"The Pitt" is the ultimate workplace drama

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Just because it does bear repeating,

the economy does not stop when headlines turn elsewhere, you know.

Also, and completely unrelated,

we're going to talk a little television on the program,

Day From American Public Media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal.

It is Wednesday.

Today, this one is the fourth of March.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

There are some things happening in this economy hours and globally

that make good sense.

Oil, for instance, spiking.

We all know why.

Gold though, off its highs right after the war started.

Still up a lot.

The U.S. dollars in Saturday morning very much in demand,

which means it's been strengthening relative to other currencies.

All of the above are par for the course when geopolitics goes haywire.

Where things are getting strange, though, where that flight to safety paradigm

that we are so very used to seems to be breaking down

is in the market for U.S.

Treasuries, the safest of safe havens.

You would expect investors to want more of them,

just like they want more dollars.

But no.

Marketplace's Justin Ho is on the, what the heck is going on here desk for us today?

When investors want to pile into the safety of the U.S. dollar,

they have plenty of options.

You could find a money market fund.

That's a relatively safe place to go to.

Brendan McKinnell, with Wells Fargo, says investors could also park their money

in corporate bonds, which you need dollars to buy.

Same with mortgage-backed securities.

You could park it in just the savings account,

right, and you're relatively safe there.

Investors have been considering these options because they're not exactly thrilled

about investing in U.S. Treasuries right now.

Sebastian Malibi, senior fellow with the council on foreign relations,

says between the president's tariffs, his attacks on federal reserve independence,

his intervention in Venezuela, and now Iran.

You just have a series of ad hoc policies that undermine the idea that there's a stable hand

guiding the system.

And when you don't believe that anymore,

you're not going to want to hold U.S. government debt because you don't trust the U.S. government.

But Malibi says investing in Europe or Asia is looking risky too,

especially since the war is making energy more expensive.

Both the East Asian economies and Europe are big energy importers.

So it's spiking the cost of energy is very, very bad for them.

Compared to that, the U.S. economy looks relatively more stable.

Christopher Vecchio, head of futures and FX with the research company Tasty Live,

says investors are basically just sitting on their dollars.

If you are someone who, for example, is in Europe and this really is more of a question for foreign

investors and traders, I may sell out of my U.S. treasuries and instead of converting the money

back into euros, I could just keep them in U.S. dollars.

Vecchio says no matter what investors think of U.S. treasuries, the dollars always going to be

in high demand because the global economy runs on dollars. I'm just in how, from marketplace.

On Wall Street today, traders did what they do sometimes.

When things go haywire, they're going to ignore anything that's not right in front of their

noses. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said today that those tariffs that President Trump announced

after the Supreme Court ruling against him a couple of weeks ago, the 10% tariffs the

President imposed. Besson said today that could go up to 15% as soon as this week.

One hesitates to presume the Secretary of the Treasury isn't aware of this, but that tariff

would be feeding into an economy already dealing with the inflationary pressures that

war brings. We're going to talk about that and some other stuff. With Heather Long, she's the chief

economist at Navy Federal Credit Union also comes by on Fridays from time to time. Hi, Heather.

What is your inflation spidey sense, if you will, telling you right now?

Well, it's certainly going to be going up. The question is how much? I certainly noticed the gas

prices on my drive into work this morning already up about 20 cents and we're all wondering what's

next. You just mentioned these tariffs that are now going to be hiked but presumably at the end of

the week to 15% and a lot of the confusion that's going on around the world about whether there

will be some exclusions for Europe or UK or Australia. Are these still our friends or not?

But look, the general sentiment here is there was already a lot of anxiety from American consumers

about high prices and March is certainly not going to help.

So let's talk transmission mechanisms. Oil and gas you mentioned and we can see that. We are

seeing that at the pump. Eventually, all of that's going to show up in the cost of goods,

right? Not just at the pump. That's right. I mean, we forget sometimes how much

those oil prices flow through the entire economy and economy where we transport goods across the

country, whether it's food products or whether it's cars. And so that's why when you really start

to see oil prices get up, I would say the trigger dollar amount that I'm really watching is do we

get to $90? Do we get into the $90 again? Because that translates to $4 gas and that's when you

really start to see that psychological shift for both consumers and businesses to thinking that

this is a higher inflation regime that we're going back to. Not for nothing, but we're over 80

on Brent. I mean, you know, it's not far away. Exactly. Exactly. So we're not there yet and I think

that's why you've seen this very muted market reaction so far. But the million trillion dollar

question is how long does this last? Well, let's go there for a minute. I'm not going to ask you

how long this is going to last, but I need an expert and you're the expert in this conversation

to talk to me about the cascading effect the longer it does last. I mean, the president is talking

about four to six weeks, you know? And that's I hate to use the word manageable, but every single

