When the going gets tough, just keep spending

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 8.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Retail sales were up 0.9% in May, which is a generally positive economic sign. But it doesn’t square with our reality, in which price inflation outpaces wage growth. That is, until you look at that pesky personal savings rate. In this episode, YOLO consumers in a grim economy. Plus: Fed Chair Warsh holds rates steady, the rate of new households is falling, and what would happen if the U.S. lost its global reserve currency status.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air.
0:11.2	I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the
0:22.4	pass, that's on the media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31.4	What happened at the Federal Reserve meeting today, you ask? Well, here's what happened. You
0:37.2	get a task force and you get a task force and you get a
0:38.8	task force and you get a task force. From American public media, this is Marketplace.
0:51.3	In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Wednesday. Today, this one is the 17th of June. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody.
1:04.0	We begin today with the Federal Reserve's new chairman, Kevin Warsh, and his first press conference. And as he promised, changes are coming.
1:12.8	We've got a task force for that.
1:14.3	This was a more bureaucratic than usual press conference.
1:18.3	The economics of it in a minute, of course.
1:20.4	But the main takeaway was that Warsh, as he said during his confirmation hearings,
1:24.8	is bound and determined to change the way the Fed does business.
1:30.0	Telltale sign number one, five, count them five new task forces on, should you be curious,
1:36.7	communications, the Fed's balance sheet, economic data, productivity and jobs, and inflation frameworks.
1:49.2	So that. Also, though, and more immediately,
1:54.6	at this moment in time, it doesn't feel as though providing forward guidance is right?
2:00.6	Forward guidance. That thing the Fed's been doing for the past, I don't know, 15 years or so, letting everybody,
2:02.0	which mostly meant markets, letting them know which way the Fed was thinking monetary policy,
2:07.2	interest rates were going to go well in advance of actually voting on them.
2:11.7	This is a big deal.
2:12.7	So I think it's important to hear Chairman Warsh's rationale.
	...

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