How's ... everybody doing?

0:01NPR

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. We're at this uncertain moment for the economy. And even Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week, we're going to have to see how things actually work out. In other words, when looking at the near future, even he doesn't know where things are headed. Here at The Indicator, we of course have been scrutinizing all the economic numbers, but these indicators don't always capture the depth of how people are thinking and reacting. So, from coast to coast, we did something a little different for our show today. We undertook some unscientific polling by interviewing as many people as we could.

0:53We wanted to hear the human voices describing how today's economy feels. Unsettled. Getting better. Evolving. From street parties in the South to an LA bookstore to a boardroom in Denver, today we listen for financial signals. It's an audio photo album of economic snapshots from this moment.

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2:22No, no, I'll finish. You're finished. Our producers live all over the country, so we fanned out. Denver, D.C., New York, Savannah, and L.A. You run the finances at your house. Yeah, I do. We stopped people on the street. Yeah, I live right over there on the high rises. Nice. We also asked you, Indicator listeners, to send in voice memos. This is Philip Gonzalez from Grand Prairie, Texas. And we zoomed into offices from east to west. Oh, good to see you. We learned about people's decisions to spend or save. We dug into business sales, the stock market and the jobs market. But what we heard again and again was people starting off talking about high prices.

3:04Everything is going up instead of being level. So high every week. It's like ridiculous. Everything's so expensive. Because the cost of living doesn't meet up with the economy. A lot of those prices are from past inflation over the last few years. Prices went up and never came down. Now, inflation as it actually stands right now is fairly low. It increased only 2.8 % from a year ago. Inflation is getting really close to where the Federal Reserve wants it, at 2%. That said, when you look at surveys of how much people are expecting prices to rise in the future, those have jumped really sharply since January.

3:45And it's partly because of those fears for the future that have people adjusting their spending and savings decisions from North Carolina to the Mountain West. I've just been starting to think about where my money goes. I don't own a car because cars are expensive. We're choosing to, you know, not go on the big trips planned a year ago. Definitely spending less right now.

4:11So far this year, Americans are now saving a little more, which tends to happen when they're feeling nervous about the future. Savings are close to$5 for every$100 in income. And that's a jump from the end of last year. I learned more about this by meeting Isis Benson on the streets of Brooklyn. I'm in a good headspace because I'm living well below my means right now. Isis works in sales for hiring platform Greenhouse Software. I'm saving like maybe anywhere between like$400 and$600 a month. I'm aggressively saving. All that saving means less spending. And many businesses are feeling the hit. Rob Carpenter runs a home cleaning business in Colorado.

4:55You know, we're down probably 30 % on the year. Rob says this pullback really varies by where a customer sits on the income ladder. We're interestingly not seeing much pricing pressure with the high household net incomes, but we do really, we see a lot of pain in that kind of upper middle class market. But the business story isn't all doom and gloom. Seven out of 10 small business owners surveyed by Goldman Sachs in February felt optimistic about 2025. Daniel Harberger's company, Woof, is known for its toys that dispense dog treats. It's looking very, very strong, but that's not to say that there aren't challenges and new stresses that have been introduced by all of the macro issues that are popping up.

5:42The big one? Tariffs, especially on China, which he used to rely on. Daniel's now getting his dog devices made in Vietnam, Colombia, and the US. And he is still getting some supply from China too. As many eggs in as many baskets as possible. He says the tariffs making China costlier have unexpected side effects. When he was just getting started, he couldn't afford to do small prototype batches of his dog feeder toys in the US, but he could in China. We are not only taking away manufacturing markets, but we're also taking away a really valuable tool for innovation. Daniel says he's going to take the tariff hit on existing products, but raise prices for new ones.

6:27And so given those increased tariffs, along with other sweeping actions from the Trump administration, we wanted to know how those were affecting people's investment decisions. I did liquidate everything from stocks and crypto probably a month ago. Nathan Gabbard is a lawyer and bookstore owner in LA. and he's feeling good about selling before the roughly 10 % drop in the stock market from its peak in February. I was just like, I feel like I want that as cash instead of sitting in the market. Now, one person's loss can be another person's buying opportunity. I try to lean in when everyone else is scared.

7:08That's Bob Brujas in Denver. He's been buying up shares in property. I am in the midst of buying a house right now and I feel like I got a really good deal on it. Barr's attitude stands in pretty stark contrast to Monique Wallace in Brooklyn. I'm really worried about it because... Monique works in support at Amazon, and she says the declining stock market and lackluster job opportunities have already changed her decisions. I was planning to go overseas a long time ago. I was like, oh, I'll just quit Amazon and I'll go, you know, work off the book somewhere in France. But, like, now I'm kind of, like, leaning back because I don't know how it's going to be in a year or so.

7:46So I just want, you know, make sure I save a little bit more money. Which brings us to our final piece of our economic puzzle, the labour market. We asked people about their work. Yeah, I'm happy with my job. I'm a general manager for a software company. I feel pretty lucky. I'm lucky. I'm fine. I'm an accountant. I just got a job off of. I feel pretty job secure. So from our straw polling at least, people are feeling pretty good about their jobs, which does check out in the national numbers. The unemployment rate is only 4.1%. But that lowish unemployment rate obscures some labour market pains.

8:25Job openings aren't what they used to be. Aaron Fredericks in Brooklyn knows this firsthand. I was previously working within consulting and within the healthcare space, so recently unemployed as of October of last year. So right now, not too great. We also heard from people who are working part-time but would prefer to work full-time. People like Priya Skelly. Especially why I have three jobs. Feeling underpaid for the most part and looking to make some more money than I usually have been. This audio photo album has some pretty pictures and some ugly scenes. And what we learned was kind of a paradox.

9:05We learned that people are frustrated at high prices and they're tightening their purse strings. and that is harming some businesses. But aside from policy turbulence, many companies feel good about their own prospects this year. The stock market is down, but not extraordinarily so. Unemployment is low, but hiring isn't booming. So overall, what do we make of this? We asked the people we spoke with to summarize the economy in one phrase. Anxious. Uncertain. Cautious. Think it's working. Unfair. Turbulent. Bad. Yeah, bad. Heartbreaking. Trauma. Grateful. Surprising. Unhappy. Blessed. Sucks. Economic hardship.

9:56Oh, that's two words. Absolutely not good. Terrible. Questionable. Precarious. Difficult. Crazy. Yeah, crazy. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie, Cooper Katz-McKim, Angel Carellas, and Lily Quiros. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Kwezi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez. Take and Canon edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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