Are U.S. consumers finally running out of steam?

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Consumers say they’re fed up with inflation, then they keep spending. But their behavior could be catching up with their anxiety, an economist told us. The clues are in data released today by the Commerce Department. Also in this episode: Can you live on just 13 gallons of water a day? One water-saving group thinks it’s possible. Plus, we look into how cities, farmers and compost brokers are tackling organic waste.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I hate to steal yesterday's theme, but I am not in charge of the economic calendar. So today,
0:06.1	we're doing data dump round two. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York,
0:20.6	I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kyris Dahl. It's Friday the 28th of March. Thanks for tuning in.
0:26.4	Today we got a lot of numbers, personal income, personal spending, consumer sentiment, and inflation.
0:32.8	Numbers that give us a better picture of where the economy was in February? To help us decipher what it all means
0:39.1	and what it says about where the economy is heading, we have Rachel Siegel at the Washington Post
0:43.4	and Jordan Holman at the New York Times. Hello, hello. Hi, Kristen. You there. Hi. So I want to
0:50.5	start today with the big E, which is inflation. The personal consumption expenditures index or PCE increased a bit in February,
0:57.6	up three-tenths of a percent from the month before, which puts us at the big number of
1:01.7	two and a half percent year over year.
1:04.1	Rachel, I'm wondering, should the Fed be worried about this?
1:07.9	Or am I just primed to be extra sensitive to every little movement we see
1:11.6	in an inflation reading now? Well, it's understandable that you would feel sensitive because we've
1:16.9	been talking about inflation and inflation not always behaving the way we want for a really long time.
1:22.9	The Fed, though, is trying to take a longer view, right? They say that they don't respond to one report this
1:29.9	month, one report the other month. Their focus is on the direction and on the signal. So last week at
1:36.0	the Fed press conference, I asked Chair Powell about this. I said, you know, how are you separating
1:40.6	signal from things that might be noise or distraction? And he said that that's actually
1:46.2	going to be a particularly difficult job, even when it's been hard already, because of tariffs,
1:51.7	because of so much other uncertainty swirling around the economy, pinpointing that trajectory is
1:57.1	going to be really hard, but that's their focus, not necessarily one number that we got this
2:01.2	morning. Well, yeah, let's stick with you and that Fed Presser from last week because you asked
	...

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