Google raises the stakes of the AI race

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1:11It's Friday. Need I say more? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

1:26In Denver, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdahl. It's Friday, September 19th. Good to have you with us. This week in the economy, retail sales came in surprisingly strong. The Fed, unsurprisingly, cut interest rates. And President Trump announced progress on a TikTok deal with China. With us to make sense of it all and what it means for you are Courtney Brown at Axios and Catherine Rampell at MSNBC. Hi, you two. Hey, Amy. Hey, Amy. So, Catherine, let's start with that much-anticipated FOMC meeting. It went pretty much as expected, ending with a quarter point rate cut. Did anything stand out to you in what Jay Powell had to say about the Fed's thinking right now?

2:12I think one of the more interesting phrases he used was meeting by meeting situation, which sounds like some corporate jargon. But in this case, I thought it was kind of interesting, particularly in contrast with the kind of verbiage used last year when the FOMC began a rate cutting cycle where Powell, among others, made it a little bit clearer that the the first cut that they were that they were announcing was the beginning of a series of cuts. I think he said something like, you know, the direction of travel is clear. But this time around, he was much more noncommittal, committal rather, about whether the cut that we saw this week was going to be the first in a series of cuts or, you know, they were going to, you know, take it meeting by meeting.

3:07and potentially it might be a one-off. Because, you know, as I'm sure we'll discuss, the Fed is in a really difficult position right now about whether cuts are the right decision at all, given their dual mandate. Right. How about you, Courtney? Why do you think he was more cautious about saying this is going to be a meeting-by-meeting kind of thing? They just don't know. As Calvin was saying, there is a little bit of uncertainty about how things in the economy are going to shake out. Inflation is above their 2 % target on the one hand, but on the other hand, they have a labor market that appears to be weakening.

3:51And Chair Powell said during the press conference that the Fed has no desire to see the labor market weakening further. So they wanna try and they wanna step in and try to protect the labor market. But they can't do so as aggressively as maybe they might want to, because on the other hand, you have an inflationary threat from President Trump's tariffs. And no one knows, you know, just how inflationary those tariffs are going to be. There are people on the committee betting it's going to be tariffs are going to cause a one time price hike. But that's far from a definite. So I think Powell threaded the needle here as carefully as he could, acknowledging that there are risks still to the economy.

4:43Right. And I want to come back to inflation. But first, Catherine, something Chair Powell said that was interesting to us was about how immigration policy is affecting the labor market, leading to what he called this curious balance of fewer workers. At the same time, demand for workers has also declined. I know this is something that you've written about. What did you make of that? Yeah, I thought it was interesting. So basically, he was saying that slumping labor demand, you know, the fact that there are a lot of companies that may not need as many workers right now is not necessarily going to push up unemployment in the short term because there's also a slumping labor force.

5:25And yeah, in the short term, that means we won't have potentially we won't have higher unemployment in the long term. It's a much bigger problem because we have huge demographic challenges in this country. We have an aging population. We need more working age people over the long run. And if we have a net decline in immigration this year, as it looks like we may be on track to have for the first time since the 1960s, that will pose serious risks to the U.S. economy's ability to grow and increase living standards and all of that. Because, as I said, the last time we had a shrinking immigrant population was in the 60s when we also had the baby boom and we had an increasing labor force.

6:12So, yeah, in the near term, it could very well be the case that we won't see as much pain, but long term it's bad. And it's also not really clear what effect all of this stuff is going to have on prices either. Powell, if you look back at his previous comments, had indicated, I think it was probably like around 2022, 2023, that the increase in immigration at that time was disinflationary. That is, you had a lot more workers coming in and potentially helping supply chain problems. But, you know, immigrants also buy stuff in addition to making stuff and picking crops and filling jobs and, you know, conducting research trials.

6:59And, you know, immigrants fill lots of different positions. They also buy things. So the real question is, which will have a bigger impact on the economy, the fact that there are fewer workers or the fact that there are fewer consumers? Hmm. Well, about consumers, Courtney, this week we did see that, you know, people keep shopping despite inflation. And, you know, there's some sense that we haven't yet seen the real impact of tariffs, partly because policy is still so uncertain. But what do you make of the the enduring strength of the American consumer? All of my sources seem to believe that this is untenable.

