Tech layoffs, recession pop and more listener questions answered

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0:11Well, well, well, look who the cat dragged in. Claw marks all over me and you don't have any sympathy? You're looking a little worse for wear. It's me, Darian Woods. And me, Adrian Ma. And also me, Waylon Wong. This is The Indicator from Planet Money, and we are here to answer listener questions. That's right. All the time we get really great questions from listeners about the economic and financial things happening in their lives. So today on the show, is it considered a price control for the president to tell businesses to eat the tariffs? Why does the market for tech jobs feel so lousy? And what is recession pop?

0:52You ask, we answer after the break.

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1:43Luckily, the Dell PC helps you get it all done. Get yours at Dell.com slash holiday. So let's start with our first listener question. It comes from Tim Madison out of Houston, Texas. Waylon, take us away. All right. So before we hear from Tim, you need a little background here for the question. In May, Walmart's chief financial officer said price increases from tariffs were too high for the company to absorb entirely. He warned that some prices would be going up. And then President Trump posted on Truth Social saying Walmart should partially eat the tariffs and that he would be watching. So Tim's question is.

2:20By attempting to intimidate private businesses into eating the tariffs, is the president effectively, if not technically, imposing price controls? Hmm, juicy topic. Okay, so let's start with what the term price controls typically means. A price control is when the government dictates in some way what private companies charge their customers. So you have a minimum level, that's called a price floor. then there's a price ceiling that's a maximum level. Like rent control would be an example of this. Exactly. So rent control is probably the example that people are familiar with, especially if you live in a city.

3:00But price controls aren't that common in the U.S. We mostly rely on the market to set prices. There have been some notable historical experiments with price controls, though. World War II is one example. Yeah, the federal government created an entire office that set price ceilings for staples like coffee and meat. There was this whole rationing system that people had to follow. Right. Then President Nixon put in price controls during the oil crisis in the 70s. And so during those periods, the World War II era and the 70s, price controls were official government policy. We haven't seen anything so formal from the Trump administration.

3:37What we have is a true social post from the president. And so back to our listener's question, is this effectively a price control? Yeah, for it to be effectively a price control, it has to be effective, right? And so that's kind of the open question. You have the president calling for a kind of price control. He's saying to Walmart, don't raise your prices. I'm watching you. But it's not clear whether he plans to enforce this. It's also not clear if Walmart executives believe there will be any consequences from the administration for raising prices. So maybe this is like a who blinks first kind of situation.

4:12Another game of chicken, yes. Okay, so our next question comes from Mei Chan, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. It feels like for those of us living in the Bay Area, perhaps due to the threat of AI, unemployment is higher for the tech industry. College students and new grads are having a tough time finding internships and jobs. Are they factored into the unemployment rate? So May is actually asking a couple of questions here. So let's tackle the first one. Is unemployment higher for the tech sector right now? To get some answers, we reached out to Svenja Goudel, who's chief economist for the job site Indeed.

4:53And Svenja says that the job market for tech jobs really has declined in the past couple of years. And it's quite drastic, actually. If you look at, for example, jobs for software developers or information design and documentation, IT ops and help desk type jobs, they all saw this incredible run up during the pandemic. Yeah. Remember how suddenly a lot more people during the pandemic were super online? They were working remotely, shopping online. And so tech companies went on a hiring spree. But then as the pandemic faded, that hiring spree kind of went into reverse. On top of that, in recent years, tech companies have also had to deal with high interest rates, kind of like the rest of us.

5:35And those high interest rates have also weighed on the industry. So tech hiring right now, as a result of all this, is actually slower than it was before the pandemic. And in addition to that, not only is it fewer tech jobs in general, we're seeing fewer tech internships being offered. That's not good for the new grads. No, it is not. And that gets us to May's second question, which is whether this reduction in entry-level jobs and internships is reflected in the unemployment rate. Svenja says that depends. The unemployment rate does not count people who are only looking for internships, but it does count someone who would also be looking for a job and still can't find one.

6:17But then May also asked whether AI could be hurting tech employment, right? So then what did Svenja say about that? Well, yes. I mean, Svenja says AI could be part of the story right now. As companies are embracing AI as a way to kind of replace workers, that could also be slowing down a potential recovery in tech jobs. OK, thank you, Adrian. Our next question is for you, Darian. It comes from Alana Benson in Lander, Wyoming. I've been hearing a lot about recession pop lately. Spotify literally has a playlist for it. Plus, Kesha is releasing new music, and it seems like the club beats from that era are having a resurgence too.

6:55So I just have to know more. Well, Alana, you are in luck. We covered recession pop a few years ago when a paper came out quantifying all the songs we love to listen to when unemployment is high. We talked to economist Marco Palameque. I was thinking that when the situation is bad, people will search for music that express their feelings, but I found the opposite. So Diana Ross, Ain't No Mountain High Enough. This was number one in the singles charts in the 1970 recession. You also had Step by Step by New Kids on the Block. This was a single during the 1990 recession. Janet Jackson, All For You in 2001.

7:32And all of these singles are upbeat, positive songs. Dancing Through the Pain, Rhythm Nation. And typically we are not in a recession right now. But, you know, how do we really know that until we check the pop charts? And so in the Billboard Hot 100, as of this recording, is a song by the name of Ordinary by Alex Warren.

8:01This song definitely gives me an emo vibe. Yeah, it's kind of mid-tempo ballad. And that is actually perhaps one good indicator for the economy. We're not so sad that we're going 180 degrees in our music, going full electro pop. And that brings me to this latest trend about the whole recession pop thing as a genre. It is related, but it is slightly different. It's a revival of the specific pop musicians that were playing on the Orcs cable in the last long recession. So that's where Kesha comes in. The song TikTok was a hit in 2009. I'm talking pedicure on our toes, toes, trying on all our clothes, clothes, boys blowing up our phones, phones.

8:48Cut it all. This really brings me back. Whaling on the dance floor, cutting some nerves. You know, this is back when the unemployment rate was more than double what it is today. And that whole crew of Great Recession pop artists like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga will now forever be known as recession pop. Music to forget the economy crumbling around you. Abracadabra, there's no recession. The only thing unemployed right now is Adrian not dancing with us on the dance floor. Come on. I'm busy making my new music plan for a compilation CD called, now that's what I call, Recession Indicator Tunes. This episode was produced by Cooper Katzma Kim and engineered by Neil Rauch.

9:31It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Julia Ritchie edited this episode. Kagan Cannon is our editor. And the Indicator is a production of NPR.

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