analyst note in my inbox right now says that if it's four to six weeks, it's a manageable hit

to the US economy. It's probably a different calculation for Europe and Asia. But you know,

the question I think that begins to transition when we get to something like $90 oil is you get

these feelings that were back to that dreaded summer of 2022 when inflation really spiked. You

know, that's the last the last time we really saw gas and oil in that, you know, $100 and a barrel

mark. And so that's I think what you're really worried about whether you're the Federal Reserve or

whether you're a corporation trying to assess this is if we get to a place where companies and

consumers really start to change their assessment of what they think the next several months are

going to be. It's not happening yet. Right. Right. Last thing and and then I'll let you get back

to work. The phrase supply shock is being bandied about because it's not just oil and gas

and it's not just the street of hormones insurance for shipping is going up. There's general

unease out there that that's a real worry, right? This idea of a supply shock now into this

economy. Yeah, that's a really good point. And you know, the goods the flip side of that is that

we had an oversupply arguably of oil and gas in the market coming into this and that most other

parts of the economy were pretty well supplied. So you're starting from a much better base than

say what happened in 2022 when we were coming off a period where there still wasn't enough supply

of cabinets or toasters or auto parts or whatever. But you're right. Again, if this is something that

lasts for months, then you're back to 2022. Heather Long and Navy Federal. Heather, thanks a lot.

Always good to talk to you. Thanks, guy.

As Heather and I were just talking about this war is already starting to be felt in this

economy. But as we're also talking about, there are things that are going to hit right away

and there are things that are going to take a while on that ladder list of things that are going

to take a while is the labor market. The February jobs report comes out on Friday and we did get

something of a preview today, payroll processing company ADP says private company hiring jump last

month, 63,000 new jobs also. And not for nothing pay was up about four and a half percent year over

a year. Marketplace to Carla Javier reads the tea leaves on that one. All this jobs data is really

important says RSM chief economist Joe Bruce wayless. The unemployment rate average hours worked,

average hourly earnings. And what the median duration of unemployment is those are really key

factors to understand the health of the American economy. He says ADP's numbers reaffirm a low

higher low fire labor market and make him want to look closely at health care and private education

in Friday's jobs report. Because it's been the primary driver of hiring for the past several

months. The Bank of America Institute says its February data also show jobs growing. I think the

story is a good one. That senior economist David Tinsley. The jobs growth at least at the start

of this year had some real momentum behind it. But he says there's also a growing gap with higher

income households seeing wage growth of more than 4% year over year. While low income households

have wage growth below 1%. He'll be looking for any indications of that in Friday's BLS data.

Kathy Boschansik at Nationwide is expecting modest job gains for February and will be

watching for any provisions to January's solid number. But in terms of what consumers,

businesses and investors are focused on, it's probably going to be overshadowed by what

is happening in Iran. And she says what impact oil and gas prices or even just uncertainty

could have as the conflict continues. I'm Carla Javier from Marketplace.

Coming up. You don't know what that doctor had for breakfast. You just show up and you hope

to God he's going to save you. And you hope the writers know what they're doing. But first,

let's us do the numbers. Down dust rolls up 238 today about a half percent 48,739. The NASDAQ

improved 290 points about 1 and 3 10th percent finished to 22,807. Yes and P500 added 52.8 10th

percent ended things at 68 and 69 bond prices. Thanks for asking. They fell yield on the 10-year

treasury up 4.10% you're listening to Marketplace. Running a business is hard enough,

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This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdon. Amazon has confirmed that several of its data centers

in the Middle East have been hit. There were service outages in that region, of course,

banking and payment apps included. But more to the point, there are increasing worries now about

data center security, which, as you know, have become the backbone of the internet and the AI

economy. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has more on that one. The Computing Power in Data

Centers is basically the new oil, says analysts Dan Ives at Wedbush. It's the essential resource that

so much of our digital economy runs on. So it was only a matter of time until this critical

infrastructure was targeted, like oil pipelines have been in war. They have to adjust to the

new realities where they're going to have to make sure they protect their assets both abroad

as well as in the U.S. The industry has been focused on the threat of cyber attacks,

says Justin Sherman at Global Cyber Strategies. China, Russia, Iran, others trying to hack into

cloud systems, data centers to steal data, disrupt training. Most of the cloud is run by Amazon,

Microsoft, and Google, which Sherman says are well-resourced to defend against hacks. But the

average commercial facility isn't equipped to deal with physical threats like drones, says Matt

Pearl at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It's just not hardened in the same way

that military infrastructure is, even though, in many cases, the military relies on it.

And some of the same qualities that make data centers unpopular neighbors also make them easy targets.

These data centers are becoming very large physically. They're above ground. It's all visible.