7:38untenable. At a certain point, the American consumer is going to be tapped out. But just think about the past few years, the resiliency of the American consumer has been a strong theme throughout the economy. The big difference this time is that we do have a very sluggish hiring environment right now, as I've written about, as many publications have written about. And so if you are someone who is unemployed and finding a job is really hard, really, how much more can you spend? But the other side of the equation is that layoff rates for now are very low. So I think that's helping to support consumption.

8:25And we know that wealthier Americans make up the bulk of consumer spending. And if you're a wealthy American, you're sitting on a lot of gains from the booming stock market right now. So that also might be disguising some softer spending among lower income consumers. All right. Well, as always, we didn't get to talk about everything on my list, but we'll have to wait till next time. Catherine Rampell is at MSNBC. Courtney Brown is at Axios. Thank you both so much. Have a great weekend. Thanks, Amy. on wall street today as courtney was talking about new records go figure we'll have the details when we do the numbers

9:31Users of Google's Chrome web browser may notice some changes in the coming months. Google announced yesterday it's integrating its Gemini AI assistant into Chrome, turning it into what's known as an agentic browser. Many varieties of these browsers are emerging in the arms race for AI dominance. Marketplace's Sabree Beneshore explains what's driving the trend. Think about how you search, how you book travel, how you check your email, how you shop. The way we interact with and traverse most of the digital world is in a browser. Diane Hinchcliffe is a VP at the Futurum Group. Our browsers have our logins, our passwords, our bookmarks, even our credit cards saved.

10:14The browser has all the keys to the castle. Agentic browsers give those keys to AI. Jordan Wilson is founder of Everyday AI. This is when there's actually a version of a large language model that lives inside the browser software and then can actually take actions on your behalf. Like find the cheapest flight. And if you let it, book it. Log into your Amazon to find the cheapest furniture. And if you let it, buy it. Look at your email and sort it and maybe even respond to it. Any website, anything that exists on the Internet, especially anything that you can log into, you know, that just opens up so many more possibilities than you have right now versus a traditional LLM AI chatbot.

10:59So like ChatGPT or Claude. Agentech browsers also give tech companies a shot at unseating the titan that is Google by starting a new browser war. Chirag Shah is a professor at the University of Washington. No matter what innovations have happened in search industry by other competitors, they haven't been able to take away any part of Google's market share for two, three decades now. Now they have an opportunity to do that. Browsers are actually just one type of agentic AI, and the stakes are enormous. Again, Diane Hinchcliffe with the Futurum Group. Our official industry estimate is that by 2028, there is about$4 trillion in value to be had by unleashing agents to do work for us.

11:44That is, if we decide to let them. There's kind of a question of how far consumers want these agents to go when completing some tasks. Eric Sufert is with MobileDevMemo. There are trust issues, there are security issues, and when an AI chatbot slips up and says something wrong and crazy, that is very different from an AI browser that does something wrong and crazy. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshaw for Marketplace.

12:37Coming up. I mean, I don't know if anyone's going to buy fabric today, and that's totally fine. The inputs of a crafting economy. But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 172 points, about four-tenths percent, to close at 46 ,315. That's a new record. The Nasdaq rose 160 points, seven-tenths percent, to finish at 22 ,631. And the S &P 500 found 32 points, half a percent, and it's 66-64, also a new record. For the week, the Dow rose 1%, the Nasdaq gained 2.2%, the S &P 500 lifted 1.2%. Sabri was just telling us about Google's plan to add its AI product Gemini to its Chrome browser.

13:24Google's parent company, Alphabet, advanced 1 % today. Elsewhere in Techlandia, Apple ascended 3.2 percent. Microsoft added 1.8 percent. Embroiled in the controversy over pulling late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Disney lopped off 1 percent today. Bonds fell. The yield on the 10-year T-note rose to 4.12 percent. You're listening to Marketplace.

14:04This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth. Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. This is the story of the one. As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast.

14:43It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers. All so that he can help students, staff, and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This is Marketplace. I'm Amy Scott. The tariff standoff between the Trump administration and Canada has unique consequences for one U.S. state, Alaska, and its food supply chain, which relies on Canadian trade routes. Eva Holland is a journalist based in Whitehorse, Yukon, which is along one of those routes, the Alaska Highway, also known as the Alcan.

