How's that BLS data coming along?

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1:11Find an agent at CINFIN.com. Okay, work with me on this one. What we've got right now is Schrodinger's economic data. It is simultaneously good and bad until we open the box. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

1:42I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Monday, today, the 20th of October. Good as always to have you along, everybody. I would start things off today by reading you a list of the economic data we are going to get this week. But it would be a real short list, as you know, what with the government not governmenting low these past three weeks. We will get a delayed version of the Labor Department's Consumer Price Index on Friday, good for the Federal Reserve as it gets set for its interest rate meeting next week, and good for Social Security recipients whose cost of living adjustments depend on it. But the damage being done to the government economic data machine is going to mean not great things for the public and for the private data that this economy relies on.

2:27Marketplace's Justin Ho gets us going. Economists have reason to be concerned about upcoming government data releases, including the Consumer Price Index. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, which puts out the CPI, their operations have essentially been curtailed. That's Lizanne Saunders, chief investment strategist with Charles Schwab, a marketplace underwriter. Saunders says the big concern is that government workers haven't been collecting price data this month. Same goes for jobs numbers. Once we get the October report, that is obviously not going to be clean data because the government was shut down for that period.

3:04That's because even if the government finally cobbles together a report, the data might be less reliable, says Menzi Chen, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin. The question is, how much of it is sort of backwards looking? How much is guesswork? how much is just like related to other series that they think are correlated with the missing data. The government shutdown is affecting private sector data, too. Yustena Zhebinska-Lamonica is senior manager of business cycle indicators at the conference board. Her company was supposed to release a report today called the Leading Economic Index, which relies on government data that hasn't come out.

3:38So the conference board held off. We don't want to publish something which is not up to the standards we're standing behind. Shabinska-Lamonica says the conference board will get back to releasing the index when government data starts coming out again. But she says she's going to have to keep an eye out for shifts in that data that might not reflect reality. And maybe look at those data with a little bit of skepticism, considering that it might not fully reflect the time that's usually covered. And skepticism about the economic data can have consequences, says Laura Veldkamp, a finance professor at Columbia.

4:15If we don't know what the quality of the data will be, maybe it's good, but maybe it's not. Well, that's uncertainty. That's risky. And that can cause companies to freeze up. What firm wants to say, let's engage in a risky and costly new investment project that has uncertain rewards in an environment where you don't have clear information about what the current state of the economy is? That's why Velkamp says unreliable data can take a toll on the broader economy. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, I mean, government shutdown, a weaker, we think, because we don't know, because government shutdown, labor market, consumers being cranky, ain't nothing going to stop traders from buying.

4:58We will have the details when we do the numbers.

5:25The government economic data set most missed right now is the monthly jobs report. We're without the September data. October, honestly, is a toss up, which is not great, given where the labor market might be right now. I say might be, as I said a minute ago, too, because we don't know, which is not great. Some marketplaces' Kristen Schwab took matters into her own hands and made some calls to people for whom hiring is their job. I asked recruiters to describe, in a word or two, the job market in their eyes. And here's what I got. Sluggishly recovering. Very active. Confusing. Quite a mix, because there's a split in the job market that echoes something happening in the greater economy.

6:09This K-shape, where higher earners are thriving and everyone else, not so much. Michael DiStefano is CEO of Corn Ferry's Professional Search and Interim Group and hires across the labor market for different industries and experience levels. The low end of the market is hurting, but the high end of the market is pretty robust. DiStefano says there's always demand for high earners, even in a sluggish economy. The higher up and the bigger the organization, the fewer people there are on the planet that can do those jobs. But he says the rest of the job market relies on an expanding economy. And right now, the picture is mixed.

6:51Most of the jobs that we have seen at the mid-level and lower levels are replacement jobs. They are not growth-oriented. Not growth-oriented because companies have been holding back from investing and taking big risks because of interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty. And then everyone's favorite T-word. Tariffs. Chris Allaire is CEO of Averity, a tech recruiting firm that focuses on software engineering. He says added together, all these factors are creating too much uncertainty. And that just put a lot of organizations into some type of like, OK, hold on a second. It means a lot of Allaire's work right now is about finding talent who he might have jobs for when companies are ready to invest again.

