Job numbers fall short of expectations

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You got your rock?

You got your hard place?

You got this economy pretty much stuck right in the middle.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal.

It is Friday.

Today, this one is the sixth of March.

Good as always.

To have you along, everybody.

Just to be completely clear here, the rock is inflation higher than we want and most

assuredly going higher and no small part, because war is inflationary.

The hard place is the labor market, which we learned today, well, it's a bit more challenged

than we all had probably thought.

The economy, well, that's us.

And it's where we're going to start today.

So do you, Freddie?

Is it MS now?

Courtney Brown?

Is it Axios?

Hey, you too?

Hi, hi.

Courtney, you get to go first.

Jobs.

We lost 92,000 of them.

Unemployment rate ticked up.

I would like you to discuss for me in the next 45 seconds what you make of that given O-Everything.

Wait, Lake, we learned earlier in the week from ADP and other private sector data that

maybe the labor market was on better footing.

I wrote a story that said that momentum was the story of February and then 830 this morning

hits and it's like, oh, never mind.

Maybe this strong job gains that the government reported in January was a little bit of a head

fake.

And maybe the story really has been intact the whole time that this labor market has

a very soft underbelly.

And that's a concern for everyday Americans, for economists and for the Fed.

I love how you started with, wait, and you're like offended at what the data said.

I love that.

I know.

I know.

Look, I hear you, man.

I hear you.

Sudeep, if I use the word stagflation now because economic growth is happening still,

but look, there's a war on and oil prices are up and who knows what's going to happen.

And inflation is still too high.

Is stagflation, am I bringing that one out of the barn too early?

It's something we should worry about.

The overall growth rate in the economy has actually been fine.

It's just the job market has been extremely weak and inflation has been a touch too high.

Neither one of these is at disastrous levels or basically at stall speed with the job market.

So if you look at the trend, we've had, I think, probably half of the last nine months

have had negative payroll number, so that's not a good place to be.

That rarely happens when things are just fine.

And inflation, we do have to see it's a week of this 35% surge in oil is worrying if that

sticks around for four weeks or six weeks, then it's going to embed in inflation expectations

are going to have people kind of starting to panic.

They'll pull back on spending and yeah, you do then get the stagflation scenario.

Courtney, let's turn to the geopolitics tax that we are all paying now.

And that's not my original phrase.

I saw it somewhere on the socials, and I would credit it if I remembered.

But Katharine Pell are sometimes colleague here on Fridays, now at the bullwork in MS

now.

She wrote the other day and said, look, if the president wanted prices to go up, what

would he be doing differently?

And I wonder, I mean, look, you're an economics reporter and not a political scientist, but

it does seem that that's exactly the result of all of these policies, that these prices

are going up because of what the president's doing.

Right.

And so there's the war, but there's also, you know, in the backdrop, the trade war and

tariffs that might be going higher, the president has made it very clear that what the

Supreme Court scrapped, he wants to replace in full.

So you have those two forces and many other forces kind of coming together and making the

environment look more expensive for consumers who are already very upset about how expensive

things are.

They don't really care about inflation, right?

They care about price level and prices are high and they just don't want to see prices

go even higher.

Right.

So, so deep that gets me to, to the next point thing I want to talk about, which is I've

said over the past couple of days, when will the markets hit the president's pain point?

And let me flip that on that, on that, on its head and ask you when you think we get

to the consumer pain point, right?

Because both oil bench marks are now above 91-ish, something dollars gases up, as you

said, you know, like 30, 40 cents in the last four days, there's a, there's a consumer

pain point here.

And let's remember consumers have been incredibly resilient.

When does that start getting beaten down?

Historically, consumer pain builds in the background.

It happens first to lower income consumers.

We're seeing some of that.

We're seeing it in delinquency rates for certain types of loans.

You start to see it, but it's just that in modern times, we have never seen a series

of geopolitical shocks to our economy like this.

We've never seen tariffs like this.

We've never seen immigration to the United States being cut off this way, certainly not

so suddenly.

We've never seen the straight and more moves being effectively shut down and oil having

its fastest increase in 40 years.

We haven't seen all of those individually.

We certainly haven't seen them collectively.

And so it's really hard to tell what happens when you put all those things together and

light a match right there.

Something bad usually would be expected to happen.

It probably will come in a way that we can't quite see right now.

Well, let's crystal ball this.

Courtney, what are you looking for?

What's your indicator here of choice as we develop war and inflation and jobs and all

of that?

I'm looking at consumer sentiment.

I was at a conference recently, and Chicago Fed president Austin Goldbee was kind of

poo-pooing consumer sentiment data saying it's not a good predictor of what consumers actually

do.

