How long until SNAP reaches kitchen tables?

0:00We've all done it. Stock our fridge with good intentions, only to sacrifice nutrition for convenience. Keep your body and mind nourished with whole body meal shakes from Cachava. It's got 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, and so much more. But it actually tastes delicious. Try one of Cachava's indulgent flavors today. Shop now through December 2nd to get 30 % off your first purchase of two or more bags. Go to cachava.com and use code NEWS. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com, code NEWS. Lowe's Early Black Friday deals are going fast. Don't miss up to 50 % off select major appliances. Plus, up to an extra 25 % off when you bundle select major appliances.

0:42And with Christmas around the corner, you're going to need more string lights, right? Save$4 on GE LED 100-count string lights. Now just$5.98. Lowe's, we help. You save. Valid through 12-3. Selection varies by location. Select locations only. While supplies last. See Lowe's.com for more details. Well, let's see. More private sector data, some rare earth elements, and pumpkins from American public media. This is Marketplace.

1:20I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Monday, today, 3 November. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. I'm just going to say, and I am for sure not alone, that while it's one thing to have to figure out what's up with this economy without federal data, we've all gotten used to our private data favors, after all, it is entirely another thing when those private data points point in opposite directions. The indicators of choice for us today are both what are called purchasing managers indexes. They track manufacturing, new orders and factory production levels, prices for materials and for finished goods.

1:57They're usually pretty good leading indicators telling us where the economy and its factories are headed. But the PMI from the Institute for Supply Management shows an eighth straight month of mild contraction, while the S &P Global PMI shows a third consecutive month of mild improvement. We asked Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman to spend his day trying to make sense of it all. Manufacturing is up. Manufacturing is down. And there's no government data to help settle the question. Looking at it all together, Ned Hill at the Ohio Manufacturing Institute sums it up. You know, if you'd see me, it'd be sharking my shoulders going, meh.

2:38Nothing's really growing. There's lots of uncertainty. This tariff thing keeps on shifting. For industrial analyst Jonathan Secreta at CFRA Research, when two reports that survey corporate purchasing managers come up with opposite conclusions, he goes and finds other economic sources. Regional Fed banks have been reporting modest improvement in manufacturing. Plus, in corporate earnings reports. The third quarter for a lot of industrial manufacturers, Caterpillar, Deer & Co., some modest growth there in orders. All that argues the more positive report from S &P Global hits closer to the mark. Except S &P Global's own economist, Chris Williamson, says his survey isn't very positive looking into the future.

3:22Companies have grown increasingly gloomy about the outlook. He says companies ramped up production to try and get ahead of rising tariff costs on raw materials and components. Now, inventory is piling up in their warehouses. Overall, says Thomas Ryan at Capital Economics, the U.S. manufacturing sector has survived tariffs. It's not been unscathed. Definitely had a hit to manufacturers' order books and push-up costs. They've not led to a complete destruction of the factory sector that some economists might have feared. But remember, President Donald Trump has insisted tariffs on imported goods will strengthen U.S.

4:01manufacturers, giving them a competitive advantage. Again, Jonathan Secreta at CFRA Research. If the idea is these tariffs are bringing back our manufacturing base, then it has not happened yet. It's quite the opposite. He says since Trump's tariffs were announced last spring, spending by U.S. manufacturers to build new factories has actually declined. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. Wall Street to start November, mixed but without much enthusiasm either way. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

4:5842 million people getting partial payment of their federal food benefits while the government is shut down. How's that going to work, do you suppose? Marketplace's Samantha Fields updates the SNAP story. Millions of people around the country were supposed to get their November SNAP benefits in the last few days and haven't. And it's been unclear whether they would get them this month at all. Now we know they will get something, but it's still unclear when and how much. I would anticipate that individuals are going to receive something like 50 % of the amount that they normally get. Jimmy Chen is CEO of Propel, which has an app that lets people manage government benefits, including Snap.

5:38He says the pot of emergency funds USDA will use to pay out partial benefits this month is about$4.6 billion, a little more than half of what it would take to pay out full benefits. It still remains to be seen exactly how this will get rolled out with states and how states will handle the payments. Chen says the federal government should release the funding in the next couple of days, but states will then have to calculate how much every recipient will get. And according to USDA, that could take time, anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. I think that that is people being incredibly cautious and not wanting to overly excite particularly families in need.

6:17Anna Sieber is with Conduent, a company that works with 16 states to deliver SNAP benefits. She says the process is cumbersome. The funds have to flow from the feds. The states have to give us the names. But most of the processors of SNAP also went through events such as disaster SNAP or COVID SNAP, where we had to be incredibly flexible and move on a dime. And she's optimistic it will be possible to get benefits out quickly. Still, Stacey Dean at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University says this is just a temporary fix. The contingency funds that USDA have available will run out in November.

