Big Tech trust-busting

Summary

Marketplace: Episode Summary – "Big Tech Trust-Busting"
Release Date: November 1, 2024
Host: Kai Ryssdal

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1. Introduction and Jobs Report Analysis

The episode opens with host Kai Ryssdal introducing the macroeconomic theme of the day: "exogenous." Ryssdal explains the term and its relevance to current economic conditions, particularly referencing the recent jobs report.

Key Highlights:

• Jobs Report Overview: The U.S. economy added 12,000 new jobs in October, maintaining the unemployment rate at a steady 4.1% (00:01).
• Expert Insights:
  • Neal Richardson (ADP): Describes the jobs report as "messy," attributing complexity to external factors like hurricanes affecting data collection (01:09). He emphasizes the importance of looking at the overall trend rather than single data points, highlighting strong private sector job gains of 233,000 (04:09).
  • Courtney Brown (Axios): Notes the difficulty in discerning clear signals from the noisy data but acknowledges signs of a healthy labor market, such as low jobless claims and steady unemployment rates (02:00).

Notable Quotes:

• Neal Richardson: "Exogenous is a technical term for messy. It was a messy job." (01:09)
• Ryssdal on Labor Market Health: "There is an incredible disconnect between what the data show us and what people seem to feel about the economy." (05:15)

2. Temp Work Industry Decline

Stephanie Hughes delves into the decline of the Temporary Help Services sector, illustrating a significant drop in temporary employment jobs by 49,000 in October and nearly 200,000 over the past year.

Key Points:

• Industry Shift: Post-pandemic, the demand for temporary workers in sectors like warehousing and manufacturing has decreased due to business projections of a potential recession that hasn't materialized (08:47).
• Reasons for Decline: Businesses are delaying projects and preferring to retain permanent staff, reducing the reliance on temporary labor (09:00).
• Volunteer Insights: Jason Levrent from At Work Group mentions a reduction in issues like ghosting, as employees are more committed to their permanent roles (09:48).

Notable Quotes:

• Timothy Landeis (Staffing Industry Analysts): "Temp fill the gaps left when permanent workers leave. And right now there are just fewer gaps." (09:59)

3. Antitrust Case Against Google

A substantial portion of the episode focuses on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) ongoing antitrust case against Google, paralleling historical attempts to break up Microsoft.

Key Highlights:

• Legal Developments: The DOJ is considering dismantling Google’s monopoly in internet search by potentially breaking off parts of its operations, such as the Android operating system and Chrome browser (10:18).
• Historical Context: The episode revisits the early 2000s Microsoft breakup case, where initial rulings favored dissolution but were later overturned, resulting in a settlement that imposed restrictions without a complete breakup (10:58).
• Expert Opinions:
  • Daniel Rubinfeld (Economist, Clinton Administration): Advocated for breaking up Microsoft to foster competition and prevent monopolistic expansion.
  • Joseph Coniglio (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation): Argues that large firms like Google drive innovation through their resources and scale, questioning whether breaking them up would hinder technological progress (13:19).

Notable Quotes:

• Courtney Brown: "The Microsoft case stopped the software maker from controlling the Internet and now we have the Google case." (12:53)
• Joseph Coniglio: "If Microsoft was broken up in the early 2000s, maybe it doesn't become a big innovator in cloud computing." (14:03)

4. California’s Reinforced Plastic Bag Ban

Kai Ryssdal shifts focus to environmental policy, specifically California's renewed efforts to ban single-use plastic bags after the initial ban proved ineffective.

Key Highlights:

• Previous Ban Issues: Introduced in 2016, the initial ban saw companies exploit loopholes by producing thicker, reusable bags that circumvented the single-use restriction, leading to an increase in plastic bag waste (18:20).
• New Legislation: The updated law aims to eliminate these loopholes by restricting plastic bag availability solely to in-store purchases or encouraging the use of alternatives like paper bags or personal reusable bags (19:26).
• Comparative Success: New York’s similar ban resulted in a significant reduction of plastic bag waste, showcasing potential efficacy for California’s revised approach (21:00).

Notable Quotes:

• Mark Murray (Californians Against Waste): "We're hoping that grocery stores will abide by the spirit of the law because we don't want to do this again two or four years from now." (20:19)

5. Impact of Hurricane Helene on Businesses

The episode features a heartfelt story from Hannah Berniske, owner of Cold Mountain Art Collective in Canton, North Carolina, detailing the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.

Key Highlights:

• Damage Assessment: Governor Roy Cooper estimates the recovery costs at $53 billion, affecting infrastructure, homes, and businesses (22:02).
• Personal Story: Berniske recounts the extensive damage to her art gallery, including the loss of valuable equipment and materials, and the financial strain of repairs and replacements (22:02).
• Community Resilience: Despite significant losses, Berniske emphasizes the support and solidarity from the local community, which provides emotional and practical assistance (25:15).