OK, I'd get that.

It's true.

But I do think I'm so curious that the pain point, if you will, for consumers, if you

look at the sentiment data, has been inflation.

When do we start seeing?

Do we start seeing consumers saying, hey, it's not just prices I'm mad about.

I'm actually mad about the labor market too.

I'm actually really feeling like there aren't a lot of job opportunities out there.

We haven't really seen that side of the equation as much as the inflation side of the equation.

So I'm curious to see if those two factors come into balance a little bit more.

And then, of course, the hard data, I want to see what is the blip.

Is January the blip the strong jobs report or is February the blip the weak jobs report?

So I just, I mean more data like Fed officials.

I mean more data.

Yeah.

Well, you are true to your beat.

Yeah.

What is the blip?

I will say that Rafael Bostic who used to beat the Atlanta Fed until like a week ago said

the same thing to me about consumers when I talked to him before he stepped down.

He basically said, hey, you know, consumers, whatever they keep spending and you're like,

all right, sir, but still.

Sudeep, same question to you.

Be brief because I got one more thing I need to ask both of you, but what are you looking

at?

I look at jobless claims.

It's the indicator of whether we go from the slower, no hiring economy to the firing

economy.

And that will be the tell that it's all falling apart.

If we do see jobless claims go up and we have not, thankfully for quite a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So brand new game.

It's an only bit of goody just a change in the title.

What is Kevin Warsh thinking in five words or less because if he gets confirmed in May,

this is his very big headache, Courtney, you get to go first five words or less.

Hmm.

How am I going to wrangle this committee because you know, I think that's, I mean, that's

six.

That was all right.

I mean, as you said, the job's market is doesn't look great.

And you know, Warsh has has supported the idea of rate cuts based on AI driven productivity

gains, but the job market doesn't look great.

But neither do inflation numbers.

That's not an environment that you can necessarily cut rates into.

You just can't.

Right.

So deep five words, Kevin Warsh's interdialogue, not good duck and cover.

He's got a job problem.

He's got an inflation problem and he's got the president coming at him.

The moment he is confirmed and that is not going to be a comfortable place to be if

you want to be an effective fed German in an environment like this 99 problems at least.

Citi Brady at MS now in Washington, Courtney Brown at Axios.

Thanks you too.

Thanks.

Okay.

Have a nice weekend Wall Street today.

I mean, do I really have to tell you details?

Those numbers when we get there.

The labor market headlines, we were just talking about so deep and Courtney and I, but

this morning's jobs report is worth another couple of minutes because the big shift this

month was in healthcare, usually a slice of this economy that grows pretty reliably month

on month.

Last month, though, down 28,000 jobs.

Market police to Kelly Wells explains what's going on there.

We're going to break this down into short, medium and long term trends.

Let's start with the biggest and most immediate factor here, the Kaiser Permanente strikes.

The estimates are that about 31,000 workers were involved with those strikes and so that

does show up in the jobs report.

Daniel Zhao is chief economist at Glassdoor.

He says that dip is temporary.

So we should see a lot of those jobs bounce back in March when those folks come back to work.

But all of that being said, healthcare, job growth was still slow, even if you do account

for those striking workers.

As remember, we went from adding 77,000 healthcare jobs in January to losing 28,000 in February.

30,000 striking people is a blip and doesn't explain the whole gap, which brings us to the

medium term trend.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

If you look at a hospital, you look at doctor's offices, whatever, they're getting much

their compensation is coming from government programs.

Medicaid, Medicare, that kind of thing.

The government cuts mean less healthcare funding, even for the private sector jobs.

When those are cut, that means they have to tighten their belts and part of that means fewer jobs.

So we've got strikes in the short term, funding cuts in the medium term, both of those

mean fewer healthcare jobs.

But one month of data, this thing that we're seeing today, it can happen.

I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

He Challenger is Chief Revenue Officer at the Outplacement Firm Challenger, Gray and

Christmas.

And he says the long term outlook for healthcare jobs is much rozier.

When we look at the long term demographics of the country, we expect healthcare to be

a segment that will grow for a decade.

Because as the U.S. population gets older, the demand for healthcare jobs will keep growing.

I'm Taley Wells from Marketplace.

Weight loss drugs are, as you have perhaps heard, hugely popular.

They're also very expensive and not universally covered by employer health insurance.

Only about half of big companies do far, far fewer small and mid-size companies.

So Eli Lilly, purveyor of Zepbound, is trying something new as Marketplace's Novosafo reports.

Many companies have been reluctant to include GLP1 weight loss drugs in their health benefits.

For one, they cost a lot and a lot of people want to take them.