15:29Her story for High Country News carried the headline, The Messy Reality of Feeding Alaska. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So, true story, my first radio job was in Dillingham, Alaska, off the road system. And I remember how expensive the food was and also how sort of poorly stocked, shall we say, the grocery store was. For listeners who aren't familiar with this supply chain, why is that? It's sort of obvious and complicated at the same time, I guess. But, you know, Alaska is really far from the rest of the U.S. And there's not a lot of roads to get there. There's just there's just the one, in fact, the Alaska Highway, sometimes called the Alcan.

16:11And initially, I just assumed the food was coming up the highway because it's a lot faster than going by sea. If you're trucking around the clock, you get there in, I think, about 40-ish hours from Seattle to Fairbanks, something like that. But it turns out most of the food, including the fresh food, does go by sea because the road is, you know, remote and unreliable sometimes with fires and floods and washouts and things. And so most food gets to Alaska by sea. One exception is that Walmart does a fair bit of trucking of their food up the highway. or really sensitive stuff comes in by plane. But it's a really complicated system to get food to Alaska because it doesn't, of course, produce enough of its own food to feed nearly a million people.

16:52Well, with this major point of transport going through Canada, of course, the Canadian government has a lot of power. And recently that kind of came to a head. Talk about what happened when the premier of British Columbia threatened to toll trucks that are transporting food along that highway. Right. That was really what twigged this story idea for me is this kind of unprecedented threat to put tolls on the commercial trucks using the highway. And I was sort of tickled by the irony of this road that was built to defend Alaska during World War II now being kind of a vulnerability like an Achilles heel.

17:31So I thought, gosh, this is an unusual threat that Alaska is sort of uniquely vulnerable to. And that was kind of the jumping off point for the story. Right. And so that has not happened, we should say. But it kind of led you down this path of just discovering how complicated the supply chain is. At one point, you called it a tangled ball of yarn. What surprised you about what you learned? I was surprised at the reliance on sea shipments to, you know, Ketchikan and Juneau and Anchorage and Dutch Harbor. And then from there, it all spools out onto trucks and small planes and goes all over the state.

18:10And that's where things get really complicated. You know, I couldn't fit it all in the story, but there's just fascinating considerations around, you know, maintaining weather stations in remote places like Dillingham and runways and roads over mountain passes that get avalanches And it's just like, you know, challenge after challenge to keep Alaska fed. Why, maybe this is obvious to some, but why doesn't more food come from within the state itself? There is an agriculture industry and subsistence gathering is pretty critical in many rural communities. Yeah, subsistence is a huge piece of the puzzle, particularly for people that live off the road network, but for people that live on the road network as well.

18:50Alaskans eat somewhere between half a billion and close to a billion dollars worth of wild foods every year. And then there is a growing agricultural sector. Of course, there's some climate and terrain considerations in terms of how much farmland there is in Alaska. A lot is mountainous or tundra or muskeg. I think it's just a matter of the population being bigger than what the current state of agriculture can support. And not many places really just feed themselves these days. Most places don't get canned beans that are local, for instance, or a bag of dried beans or staples like that, rice, all that kind of stuff, right?

19:29We're all so interconnected with food these days. Yeah, and I guess it was surprising to see how vulnerable that system is, not just to, you know, trade tensions, but public infrastructure. And, you know, I'm curious what you think about the future of Alaska's public infrastructure, given, you know, the current federal administration. Yeah, that was the real revelation for the story for me, I think, is that, you know, you can't have your food all come by sea if your ports are falling apart and you need the roads to work for the second stage of trucking and you need, like I said, weather stations in remote airstrips and all this shared infrastructure.

20:13And so I think even though Alaska has this very sort of rugged individualist reputation, which is earned in lots of ways, there's really like a collective need for public infrastructure there that's maybe not being addressed. Eva Holland wrote about the messy business of feeding Alaska for High Country News. Thanks so much. Thank you.

20:39And speaking of the messy business of food, the upcoming season of our climate podcast, How We Survive, is all about the future of food on a hotter planet. It launches October 15th. Check it out on the podcast platform of your choice.