Notable Quotes:

• Hannah Berniske: "It was just five pounds because it was homemade with love. And somebody was just like, you should have this. It was just... what keep you going, you know." (25:15)

6. Market Updates and Economic Indicators

Kai Ryssdal provides a brief overview of the current market conditions, noting movements in major indices and specific company performances.

Key Highlights:

• Stock Market Performance: The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 288 points (7.10%), the Nasdaq increased by 144 points (8.10%), and the S&P 500 climbed by 23 points (4.10%) on the day of the report (15:30).
• Weekly Trends: Over the week, the Dow slightly declined, the Nasdaq dropped by 1.5%, and the S&P 500 decreased by 1.4% (15:24).
• Corporate Earnings: Intel reported a significant net loss of $16.6 billion for the last quarter, attributing it to restructuring costs and lower product demand, despite a stock price spike of 7.8% on the news (15:30).

Notable Quotes:

• Ryssdal on Market Movements: "Sometimes the classics really are the best, right?" (15:24)

7. Conclusion and Final Remarks

The episode concludes with Ryssdal reflecting on the complex interplay between economic data, corporate actions, and regulatory measures. He underscores the ongoing scrutiny of Big Tech companies and the broader implications for innovation and competition.

Closing Insights:

• Antitrust Implications: Whether Google’s potential breakup will catalyze or stifle innovation remains a subject of debate among economists and policymakers.
• Economic Sentiment vs. Data: Despite robust economic indicators, public perception remains mixed, highlighting a disconnect between statistical health and individual experiences.

Notable Quotes:

• Ryssdal on Innovation: "I think it's wrong to think that the path of innovation is predetermined and that it can't be influenced by actions taken by the trust agencies." (14:50)

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Notable Quotes Overview:

• Neal Richardson: (01:09) "Exogenous is a technical term for messy. It was a messy job."
• Neal Richardson: (05:15) "There is an incredible disconnect between what the data show us and what people seem to feel about the economy."
• Courtney Brown: (12:53) "The Microsoft case stopped the software maker from controlling the Internet and now we have the Google case."
• Joseph Coniglio: (14:03) "If Microsoft was broken up in the early 2000s, maybe it doesn't become a big innovator in cloud computing."
• Hannah Berniske: (25:15) "It was just, you know, what keep you going."

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Conclusion

In this episode of "Marketplace," Kai Ryssdal navigates through a multifaceted discussion on the state of the U.S. job market, the declining temporary work sector, and the significant antitrust developments surrounding Big Tech giants like Google. The episode also touches on environmental policy challenges in California, the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene on local businesses, and current market trends. Through expert interviews and personal stories, Ryssdal provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how these economic and regulatory dynamics intersect and influence everyday life.

Transcript

[Kai Rysdal]

The macroeconomic word of the day today is exogenous. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace in Los Angeles. I'm Kyle Rysdal. It is Friday today. This one is the first day of November, if you can believe that. Good as always to have you along, everybody. All right, so exogenous relating to or developing from external factors used in a sentence, it might go something like this. Those hurricanes and the machinist strike at Boeing were exogenous variables in this Morning's jobs report. 12,000 new jobs in this economy in October. As you've heard by now, the unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%. That is where we start on this Friday. Neal Richardson is at adp. Courtney Brown is at Axios. Hey, you two.

[Neal Richardson]

Hi, Ken.

[Courtney Brown]

Hello.

[Kai Rysdal]

Neela, let me begin with you. The trained economist in the room. Trained, I'm sure, in data analysis. You look at this morning's data on jobs and you say what?

[Neal Richardson]

Exogenous is a technical term for messy. It was a messy job.

[Kai Rysdal]

I love that you're playing along with my vocabulary day.

[Neal Richardson]

Absolutely. Always. It was a messy month for government to collect survey data. And so it was hard to read the 12,000 job gain that the government reported this month next to the over 190,000 job average that the government has reported over the last 12 months. But there were some clear signs, I think, in the data, and those clear signs are worth mentioning. One, we've seen very low jobless claims. So that's a proxy for layoffs. Proxy firms aren't letting people go and the unemployment rate held steady. And that's what the Fed has been playing very close attention to for signs of a recession.

[Kai Rysdal]

Courtney, you and your colleague Neil Irwin at Axios today wrote, I think the headline actually was signal to noise or something like that. There is, as Neil alluded to, there's a lot of signal in the noise of this jobs report. Right. What else do you like?

[Neela Richardson]

Yeah, you kind of squint to see the signal, but there is some signal there about the health of the labor market. Maybe not as. As big of a signal as we're used to getting. One of the things that we noticed was the labor force participation rate or the number of people in the labor force went down in October. That comes from the survey that the government said wasn't terribly impacted by the hurricane. So something to watch there. Obviously, there are two surveys that make up the jobs report, Household survey and the survey of establishments. It was a survey of establishments that the government said was a little funky because of the hurricanes. So you have that drop of people in the labor force, which is a little bit troubling. And then, you know, you also had an increase in the people who said they were not employed. So is that a warning sign that layoffs are starting to take off? I mean, I don't know. It's so messy sometimes. The jobs report is easy. Not today.