He says even consumer drones can do a lot of damage, the kind that takes more than some lines of code

to repair. I'm Megan McCarty, Corino for Marketplace.

We're in the thick of Hollywood Awards season right now, movies and TV. And if you happen to have

seen or read about the actor awards Sunday night, you know that in the world of television, the pit

one big. I wish we could say we could plan it this way, but we got lucky that the very next morning,

we found ourselves on the Warner Brothers lot out in Burbank. I don't usually do this with Hollywood

bigwigs. Well, you're not doing it today with Hollywood bigwigs either. That's R. Scott Gamel. He

created the pit. He's also the showrunner and a writer and an executive producer of that show along

with Noah Wiley and John Wells, both of whom he worked with on ER way, way back in the day. If you're

not watching full disclosure, I am the pit is a medical drama on HBO Max. It happens in real time.

Each episode is a single hour of a shift in the emergency room. New episodes drop on Thursdays,

if you're looking for something to watch, by the way. Scott Gamel and I sat down in the show's

writer room. There's so much in here I want to talk about. Let's talk about that thing behind

you first of all. It looks for all the world like an architectural drawing like actual plans for

a hospital ER except clearly it's for the show and you've got I guess characters and people in

places and all sorts of things on on multi colored stickies up there. What's going on there? This is how

we plan out our show. You know, we have to track everyone where they are. These are all patients.

You can see they've all got tags on them. I'll also tell what episode they're in so we can tell

you know when they're coming when they're going. All of us have these at home. We all have

really maps. Yeah. You like all the writers. All the writers. Okay. Yeah, you can't write without

the map and then you have counters or players for all the actors and we just move them around like

risk as you figure it out because our show is very kinetic and very and so in order to keep

that going you have to know the set very well and you have to know that if I want to have Robby

and Dana have a conversation you know starting in room 20 that ends at the hub I better make sure

that dialogue covers that distance you know so you have to literally the time it takes to watch

it. Absolutely. Yeah. So you'll see us down there all the writers talking to themselves you know

as they walk the set. You've been in TV for a long time. You've been. Jagged and obviously

yarn and NCIS. What was it about doing this project that got you to come back to a thing that

honestly you've mastered kind of right? Yeah. Ironically enough this came out of a conversation

of why I would never do another medical show and I listed a bunch of reasons and thought of one

maybe that I would do and then it just transformed into you know once sort of hit upon the real

time aspect changed everything and what we wanted to do was we had the opportunity to create a new

medical show from scratch and so that was exciting because you were inheriting nothing other than I

had Noah and John. Did you know it was going to work? No. I didn't bring any of my writers from

my other shows with me. I didn't bring anyone with me because I was afraid it wasn't going to work

and I didn't want people to take on a job at my behest and then have it fail. And we wrote the

hole and shot the hole for season without any air date so we didn't know when we were going to be

on the air. We didn't know if people were going to like there was no feedback really. This is your

first streaming thing. It is my first streaming show. What do you think? I think it's fun. Is it

working out for you? It works so far so good. Yeah no it's fun. I just wrote a pilot for a

network show and it was one of the most difficult things I've done because I've been like just

now recently. Yeah sorry aren't you busy enough? Yeah well I was a favor. I was a favor but it was

so weird to be off. I've been off leash for a couple of years so it was better. Yeah I enjoy this.

Yeah it's fun. Yeah it's very fun. About the show. A couple of things. Medical drama sure

yes that's the way you guys are doing it and thinking of it. For my money, for the program I work

on. It's a workplace drama, right? These people are doing a job. Yep. We never go home with them.

Well that's the thing I wanted to ask you about. You only see them in the workplace. Yeah.

How come? Because I think that's your experience when you're in the ER. You don't know where that

doctor had for breakfast. You just show up and you hope to have God he's going to save you you know

and I think it made it much more realistic, much more immersive. You know we really wanted to focus

on the emergency department and not so much on the doctors of course but only in their work environment

because that's where we see them. Speaking of doctors, you have a lot of them. I do sit on staff.

Well we have one on set every day but we rotate them out so we have four or five that rotate out

because they're all working so they have to you know do the real medicine and they're not doing

our fake medicine and then I have this year we'll have three doctors in the writer's room and

that makes you know that's makes it so authentic is because we're working with real doctors all the

time and we are also working with experts and other doctors especially this time of year we're

just starting episode season three we talk to a lot of experts in the medical field about you

know anything that's coming up. Are you writing in your shooting? We're done shooting and today

we're our first writers meeting today for season three. Do you still write? Oh yeah. Yeah that's

the best part of the whole job. I read somewhere that you sleep like eight at night to two in the

morning and then you get up right in the middle of the night. Is that true? Yeah I do a biphaseic

