Three beefs: U.S. and Brazil, Taco Bell and liability, Waymo and trial lawyers

0:00NPR.

0:30Stacey Vanek Smith:doing indicators of the week. This is, of course, the day when we talk about our favorite numbers from the news. On today's show, we've got the U.S.'s beef with Brazil, which is partly about a payment system. The outbreak of litigation in the wake of an outbreak of cyclosporiasis. And who would oppose safe driving cars? All that after the break. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Made in Cookware. President and co-founder Jake Halick shares why he was inspired by his family's fourth generation kitchen supply business. Growing up in a commercial kitchen at home really opened my eyes to bringing what was cool in restaurants into your home.

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1:58So every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new Workday.

2:08Indicators of the week, Darian Woods, you go.

2:10Stacey Vanek Smith:My indicator is 25%, which is the amount of tariffs that the U.S. is slapping on most Brazilian products this week. is an increase from the blanket 10 % temporary tariffs. Darren, what about my Brazilian flip-flops? I'm sorry. They'll likely be tariffed. Sorry to say. Well, they aren't yours yet, if you haven't bought them. This shirt I'm wearing, actually, is also Brazilian. Happens to be. I got it before the tariffs. Well, you look like a Brazilian bucks, Darian. That's good. I'm simultaneously smiling and shaking my head. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the US government justified these tariffs with something up our alley at the indicator.

2:53Stacey Vanek Smith:It was about Brazil's electronic payment system called PIX. So is that like PayPal or Venmo? It's like a better Zelle. You've got instant payments between bank account to bank account. You don't even really need to use a credit card or a debit card in many places in Brazil now. PIX is extremely popular. It's almost taken the place of cash in many areas of Brazil. It's run by the Brazilian Central Bank. And the US government does not like that the Central Bank is both regulating financial services in general and running PICS, which could be argued as a competitor to other financial products. Right.

3:33So I'm guessing MasterCard, Visa, they're not very happy about this.

3:37Stacey Vanek Smith:Yeah. Funny you say that. There is a trade group called the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents Visa, MasterGard, but also Meta, among others. And it has complained that Brazil's central bank mandated that the retail banks have to use and promote PIX. And it's also annoyed that after WhatsApp launched a way to transfer money a few years ago on the app, Brazil's central bank immediately changed regulation that forced Meta to suspend that service. Okay, so the idea is that But if Brazil is making regulation that can stifle competitors, that would be bad for competition. Yeah.

4:14Stacey Vanek Smith:But at a news conference, the head of the Brazilian central bank said it would be kind of like saying that creating basic sanitation hurts the revenue of those who own water trucks. He thought the whole thing was ridiculous. A trade group of payment companies that's actually inside Brazil is very pro-PICS. And PICS has been so successful that other countries are looking to Brazil to use the system elsewhere. It's a Brazilian PICS success story. Very interesting. Thank you, Darian. My indicator of the week is 4 ,173, which, as of this recording, is the number of confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, according to the CDC.

4:56Yeah, that is not a great number to hear. So in case you missed the PSA, cyclosporiasis is a foodborne illness that's caused by a parasite called cyclospora kiatinensis. I think I'm pronouncing that right. And it makes people very sick if you eat or drink it. How sick? I think a lot of people have heard them. They include nausea, fatigue, cramping, and also explosive diarrhea. Now, the exact source of this outbreak is still unknown, but federal health officials, they've been investigating whether this may have come from contaminated lettuce from Taylor Farms that was served at Taco Bell. And as you might expect, in the days after they made this announcement, there has been an outbreak of litigation, of lawsuits against Taco Bell, arguing that Taco Bell is responsible for making people sick.

5:51and one of the legal theories that they're doing this under is a theory called strict liability, which means that they don't actually have to prove that Taco Bell was negligent in this case. They only have to prove that the product, i.e. their food, was defective and dangerous and they got hurt by it. So even if Taco Bell did everything right, it could still be liable if somebody gets sick from food it served? Right, even if they were wearing hazmat suits while handling the lettuce, right? Potentially. And there are a few reasons why strict liability is this legal principle that judges often apply to cases where products end up injuring people.

6:35The first one being that it just seems fairer for a company to bear the cost of this kind of injury rather than an individual. And secondly, this is a situation where a contest might say there's an information asymmetry. The company is in a better position to inspect products for safety hazards than the general public. Finally, holding companies responsible in this way incentivizes them to really prioritize safety and kind of be on it. I've got some lawsuit stuff. My indicator this week is 40 ,000, and that's roughly how many Americans die in car crashes every year.

7:15Stacey Vanek Smith:Okay, it's just brutal stuff. about Americans' health this week. But carry on. Yeah, and I actually read a blog post this week by Alex Tabarrok. He's an economist we actually interviewed on another episode earlier this week. His post was about how Waymo, the self-driving car company, released a huge tranche of safety data on its self-driving cars. It claims that if you're in a self-driving car, you are 94 % less likely to be seriously injured or worse in a car crash. Notch one win for the robots. To be fair, it is Waymo's own data, and it was also limited to a small number of cities. But there's all this proposed legislation kicking around Congress right now to encourage more cities to allow self-driving cars.

8:00It's all built on the idea that these cars are, in fact, safer. Still, though, there is some opposition. Okay, from? Well, okay, let's think about it. Who makes a ton of money on car crashes? who really wants to take home a slice of the around$200 billion car crash payout pie?

8:22Stacey Vanek Smith:Who really... 1-800, you've been injured on this highway. Call us now. We're going to get a big settlement for you. That's right. Trial lawyers have been lobbying against legislation like this for years. And a skeptic might conclude they're worried that fewer accidents means fewer lawsuits means maybe a lot less money from one of their biggest profit engines. But they also point out that big settlement costs motivate manufacturers to up their safety standards. For example, there's this General Motors litigation from a little over a decade ago over bad ignition switches. Right. So the lawyers sued General Motors.

8:57Stacey Vanek Smith:And what, did General Motors improve their product after that? Yeah, the ignition switches had caused over 100 deaths and 30 million cars to be recalled. And afterwards, General Motors took all those cars off the road. But Alex, the person who wrote that blog post from earlier, he says lawsuit outcomes can also kind of be pretty random. Things like what state you got T-boned in and who's on the jury can have a much bigger impact on the outcome than the accident itself or whether an ignition switch was or wasn't defective. So if there are fewer crashes in a world with robotic cars, who would actually be doing the motivating to make cars safer if it weren't these lawsuits?

9:41Alex basically thinks it would be the insurance companies that would be doing this. His idea is to borrow from this 2018 law in the UK, which made all self-driving car makers buy their own insurance. And then if there's an accident, you just let the insurance company and the manufacturers duke it out.

9:58Stacey Vanek Smith:Maybe you can automate that as well. All right. Well, that's it for Indicators of the Week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Vito, for joining. Thank you for having me. Let's do this again. And people, take care of yourselves. Maybe wash your lettuce real good before you eat it. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Kweisi Lee. It was fact-checked by Corey Bridges and Emma Ferrara. KK Canada edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR. This message comes from Edward Jones, where they believe rich means opening yourself to new possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, helping you move forward with confidence.

10:43Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This message comes from Workday, the enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new work day.