ICE is bad for business, heat is bad for coffee, and sci-fi is bad for markets

0:01Carden Hedengren:NPR.

0:11Diana Diep:This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong.

0:14Carden Hedengren:I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Adrian Ma.

0:17Diana Diep:And today is the day of the week when we talk about our favorite numbers from the news. That's right, everyone. It is Indicators of the Week. So on today's episode, how Minnesota workers were affected by the administration's immigration crackdown.

0:34Carden Hedengren:How coffee is getting very hot price-wise. And how basically a sci-fi blog piece jolted the stock market.

0:49Carden Hedengren:Indicators of the week. Waylon, do you want to go first?

0:54Diana Diep:My indicator is$106 million. That is the estimated amount of wages that workers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area lost during Operation Metro Surge. This$106 million figure was published this week by a Minnesota research institute called North Star Policy Action. And Aaron Sojourner helped crunch the numbers. He's a labor economist that we've had on the show before.

1:17Carden Hedengren:So the Department of Homeland Security, they say they're ending this operation, right?

1:24Diana Diep:Yeah, DHS says it's withdrawing agents, although it is keeping a presence in the state. And we have seen a devastating human toll from Operation Metro Surge. Federal agents shot and killed two people, Renee Good and Alex Preddy. And fear of detention or violence kept people home. That means they missed school and work and they couldn't go out to get groceries or to access health care. So this crackdown caused a lot of ripple effects and lost wages is one of them.

1:53Carden Hedengren:So where do these numbers come from?

1:55Diana Diep:Yeah, so the researchers were able to get data from a company that makes payroll and scheduling software for small businesses. They were able to look at things like the number of employees working and how many hours they worked. And then they compared numbers in January and February with what would be considered typical activity. And their analysis estimated that the number of employees fell almost 3 % and total hours worked fell almost 2%.

2:19Carden Hedengren:OK, so employees fell 3 percent. The hours worked fell 2 percent. Those don't sound like huge numbers, but I'm guessing they add up. Yeah.

2:30Diana Diep:And one important thing to note is that this analysis picked a single hourly wage, around$17, as a proxy for all workers. That is the median wage for food prep and serving employees in the area. And the researchers said that they're one of the lowest paid groups. So if you picked a higher wage as the proxy, you would actually end up with a lot more lost wages.

2:52Carden Hedengren:Well, thank you, Waylon. Now on to Adrian. What's your indicator? Mine is sort of bouncing off the State of the Union address that President Trump gave this week. In it, he said that, quote, inflation is plummeting, unquote.

3:06Diana Diep:Is it, though?

3:07Carden Hedengren:Well, he named a lot of things which were not all correct. But to try and back up his statement, he did name a few household staples where this has seemed to be the case, right? Like, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the prices of butter, chicken, and eggs have decreased over the past year, and Trump had mentioned all of those. But as we know, the prices of many other staples are still going up, and some a lot more than others. Which brings me to my indicator of the week, which is$9.37. That is the price of a pound of coffee, according to the BLS. and$9.37 is 33 % higher than a year ago.

3:50Diana Diep:That is a huge increase, but also I've been feeling this because just like a month ago or something, I went to the grocery store and I saw what just like a can of Folgers, you know, really basic coffee was selling for. And I literally took a photo and texted it to my husband and I said, coffee prices are out of control.

4:07Carden Hedengren:Yeah, it's, you know, in all of the sort of major food categories that the BLS tracks in its consumer price index. This one seems to have had the biggest increase over the past year. And there are two basic forces at work here, right? One is that this is part of a long-term trend. Climate change is really affecting the climates in some of the biggest coffee-producing countries like Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia. And what researchers have found is that these countries have gotten hotter on average. And when temperatures get too hot, it hurts coffee production. And that challenge to the coffee supply means higher prices.