7:35He says there are lots of excellent candidates, workers who companies would normally start bidding wars over, on the sidelines. The quality of talent that are available right now on the market has never been higher. It is phenomenal. So tech jobs outside of AI not doing so well. Neither are government jobs with all the federal downsizing. On the positive side, there's health care. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 1.9 million job openings in the sector each year through 2034. Also doing well are companies that cater to luxury tastes. Susan Levine is CEO of Career Group Companies, which has worked with Prada and Waldorf Astoria Hotels.

8:17I mean, there's no shortage of successful, wealthy people. Inflation is affecting top earners less because price increases don't hit them as hard. So they're still spending on cars, vacations, and clothes. We've never been busier. We are as busy today as we were coming out of COVID. Levine is very much an optimist. And as tough as it might be in different parts of the job market right now, DiStefano at Corn Ferry is too. It feels as though brighter days are ahead. Each month, touch wood, seems to be getting a little bit more buoyant. And we'll keep on that path, he says, if the Federal Reserve continues to lower interest rates.

9:02I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

9:29I know we've been lamenting the absence of government economic data the past couple of weeks, and it is a real loss. Don't get me wrong. But there are transactions in this economy that just don't show up in data. Like when you do a favor for a friend or lend some of your time in exchange maybe for some goodwill down the road. But what if there was an app for that? Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Jonathan Sims. I was born and raised in Alabama, but I'm currently up here in New York City. I am a social entrepreneur who has recently launched a platform called Barter Block.

10:09It is a community platform where people are able to exchange skills, services, hobbies, and eventually items without the use of cash. my day job is i am a software engineer working at an investment bank and last year was a very heavy hitting year and the thing that kept me going outside of work was all of my different hobbies so i was into chess heavily i was into muay thai i was into weightlifting and i realized that every single hobby that I went to, people were asking about the other hobbies that I did. So in chess, people noticed that I had the physique of a bodybuilder, so they would ask me questions about that.

10:55And then the same thing happened when I would go to Muay Thai class. When people found out that I was a coder by trade, they always mentioned, I would love to learn about coding, but I don't know where to get started. And so that's really how Barter Block came about.

11:13If you think about it, we go through life and we barter informally already when someone's like, hey, I need to borrow your car for the next hour. In exchange, is it cool if I just cook you a home-cooked meal? Or hey, I know that you mentioned that your grass hasn't been cut in a while. I can just do that in exchange. That is the reason I decided to go down this route of allowing people to either exchange their skills and services using time banking or exchange their skills and services using bartering. So for me, one of my offers that I have on the app right now is to teach people the basics of weightlifting.

11:54I can then take that one hour time credit to learn another skill or service or hobby that I've always been interested in. So someone on the app is offering first aid basics so I can use that time credit that I just earned from teaching to learn about first aid. To be candid, I am overwhelmed. I am wearing a lot of hats on top of trying to, you know, show up fully for my full-time job, as well as all of the other stuff outside of both, like going to the gym, making sure that I'm tapped into source. my brother he's always been in my corner supporting me and even my mama as well and we had a very uh close heart-to-heart conversation this past weekend and she just doles on me she's always like hyping me up she's doing her best back home in alabama to tell everyone about the app as well and so i have people who rock with me and people who are excited to see you know where this vision goes

12:59That's great, right? Jonathan Sims in Brooklyn, New York Tell us, would you, about your vision? Marketplace.org slash my hyphen economy

13:34Coming up. Marketers love to treat generations as animals in a zoo. And that makes Gen Zers. What do you think? First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is up 515 points, one and a tenth percent, 46 ,706. The Nasdaq climbed 310 points. That is 1.4%, 22 ,990. The S &P 500 up 71 points, 1.1%, 6735 there. The week did not start well for Amazon. As you know, Amazon Web Services in particular, an outage, hit its cloud computing services early this morning. Knocked Snapchat, Reddit, and thousands of other websites offline. Things had, of course, improved by afternoon, but there were still some issues.

