to, obstreperous economist, said very famously that monetary policy works with a long and variable lag, right?
1:47.0	Monetary policy, of course, the raising and lowering of interest rates, long and variable lag,
	...

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