6:55And so that creates just another serious concern for December. If the shutdown continues. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

7:27Rare Earth elements. So much in the news of late are not, in fact, all that rare. They're just not found in easy-to-extract concentrations, so actually getting them is hard and it's expensive. China has an all-but-stranglehold on rare earth, a market power it had chosen to exercise in response to President Trump's tariffs until the two sides put the trade war on pause last week. But truth notwithstanding, the United States is still in a global competition for these elements, elements that find their way into everything from MRIs to intercontinental missiles. Marketplace Supreme Beneshore looked at how that competition's going.

8:06Back in April, China started to restrict how seven rare earth elements and magnets made from them were exported. Manufacturers freaked out. Ford had to stop manufacturing its Explorer model in Chicago. Suzuki had to stop manufacturing the Swiss model. Gracelyn Baskarin is director of critical mineral security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Chinese exporters had to apply for licenses and prove to the Chinese government they weren't supplying foreign militaries or even suppliers of suppliers of suppliers to those militaries. The application backlog snarled the global supply chain for months.

8:44And then in October, the restrictions were expanded to include more, more exotic rare earths. It would have crippled access to rare earths and permanent magnets for our defense sector. Yttrium is used to coat jet engine parts so they don't melt. Dysprosium and terbium are in the magnets that guide hypersonic missiles. This year made us realize how vulnerable we are, not just for our national security, but also for the sustainability of key industries. The one-year pause on some but not all of China's restrictions is giving the U.S. a little more time to build its own rare earth supply chain. China has made that difficult too.

9:24They've had the monopoly in this space for a really long time. Neha Mukherjee is research manager for rare earths at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. China controls more than 90 % of the refining of rare earths. Mukherjee says it has used its monopoly power, low-cost production, and subsidies to hold down prices. Any new producer that is trying to come online is not being able to make any money. The U.S. government has gone to extraordinary lengths to get around this. We are restoring the full supply chain end-to-end. Matt Slosher is chief communications officer for MP Materials, which owns the Mountain Pass mine in California, about an hour south of Vegas.

10:03It is the second biggest rare earths mine in the world, and two years ago, it started refining rare earths, too. In July, the Pentagon announced it was becoming the largest shareholder, investing$400 million. It also guaranteed a minimum price for certain refined rare earths. That enables us to earn a fair return and enables us to continue to have reinvestment economics. As China has bent market forces, the U.S. is learning to do the same. The Pentagon promised that if MP Materials built an additional large rare earth magnet factory, it would buy 100 % of the magnets that came out of it for 10 years.

10:43That factory is now being built in Texas. We're going to be scaling up to 10 ,000 tons of production, which is more than we import. That is on top of the rare earth magnets being produced by another U.S. company, Novion. The U.S. is well on track to being self-sufficient for magnet production by 2030. Ryan Castillu is managing director at Adamus Intelligence. The major bottleneck today that the industry is facing is with respect to the so-called heavy rare earth elements. These are the more exotic ones that are harder to find and harder to refine. They go into laser crystals and supermagnets that can still work while hot.

11:19Mountain Pass mines them. So does uranium mining company Energy Fuels, which has also started to refine heavy rare earths in a pilot project this year. Still, a full rare earth supply chain that meets all of the U.S.'s needs with no missing links may be decades away, says Benchmark Minerals' Neha Mukherjee. The capacity that is coming online is not enough. There needs to be more investment. Time is of the essence, says Adamus Intelligence' Ryan Castiou, because the reason for China's restrictions on the market in the first place are not just about competition in defense. It's also about undermining and slowing the progress of key industries with which China is competing with the rest of the world for EVs, for robotics.

12:05China, he says, is using its rare earth muscle to buy time. Time to develop an insurmountable lead in the industries of tomorrow. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace.

12:39If you could buy your childhood home to live in again, would you? Nostalgia is a powerful thing, right? Because last year, Zillow did a survey that showed 44 % of Americans would, in fact, buy their childhood home, assuming cost wasn't an issue. But what if we replace childhood home in that survey with previous home? Here's today's installment of our series, Adventures in Housing. My name is Meg Tipton, and I live in Alexander, North Carolina, for the second time. Four years ago, I sold my ramshackle dream house and was able to buy it back all fixed up and shiny and beautiful. When I first saw it, I immediately fell in love with the place.