Matthew Ray, with an on-partisan health policy research from KFF, has been serving companies

about the issue and says that those that do pay for the drugs have found themselves

in a pickle.

Many employers were spending much more money than they were anticipating.

So we get big chunks of employers in our survey and through discussions with employers who

told us that they blew the budget.

That's led to a serious math problem, says Luke Ameene of Harvard Medical School.

Previews have gone up this year for a variety of reasons and I think GLP1s have contributed

to about 30% of that increase.

Some companies have even dropped coverage of them all together.

Overall, only one in five employer-sponsored health plans cover the drugs for weight loss.

Eli Lilly has announced a new initiative trying to address these problems.

Senior Vice President Kevin Hearn says they're offering one transparent price, $450 a month

for Zepbound, so that companies can budget better.

We hope that the ability to see a discreet and clear net cost can help employers understand

could they make this work and potentially access a new class of medicines for their employees.

Eli Lilly is also partnering with telehealth providers to help companies administer the drugs.

And then the employer can choose do they want telehealth services, do they want to wrap

around obesity management, lifestyle program and point solution and so we're really trying

to provide choice for the employers in order to get more of them to conclude that

paying for the drugs is cheaper in the long run than the costs associated with obesity.

I'm Nova Sofford for Marketplace.

Coming up, you know, we've had our sewer backup before that trivia money came in really,

really handy.

Honestly, I don't even know what to do with that, but first, let's do the numbers.

Dow industrials down 453, about 1%, 47,501, the NASDAQ off 361, that is 1.6%, 22,387.

Yes, and P500 down 90 points, 1 and a third percent, 67, 40, the wall was indeed.

However, comma, for the week, the five days gone by, the Dow gave up 3% that NASDAQ down,

1 and a quarter percent, S&P 500 slipped to 2%.

Clothing retailers shared the pain today, winter quarter at the gap wasn't so great,

that includes their brand's old Navy banana public and athlete, the gap tanked 14 and

four tenths of 1% today, rival Abercrombie and Fitch declined 3 and 8 tenths percent.

Nova was just talking about Eli Lilly, both Lilly and its rival Nova Nordisk have been

cutting prices of their GLP1 drugs for customers who pay out a pocket, Indiana-based Eli Lilly

and stuffed 7 tenths percent, the Danish Norvo Nordisk contracted 1 and a quarter percent.

Bond prices should you be curious and you should be, they fell, the yield on the 10-year

T-note rose to 4.14 percent. Do I really have to explain why you should be curious?

I feel like we do that story all the time. You're listening to Marketplace.

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With nearly 300 Minneapolis attorneys helping clients solve complex legal issues in meeting

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This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal. As everybody back east is pretty much aware,

this has been the coldest, snowiest winter they've had in years record breaking.

In point of fact, increasingly, it seems people are getting their forecasts and their storm coverage

from independent meteorologists on social media and YouTube versus plain old TV.

It has become so common actually that the American meteorological society has started offering

something called a digital meteorologist certification to help people suss out which accounts

they can trust. Marketplace to Samantha Fields has more on that.

Almost all day Sunday and Monday during that recent East Coast snowstorm, Ryan Hall was live on YouTube.

The Blizzard of 2026 is well underway. We got an incredible snow band parked from Boston all

the way down to New York City. Hall runs one of the most popular weather accounts on social media

and YouTube where he has more than three million subscribers. It started as a hobby early in the

pandemic. I didn't think it was going to turn into anything and here we are about five years after

that we took off insanely. Hall has been into meteorology since he was a kid. He thought he'd

get a degree in it and do weather on TV, but when he got a job at a local station in college,

he realized he didn't like the constraints of TV. So he quit and did other things for a while,

before starting the YouTube channel. One of our first streams for severe weather was the

Mayfield Kentucky tornado, which is like one of the deadliest and worst tornadoes in the United

States has seen in a very long time. And we were live for that while a lot of other networks weren't

because it was like in the middle of the night. And we helped a lot of people that night.

It was after that in 2021 that Ryan Hall y'all exploded and he started doing it full time.

These days, he says the channel generates millions of dollars a year through ads,

sponsorships, and merch, and employees about 30 people both full time and contract.

I say I took a non-traditional path into meteorology and I think it's opened up a door

where this is a real career path now for people who want to get into doing the weather not on TV.

Hall is an outlier though. Most people running their own online weather accounts are not making

that kind of money. But increasingly, many are making a name in the living doing forecasting online.

I always say we're at the Golden Age of Meteorology because so much data is at your fingertips.

And so much opportunities are at your fingertips. Steven D. Martino is a meteorologist who started

his own account focused on New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania weather back in 2007.