14:20Nonetheless, Amazon.com accumulated 1.6%. Snap toted up 1%. Redded improved about 3.9 % of 1 % today. Steelmaker Cleveland Cliffs reported revenue that came in below expectations and a bigger loss than they had been expecting. Even so, reporters an improvement. Over a year before, Cleveland Cliffs heated up 21.5%. Also, they're going to start looking for rare earth minerals. Always a winner. Bonds up. Yield on the 10-year T-note down 3.9 % or 8%. You're listening to Marketplace.

15:08We'll see you next time.

15:23100-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. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. The big oil services companies are getting their ride on the earnings report merry-go-round this week. Halliburton makes its announcement tomorrow, Baker Hughes later in the week. These are the companies that do the actual drilling and fracking in places like the Permian Basin out in West Texas. And that has been a tougher business of late. With low prices for a barrel of crude, West Texas down around$57 today, and an oversupplied global market.

16:03Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has more. Oil services companies do a lot for the BPs and chevrons of the world, like drilling. Dan Pickering is with Pickering Energy Partners. A drilling rig sits out there and helps you drill two miles into the earth. You're putting pipe down that hole. That rig would cost anywhere from between$20 and$40 million. Rigs run 24-7 and can drill two to four wells per month. Just one employs dozens of people. The companies that own them compete for drilling contracts. So when the market is soft like it is now, they don't want their high-cost equipment gathering dust in some stockyard.

16:44And therefore, pricing gets competed down, and that's what's been happening for the past year. Because of global oversupply, U.S. crude oil has been priced in the high 50s, below the break-even point for a lot of oil companies, says analyst Sir Rob Pant with Bank of America Securities. A lot of people are not making money at below 60, right? So they're not going to drill and that's going to show up in the recount. That's going to show up in the revenue for our companies. But this is more of a North America thing because of higher break-even points and faster drilling cycles. But companies with big footprints outside the U.S.

17:21are in better shape because it can take years to develop new projects. So they're less affected by oil price swings, says Gregory Brew with Eurasia Group. In some areas, they're not expecting to be dinged quite as badly. In places like Guyana, for instance, activity is likely to remain fairly robust. And even in the U.S., there's still an upside to consider for oil services companies. The sentiment on the gas side, particularly in the U.S., is still very strong. Rate count for gas continues to increase or remain fairly steady even as the oil rate count falls. Companies need to get that natural gas out of the ground to power growing electricity demand, whether it's shipped abroad via LNG or used in natural gas plants domestically.

18:04I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Earnings season is kind of like a smorgasbord. You get a little bit of everything as publicly traded companies fulfill their obligations to securities law. Netflix reports tomorrow. The streaming giant has been rolling out a bunch of new offerings beyond its standard TV show and movie library. You got more live sports, video games, podcasts, too. Hello. And Netflix being, you know, Netflix, all the other streaming platforms are watching them pretty closely. Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman looked into what it takes to get a leg up in the streaming wars these days.

18:41Fans of the steamy Netflix dating show Too Hot to Handle can write their own love story in a mobile game version of the show, available exclusively to Netflix members age 17 plus. All of this is about brand extension. Jawad Hussain is with S &P Global Ratings. You take a piece of content and you expand it out and then you can monetize it in so many different ways and you can extend the franchise life. He says it's like how Disney has mastered the art of making a movie, then selling its characters on t-shirts and toys, and coaxing families to visit Disney World. Netflix is going in person too with Netflix Houses for movie screenings and photo ops with your favorite characters.

19:19All of these efforts are to increase engagement. Alicia Reese is with Wedbush Securities. She says Netflix wants to keep people watching for longer, in part to sell more ads. And to do that, they have to have a pretty broad array of content. And with such a massive global footprint, those tastes vary pretty widely. Reaching the widest possible audience is a somewhat unique strategy. Analyst Dan Rayburn says other platforms are going more niche. In terms of who they want to reach, the type of content that they're going after. For example, HBO Max sold off its rights to stream new episodes of Sesame Street last year.