13:26It just felt enchanted to me. It's tucked out in the country. It has a beautiful little creek. It's surrounded by pasture land. But I brought my mom out to see it with me. And there was a retaining wall in the back that was falling apart. There were carpets all over the floor with like stains on them. The roof had a rock holding down a part of it that I called Rocky the Roof Patch. It was absolutely terrifying. My mom looked at me at a certain point and was like, do not buy this house. And I was like, I'm going to buy it anyway. I thought I'd be able to fix it up over time. But being a single mom and a community college professor.

14:08I did not have the funds to do it. Then I ended up meeting my husband, but he lived in South Carolina. So I sold it and I was in South Carolina for almost four years. Every day I missed this house and occasionally my husband and I would drive by just to check on it. And finally, he's like, okay, we can move back to North Carolina. We looked for real estate for a while, and our budget, we thought, was very generous. It was like$500 ,000. We're like, we can totally find something great. But we wanted a little bit like an acre of land. We wanted to be kind of removed from neighbors, and we couldn't find anything in our price range.

14:52And that's when I was sitting around looking at Zillow, a little bit defeated, and saw a familiar address. And I sat bolt upright in my chair. I was like, oh my gosh. That's my house. We came out and saw it the next day. And my realtor said that it was less like a normal house showing and more like an HGTV reveal. Where it's like, check out what we've done with your fixer upper. She opened the door and we were like, oh my gosh, it's beautiful. New roof, new retaining wall, new deck. Like everything in it is completely gorgeous. and completely not the way that I would have done it, but so much better.

15:38Everybody thought that was the craziest thing they'd ever heard. And the seller's agent came to get the lockbox off. And I started to explain the story and he's like, I know the story. Everybody knows the story. There's never been a story like this. Even if it hadn't been perfect, I would have been okay because it's my house and I would have been glad to have it back. We plan to stay here forever.

16:07Pretty good story, right? Meg Tipton back in Alexander, North Carolina. Whether you are thinking of your last home or your next one, tell us about it, would you? We'll get it on the radio. Marketplace.org slash adventures in housing.

16:38Coming up. Pumpkins? I don't think pumpkins are cheap. How much is too much to make your house look good? First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is off 226 points today, about a half percent, 47 ,336. The Nasdaq rose 109 points, a half percent, 22 ,834. S &P 500 added 11 points, close to two-tenths percent, 68.51 there. Mitchell was telling us about the state of manufacturing in this economy. So checking on a few big thing makers on Wall Street today, Apple downed about a half percent. Ford, which reported a big drop in EV sales, dipped nine-tenths of 1 % today. Caterpillar, maker of really big things, lost 1.1%.

17:23Rare Earth firms had a not-so-good day on Wall Street. MP Materials slipped more than 8%. Energy Fuels slipped more than 13%. Niocorp fell away more than 11 % today. In corporate news, the maker of Tylenol and Nicorette jumped after agreeing to be absorbed by the maker of Huggies and Kleenex for more than$48 billion. That's Kenview. It was 12%. Kimberly Clark of Scott and Cottonelle Bathroom Tissue fame fell 14.5%. We do everything here on this program. You're listening to Marketplace.

18:16We've all done it. Stock our fridge with good intentions, only to sacrifice nutrition for convenience. Keep your body and mind nourished with whole-body meal shakes from Cachava. It's got 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, and so much more. But it actually tastes delicious. Try one of Cachava's indulgent flavors today. Shop now through December 2nd to get 30 % off your first purchase of two or more bags. Go to cachava.com and use code NEWS. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com, code NEWS.

19:10Oh, oh, O 'Reilly. Auto Parts. I'm Eric Glass. On This American Life, we tell real-life stories, really good ones. My mother said, I'm sorry you weren't here because Father Sager was here visiting, and he found a very nice orphanage for you. And I said, but I'm not an orphan. Surprising stories every week. This American Life. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. Here comes a story about marginal changes in supply and what that can mean in the global industry that is crude oil. We produce, give or take, 100 million barrels of oil a day. We use, give or take, 100 million barrels of oil a day.

20:04So even small changes can matter. OPEC Plus, that's the cartel and its allies. Announced over the weekend, it's going to pump more oil in December, 137 ,000 more barrels per day for the third straight month. So more supply, never mind that crude has been falling this year. Daniel Archiman explains why. The story starts a few years ago, says Jorge Leon of Reistad Energy, when OPEC began a different push, one to limit pumping. OPEC has since October 2022 been cutting production to support prices until December 2024. Leon says those cuts did prop up oil prices, but they had a side effect for OPEC.