When like YouTube is like cat videos and Twitter had like five people on it.

He's always had other jobs too, but today he has tens of thousands of followers on social media

and says he could do this full time now. It's kind of like a 20 year overnight success type thing.

I always tell young meteorologists look, build this but also have other income to supplement.

It takes time because what you're doing is you have to build trust.

Trust is key in a world where anyone can post a forecast online.

Social media is like kind of a choose your own adventure during weather events.

Matt Lanza is one of the meteorologists behind the popular Space City Weather Account in Houston.

He's also still a full time forecaster for the energy industry.

He says you can tell if a weather account is legit if the person running it has a degree in

meteorology or a certification. And if they don't, look at their track record.

If every weather event to them ends up being the biggest, the worst, the most extreme,

all the writing is in all caps with lots of exclamation points.

They're probably just trying to hook you and get you to engage so they can monetize their account.

At Space City Weather, Lanza says they do the opposite.

Most of the time we want to be kind of boring, but when the stuff gets a little crazy,

you're going to notice us really ramp things up so that people really pay attention when it matters.

Like during Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston in 2017.

After that storm, many wrote in to Space City Weather to thank them.

One in particular struck me was someone saying like, you know, I trust you guys, I read you guys

every day. When you started writing the way you did ahead of the storm, I took

stuff that they had on their ground floor of their house and moved up to the second floor.

The first floor of their house flooded, but they'd been able to save things that mattered.

That's the goal, right? The goal is not, it is to get that engagement. It is to get

ways to monetize it, but that's not the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal, Lanza says, is to get people good information so they can protect their stuff

and themselves from extreme weather. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

We were talking jobs up top. You dig a little deeper into that report we got this morning.

You will see data on the percentage of people in this economy holding down more than one job.

It was down just a bit last month, but since the pandemic, the share of multiple job holders

has been trending up. And that gets us to today's installment of our series, My Economy.

My name is Andrew Anderson. I live in Columbus, Ohio and I do bar trivia one and a half times a week.

So I started hosting about two and a half years ago and I initially came to it because I had

gone to trivia at my local bar and a friend of mine asked me if I'd like to take over.

The very first time I hosted, we had a tie and I did not really have a tiebreaker,

so I had to come up with something very quickly.

I was asking about the Great Wall of China. I believe I asked about the actual length.

I had to Google the answer because I certainly didn't know that off the top of my head

and ever since then, I have always had at least one tiebreaker question.

My primary source of income is as a university professor. I teach in the French department

at Capital University. When I started this job with trivia, I initially envisioned it as a very

much a part-time sort of side hustle and now I really do think of it much more as a second job.

We make $100 a week. My wife and I do this together. It's really nice to have that sort of

income together and the money that we've gotten has really helped with a lot of the little expenses

that you don't expect. Car stuff, stuff with the house. We've had our sewer backup before

that trivia money came in really, really handy. It's great to have a little source of income.

It sort of takes the pressure off of the little everyday things.

I think what's kept us going with this is that it's a lot of fun. It's also really nice because

I get to continue to be a teacher, but I got an engaged classroom at a bar, which is ridiculous.

Kind of is ridiculous, but it's great, right? Andrew Anderson, hosting bar trivia in Columbus,

Ohio. Whatever your tiebreaker question is, tell us how your economy is doing.

Marketplace.org is where you can do that.

This final note on the way out today, in which I will note the date one more time, March 6th,

2026, 100 years ago today, Herbert and Rose Greenspan. Welcome to Bouncing Baby Boy

into the world. They named him Alan, and today his four times removed successor is the chairman

of the Federal Reserve, sent along his best wishes. We here at the Fed are rationally exuberant

to celebrate your hundredth birthday with you. Rationally exuberant, get it, pal made of funny.

Little known facts, by the way, Greenspan didn't get his PhD until he was 52 years old.

Our theme music was composed by BJ leaderman, Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargali.

Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer, Neil Scarborough's vice president and general manager.

I'm Kyle Riddle. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody. We will see you back here on Monday, all right?

This is APM.

Hey, David Brunkachio here. I hope you're well, and that your passport is up to date,

because I am hosting a trip to Italy this fall, and you, you, are invited.

Stay at a world-class Tuscan Villa, and step into the world of the Medici, the formidable family,

whose influence and power help give rise to the Renaissance, and the art we still celebrate today,

and not to mention the banking system. We're going to visit the world's oldest bank,

swim in the thermal spa waters in Montecatini, and take in the art of the Ufizi. All of this,

and then we'll try to put it all into context with great conversation over even better meals,

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marketplace.org slash travel to reserve your spot today. That's marketplace.org slash travel.