19:57They came right out and said publicly, our members just aren't watching it, because who thinks of HBO Max as a child's platform? Probably not the folks watching The White Lotus after their kids are in bed. Netflix picked up Sesame Street, by the way. And while HBO is focused on premium content for grown-ups, Jawad Hussein of S &P Global Ratings says Disney has doubled down on the superhero set, also live sports through its purchase of ESPN. Hussein says early in the streaming wars, other platforms wanted to do everything and be Netflix. The problem was Netflix had just gotten a bit too much of a head start.

20:33So now, Hussein says the streaming wars have reached something of a detente, with most competitors choosing their own lanes and settling in for the long haul. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

21:06That Netflix story from Dan Ackerman was about one company trying to appeal to all kinds of consumers. Now, how all kinds of companies are trying to attract one specific kind of consumer, Gen Z by name. They are, give or take, 13 to 28 years old right now, meaning their spending power is on the rise. And companies and brands like Brilla, the maker of Italian foods, also Advil and Meta, have been looking for help reaching that generation specifically. Katie Dayton wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day about how companies need some help with their Gen Z translations. Katie, welcome to the program.

21:43Good to have you on. Thank you so much for having me. So it is not news that companies need help advertising to younger generations, though. Gen Z is a little bit of a challenge, right? Gen Z has proven very tricky for marketers, I think, primarily because of the speed at which their trends come and go. Marketers, you know, largely rely on a lot of insights and data and cultural teams to help them keep their fingers on the pulse. but they're not able to keep up with the way that TikTok trends come and go, for instance, or what's cool and what's not comes and goes. And, you know, also the proliferation of media channels.

22:25So it's very just hard to keep up. How are companies doing it? Because obviously they got to keep doing it because they need to sell stuff. Well, enter this sort of influx of companies that say that they can help. So Gen Z agencies have really branded themselves as very vital for right now. Some of them are staffed by Gen Z people themselves. One company I spoke to is full of marketers that graduated in 2020. Very difficult to find a job back then. And they have been able to sort of sell themselves as an agency you can turn to if you need help. And then there are established companies that have formed these sort of mini agencies within them to say, you know, we'll take the task of understanding the generation plus keeping up with all these trends so you don't have to.

23:18And you can just pay us to do that. Several interesting things about this piece, but about Gen Z specifically. Number one, they're really attached to brands. But also, number two, and this really kind of got me. they're not afraid to tell those brands what they think they share feedback like all the time i know and it's funny you know i i'm 33 right i think when i was younger it would be so embarrassing to care so much i don't think i would be writing or emailing brands but this generation does and they just seem to connect with them on a level that is is being different to what's come before them.

23:57They really connect their identities to the brands that they purchase and interact with, and therefore they have more of a sort of parasocial relationship with them. And because they've come up in a world where they can very, very easily get in contact with these companies, we've all had instances before now where it's very hard to get in contact with a company and share your feedback. They've never grown up in a world where that's been the case. So they're happy to tell them. Right. And we should say here, and you alluded to this earlier, right? There are the big companies that have these Gen Z divisions, if you will.

24:34Also, Gen Zers are just starting these companies themselves, as you said. Yeah. And I think it's a really smart way for them to cut through. The marketing industry right now is going through a little turmoil, being totally disrupted by AI, and particularly at the junior level. You know, companies, agencies are already telling me that those are the jobs that are going first. So if, you know, you're graduating with a marketing degree, I think to be able to pitch yourself as someone that knows the audience because you are part of that audience, I think it's a really smart decision on that part. We should say here, it's not like this problem for companies is going away because right behind Gen Z is Gen Alpha.

25:17And they're like, you know, the older ones are like 10, 11, 12 now. Just, you know, they're getting that consumer consciousness. And pretty soon companies are going to be like, oh, man, how do we market to them? Exactly. And let me tell you, my inbox is full of people that seem to have insights on Gen Alpha, too. You know, it's it's it can be overblown. you know these differences. At the end of the day, the marketing departments that succeed are the ones that just, you know, know how to really speak to audiences in the moment. But yeah, marketers love to treat generations as animals in a zoo sometimes and sort of subscribe traits to them.