4:49Carden Hedengren:And I imagine because in the jargon of economists, demand is inelastic, right? People will still pay for higher prices of coffee because they need their caffeine fix. In the jargon of a coffee drinker, coffee is drugs. It is addictive. And the other important factor to mention is President Trump's tariffs. It is worth noting that back in November, Trump issued an executive order exempting coffee from tariffs. But it will probably take time for that to actually show up in the price of coffee.

5:23Diana Diep:The best way to avoid this problem, this consumer problem, is to not drink coffee.

5:27Carden Hedengren:Yeah, what's the price of tea? I don't think that's the option. What's the price of tea? There's no substitute for coffee for the millions of people who drink it, right? They're not going to switch to tea.

5:36Diana Diep:They're not going to switch to tea.

5:38Carden Hedengren:Which is also more expensive, by the way.

5:39Diana Diep:They're not going to switch to kombucha or mushroom coffee, whatever that is. Mushroom coffee, I feel like that's a scam.

5:48Carden Hedengren:I mean, it ain't coffee.

5:49Diana Diep:I feel like it's like in the Civil War when they didn't have coffee, so they would just boil random things that grew in the ground and be like, this is coffee. That's what mushroom coffee feels like.

5:58Carden Hedengren:I saw this article today that I thought could be another solution to the expensive coffee problem. You could just buy a ton of coffee at a time and try and stretch it out. Apparently, Dunkin' is selling a 48-ounce iced coffee now. And you can buy it in a bucket with a handle.

6:16Diana Diep:I feel like that would give me a heart attack. Well, maybe if I spaced it out, right? If I didn't consume it all in one sitting. If I stuck it in my fridge and drank it during the week. Is that what we're doing now?

6:26Carden Hedengren:That sounds bad. If you want to live on the edge, you could just go for it. I want to live at the hospital.

6:32Diana Diep:Well, who needs caffeine to get your heart racing when you've got the stock market?

6:37Carden Hedengren:That's right. My indicator is 1%, which is roughly how much the S &P 500 fell on Monday morning amidst AI doom and gloom, which was partly thanks to basically a sci-fi story posted on Substack.

6:51Diana Diep:Okay, so this is like a War of the Worlds-style panic?

6:54Carden Hedengren:Yeah, there are definitely parallels. I mean, everyone knew that this thing was fiction, but were the projections into the future real or not? That's the question. So this is a scenario posted by the financial research group Citrini Research. Citrini is a small company, but it's the number one finance sub-stack newsletter. And they posted a fictional macroeconomics memo from a couple of years into the future, and it details what they call the global intelligence crisis.

7:23Diana Diep:Is this a crisis where we all get dumber?

7:25Carden Hedengren:In relative terms, we are dumber compared to the machines. So global intelligence crisis as in like a global financial crisis, but for artificial intelligence? Essentially, this is their branding of this kind of economic crisis that will might emerge in the next couple of years. So this War of the Worlds-style note wrote about things about AI we have heard before, like a picture of AI taking over more and more jobs. And then it runs through all the links in the chain of the wider economy, like house prices falling, a stock market crash, and that being part of this endless loop of companies losing money.

8:02Carden Hedengren:And so they try to save money by replacing even more staff with AI.

8:05Diana Diep:Okay, so what's like your personal assessment of whether all this stuff will actually come to pass?

8:10Carden Hedengren:So there's been a lot of debate about whether this AI apocalypse is sound, like productivity improvements are usually a good thing for the economy, not bad. even if there are pockets of disruption. Another financial firm, Citadel, even wrote a note poking holes in this Citrini scenario. Hmm. Okay. Like what? They point out a few things, like that the adoption of a new type of technology usually peters out at some point. And this kind of critique might have contributed to the stock market soon, recovering all the value it lost on Monday. But, you know, I do think this Citrini episode highlights just how uncertain it is how rapidly advancing AI is going to affect the economy and how jittery investors are and that they're jumping pretty strongly at any excuse to sell, even from sci-fi's substack posts.

9:00Diana Diep:The power of the pen.

9:01Carden Hedengren:The pen is mightier than the sword. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Kweisi Lee. It was fact-checked by Julia Ritchie and Vito Emanuel. Cake and Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.