sleep cycle yeah. Really? Yeah. I guess it works. It works yeah it happened during hiatus I was

not sleeping well and I was getting really pissed off and so I was like if you're gonna be up

you're gonna work and I actually got a lot of work done went back to bed woke up start my day

had a whole days with the writing. I mean you look pretty good. I feel okay. I fall asleep driving

here sometimes but other than that it's okay. Hold on a second. Part of what makes this show work

is the versimilitude right. Obviously the medical stuff and the injuries and you see it all and

you guys are gonna great job with prostheses and all that jazz but there's AI in season two and

there's the Medicaid cuts in season two there's the measles outbreak right in season one which you

guys where I think ahead of yeah happening in actual real life. Clearly you're thinking about

real world stuff as you as you write this show right. Well what happens when we talk to the experts

regardless of what field of medicine they're in you know we talk to them about what scares them

what keeps them up at night and then when we extrapolate where things were going being in the head

of the measles epidemic was not being overly prescient it was just nobody's getting vaccinated

eventually this is gonna hit a turning point tipping point and so I think we look at things like that

Medicare Medicaid cuts you cut people's Medicare Medicaid they're not gonna have a primary care

physician when they do get sick they're gonna be really sick and the only place they're gonna go

is the ER so it's gonna put even more strain on the system which is gonna be even harder on the

nurses and the doctors and so it's just about looking at the real world situations and then

thinking about how they're gonna play out. You uh I watched your your uh Emmy speech from a

year ago when you won Best Drama and you made a point at the end of that speech of of honoring and

dedicating it to healthcare workers you said you know honor them trust them protect them I think is

what you said um why well we wouldn't be here without them I mean I wouldn't be here without them

and you know that thus sort of show is kind of a love letter I think to the healthcare workers

for what they do a lot of my friends or doctors and um and nurses and I just think it's a wonderful

profession and we deserve to give them the credit they deserve did it start that way though because

I mean you know you read about Noel Wiley and him actually going to Pittsburgh and going to medical

centers there and people treating him I mean yes he's a star but treating him like an actual

rock star you know and going crazy over him did was that the plan did that surprise you yeah that

surprised me because I think our show was a slow build we kind of came out of nowhere and a lot

of it was word-of-mouth and a lot of it was word-of-mouth from the healthcare professionals and

if anyone embraced the show that's who we wanted because that's who it was sort of meant for

and dedicated to and if we can do well by them then I half our job is done working on season three

now yep you're gonna start writing it's gonna start shooting soon enough I suppose June 11th I think

you're gonna ride this for a while oh yeah I mean I was on my last show for 14 seasons yeah for me

part of my job I think a very important part of my job is to keep a show on the air as long as

possible to keep people employed for as long as they want to work and so I stay with a job

until they turn the lights out talk to me about that ecosystem right because this now the show now

and and you and Wellson and Noel Lee are kind of economic engines you're kind of economic drivers

right yeah of the whole infrastructure of the show yeah you think about that sometimes I focus

mostly on the storytelling the other parts are are gravy you know if the storytelling's good and

people are enjoying it then everything else will fall into place I think a word here about the

business of this business and you can dodge this one if you want to the the Paramount Netflix

Warner Brothers goat rope for a want of a better word has now been resolved are you what's your

worry factor of that or are you just keeping your head down and doing your job yeah I don't really

worry about it um you know it'll change business the business side of it but it won't change what

we do you know our job is to still tell stories that touch on the human condition and move people

to me it's kind of like I said the other day it's kind of like a divorce you know it's coming you

just hope you get through it and and see what happens so you can move forward you know it's got

camel thanks a lot thanks man I appreciate it appreciate it

this final note on the way out today in which it's all over but the voting I guess the White House

announces afternoon it has formally sent Kevin Worsh's nomination to the Senate both as a member

of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve that is a 14 year term and as the new chairman

thereof that is a concurrent four year job two things of note about the above number one

at least one Republican member of the Senate banking committee has said he is a no on Worsh's

nomination unless and until the Department of Justice drops its criminal investigation of the

central bank and the incumbent chair speak of whom the incumbent chair that is this is thing number

two Jay Powell's term as chair is indeed up in May but he's got another two years or so left on

his 14 year stint on the board itself and the parlor game among fed watchers right now is whether

or not he is going to stick around our media production team includes Brian Allison John

Fokey Montana Johnson Drew Jostett Garry O'Keefe and Charlton Thorpe Alex Simpson is the manager of

media production and I'm Kyle Rizdal we will see you tomorrow everybody

this is APM

Hey David Brunch at you 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 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 and wine tasting please join me and know this

buying into this trip will provide essential support for public media discover more about

this falls Tuscan adventure at marketplace dot org slash travel to reserve your spot today

that's marketplace dot org slash travel