20:48Gradually, but steadily giving up market share. Elevated prices prompted non-OPEC countries to muscle in. The US, Brazil, Argentina, Guyana, Norway, and Canada raised output to the point that this year, OPEC finally decided... They don't like giving away market share to other players. So, Mark Finlay of Rice University says OPEC is now reversing course and trying to undercut those other players. That's why the cartel is boosting production amid an oil glut. The group has been on a program for much of this year of trying to gradually unwind large production cuts that have been in place for several years.

21:26But the market can only soak up so much oil. China had been buying and stockpiling crude on the cheap this year, but that's now slowing, says Matt Smith, an analyst with Kepler. Now that China isn't stock building, they've been absent from the market, and so we're seeing prices moving lower. Meanwhile, global sales of electric vehicles keep growing, and the geopolitical risk built into the price of oil has declined since the Gaza ceasefire. All of which leads Jorge Leon of Reistad Energy to say, Next year, there is going to be a market that is going to be heavily oversupplied. OPEC says starting in January, it'll finally stop pumping more oil.

22:07I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

22:26Where are you on pumpkins? Not pie, not for the love of peat spice lattes, but the actual gourd as a decorative item, specifically outdoors on your porch, because it seems pumpkin scaping is a thing. Lane Florsheim had the story in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Lane, thanks for coming on the program. It's great to be on. These pumpkin scapers, pumpkin stylists, what do they do exactly? Well, the way that I've been explaining this story is that, you know, you've probably gone by a porch that's been elaborately decorated with pumpkins and maybe some mums and Halloween decorations. And they're, you know, they're very festive.

23:10What you might not know is that there's very likely a pumpkin stylist or pumpkin entrepreneur behind that who, you know, brought the pumpkins to that house, did the styling. It's this kind of new micro industry that's sprung up in recent years. It is an amazing small business. Let's say I wanted to pumpkin style my front porch in a, you know, mid-range kind of way. How much is it going to cost me? You know, all of the pumpkin entrepreneurs who I interviewed have a variety of packages that kind of start in the low-ish hundreds, like$300 or so and go up to over$1 ,000. I sound like a cheapskaker, I know, but oh my goodness.

23:50Pumpkins, I don't think pumpkins are cheap. No, but we should make sure people understand this. I mean, we're talking like lots and lots and lots of pumpkins of all sizes. Yes, one of the most fun parts of working on this story was kind of learning some of the names of these pumpkins. You have like some of the small white ones are called Baby Booze. You have Cinderella pumpkins. You have all sorts of fun names. Attentive listeners to this program will realize that we are speaking to you after Halloween. So it's not a news peggy kind of story, which I feel OK about because these folks leave it up through the fall and it becomes their fall decoration.

24:32Yes, these pumpkins can last for weeks and even months, depending on the climate. And I think that a big draw for committing to a purchase like this is that they do last for so long. And you can hit both Halloween and Thanksgiving and really have the pumpkins up all season long. So you pointed out in this piece that it's basically started for real 2020-ish. Where did this come from? How did it start? So this woman, Heather Torres, who's the founder and CEO of Porch Pumpkins, she was living in Dallas at the time. She lived across the street from the Dallas Arbitorium, and they do this really incredible pumpkin village every year.

25:13And so she felt really inspired. And she went out and bought a bunch of just orange pumpkins and said, honey, I'm going to decorate the porch. And she cracked me up because she was like, my first design was quite heinous. But then she added some other sizes and colors and varietals and she won Porch of the Month from her Neighborhood Association. And this was actually in 2013. And people kept asking her, will you do this for me? And she said, no, no, because she knew how much these pumpkins cost. And she thought, no one wants to spend that much on pumpkins. But then when the pandemic hit. And lo and behold, right?

25:49Right. Lo and behold, now she decorates 1300 houses a season and sells out every year and is very in demand just kind of across the state of Texas in different areas. You know, it's interesting because I could pile a bunch of pumpkins on my porch and it would look as as this woman said, heinous. So there is some there's some artistic skill involved here. There's a design element. Definitely. A couple of the people who I interviewed for the article are also their day job is being real estate agents. And they said that doing things like staging and marketing helped them really have an eye for this.

26:24A little curb appeal, right? A little curb appeal. Yeah. Do you have a porch and have you pumpkinscaped it? You know, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn, and so I share a porch with a lot of people. And I cannot say that I pumpkinscaped it. You should try it. Just take up a collection plate for all the people in your building. See what they have to say. It's something to aspire to, for sure. Maybe next year. Lane Florsheim at The Wall Street Journal. Lane, thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Thank you.