21:22Earlier this year, Joanne Fabrics, the national crafting chain, closed its doors for good. It was a hard day for a lot of sewists out there, which, yes, is the preferred term for people who sew. But then, to add insult to injury, the parent company behind a bunch of the biggest brands in commercial sewing patterns filed for bankruptcy. Still, the firm Cognitive Market Research estimates arts and crafts supplies is a$50 billion industry globally. So where are crafters turning now for their knitting and sewing needs? Marketplace's Sarah Leeson went to find out. Yes, the industry is in flux, but I met some sewists the other day who, unlike Joanne's stores, aren't going anywhere.

22:10I was at Stitch House Dorchester, a knitting supply shop just south of Boston's downtown. Regulars meet up here every month, and I was among a group of about 20 women, ranging from their 20s to their 70s. What a spread! We're talking calzones, cookies, other baked goods, all piled on a table and surrounded by half-made knitting projects. I'm finishing up a cowl, and this is leftover yarn. I have a big stash. Diane Gantman was 40 when she started knitting. She's 76 now, and she brought two more projects she's also working on, all made with yarn that she bought in person. Do you shop online? No.

22:56Not at all? I have to touch it. I have to see it. I have to see the color. That commitment to shopping face-to-face is what Anissa Asabi-George, Stitch House's owner of 17 years, is betting on. There are now fewer places for people to go and look and feel and touch, and crafters will understand this comment, smell, before you buy it. So we've seen definitely a little bit of a bump in some new customers. But depending on where you live, you might not have a place anymore where you can look and touch and smell the fabric you're buying in person. So online shopping is just what you got to do. When people buy our fabric, like a lot of times they just start out with a couple yards.

23:41But then a lot of times I see them come back and they'll spend way more than that money when they learn to trust their company. Joanna Lynch and her husband own The Linen Lab, a fabric manufacturer based in Seoul, South Korea. It's been in business since the 80s, but didn't start selling online until 2020. And Joanna quickly learned that sewists want more than just a picture before they buy. She's originally from the Boston area, and when she's back, she acts as a local sales rep and hosts coffee shop meetups for local sewists. The goal of this is to let them touch fabric, see if they're happy with the feel, tell them about the company so they know it's trustworthy.

24:22Yeah, that's why we're here. She gave me a ton of samples to look through. Think a fabric version of paint swatches, with plaids, ginghams, solids of every color. I mean, I don't know if anyone's going to buy fabric today, and that's totally fine. A lot of times my goal is, like, brand recognition. In the Linen Lab's first year selling online, it pulled in about$50 ,000 in overseas sales. Now that Joanna has built that brand recognition, this year it's at$200 ,000 and counting. So that's the fabric side of things. But to actually make something, you're probably going to want a pattern. And the online market is the place to find it now.

25:04Sana Myers has been making patterns professionally since 2017. I went to pattern making school in Sweden. It's like a trade school. She's based in Oahu, Hawaii now. And she's worked with some small local brands. But during the pandemic, she discovered the world of indie pattern makers on Instagram. I saw what they were doing and I said, wait, I actually, I have all those skills. So I was like, I should just do it myself. She started by sharing some designs online. I sold a few, but nothing to write home about. Until one pattern, a low-back dress, had a viral moment. It was kind of insane. I had notifications on on my phone.

25:46I just went ding, ding, ding, ding. I was like, what just happened? That dress pattern that put her on the map has single-handedly pulled in almost$90 ,000 in the four years it's been online. And then I've built more of a following since then. That following, more than 60 ,000 on Instagram alone, has meant more trust from sewists, more connections, and more sales, even online. In Boston, I'm Sarah Leeson from Marketplace.

26:43This final note on the way out today, Catherine Rampell was talking about how immigration policy is affecting the labor market. Well, another change is coming. President Trump is reportedly planning to add a$100 ,000 fee to new applications for H-1B visas. That's the program many tech companies rely on to recruit skilled workers. The new charge would come on top of existing fees paid by employers that can run a few thousand dollars. It's part of a larger overhaul of the program, which Trump has said undercuts U.S. workers. Our theme music was composed by B.J. Lederman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fregali.

27:23Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer. Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager. And I'm Amy Scott. Have a great weekend. We'll be back on Monday.

27:58This is APM.