[Kai Rysdal]

So, Neela, can you actually draw any conclusions from this report or is it, you know, it's one data point. Let's see where the trend goes next month. And generally speaking, the job market is doing what we thought it was going to do.

[Neal Richardson]

Well, you're asking me and I sit on 25 million payroll records at ADP, so I have probably a different perspective than most economists. I would say that there are. We saw a clear sign of strong hiring in October. We reported 233,000 private sector job gains. And that matched some other signals from private sectors. Sources of strength. So I really do think that we need to look at the overall trend of where the job's going. Not a single month, not even a month as important as October. It's really what does the job gains look like over the next three months that are going to be more telling?

[Kai Rysdal]

Along those lines, Courtney, just on looking at the whole big picture thing, you know, there was that headline article, I forget whether it was opinion piece actually in the Wall Street Journal this week saying, and I think this was verbatim, the next president inher a good economy. Interesting to me that number one, that comes from the Journal. But, but number two, it seems not to make a difference in the politics of this election right now.

[Neela Richardson]

Times are so weird because the economy is good. We got the GDP report for the third quarter this week as well. So much data this week. 2.8% growth rate. That's so good. That's really good. And we talked about the unemployment rate. Even though this month was messy, unemployment rate still largely held at, you know, historically low level. One of my colleagues pointed out that the unemployment rate hasn't been this low heading into a presidential election since 2000. That's, that's, that's incredible. So there is this incredible disconnect between what the data show us and what people seem to feel about the economy. But the data is good.

[Kai Rysdal]

Yeah, and we should say here, Courtney, that, that people's opinions on this economy were baked a very long time ago. This data out today, the chances that it sways more than like a vote are negligible. Yes.

[Neela Richardson]

Yeah. But I feel like the narrative has been pretty consistent over the last. I Don't know. Year or so, the economy's been doing well. I think there was a little bit of a scare earlier this year about whether inflation was, you know, moving up. But, you know, we still got inflation data this week, 2.1%. That's basically the Fed's target. I think we're on a good path here, Neal.

[Kai Rysdal]

I want to talk about inflation, but I want to talk about it in terms of wages, wage growth slowing a bit, but still trending positive.

[Neal Richardson]

Right. So that inflation number that Courtney mentions, that 2.1%, well, let me just put it this way. Have you ever tried to lose weight, Kai?

[Kai Rysdal]

Yes, I have. Thank you very much.

[Neal Richardson]

Let me tell you, as an expert on this, it's always the last few pounds that are hardest, especially if you're trying to target a place. And for the Fed, the target is not just that headline, 2.1%, it's the core, which has been stuck on 2.7% for the last three months. And I think one of the reasons why is that we do have this healthy, robust jobs market, and we're seeing pretty robust pay gains, pay growth. Now, that's not triggering inflation higher, but it could keep inflation at that core core measure that the Fed prefers a little bit higher for longer. And so it's not a foregone conclusion that we'll get by this preferred measure all the way back to 2%. The Fed may take the 2 points up, just like I will maybe take those extra five pounds because it's just so hard to get it down.

[Kai Rysdal]

I appreciate what you're saying, but it is worth pointing out here, Nelly, that the Fed has said, especially in their last big review that they did, I guess, four or five years ago, they want symmetrical inflation, right? So if it's 1.8%, that's fine. If it's 2.2%, you know, the implication is that's fine, too, right? Somewhere near 2%, they said that was.

[Neal Richardson]

Fine when the biggest problem that the Fed was facing was too low inflation, not too high inflation. And starting at the end of this year, and I'm sure Courtney will be covering this, the Fed is going to start rethinking that framework for the state of the world that we're in now, not the state of the world that we were five years ago before the.

[Kai Rysdal]

Pandemic Fed meeting next week, Wednesday, Thursday, by the way, day after Election Day. Courtney Brown at Axios and Neal Richardson at ADP thanks you two.

[Neal Richardson]

Thanks, Kai.

[Kai Rysdal]

Wall Street. To begin the 11th month of the year, Tech turned things around from yesterday. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. One industry that popped out to us in the jobs report that came out this morning, perhaps because it did actually the opposite of pop is temp work Temporary Help Services, which is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls it. Employment There fell by 49,000 jobs October from September, down nearly 200,000 jobs in the past year. These are the people who were employed by staffing agencies to fill in temporarily, obviously forklift drivers, office administrators, IT professionals, you name it. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has more on that slice of the American labor market.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Let's travel back in time to spring 2022. The labor market is red hot. People are thinking about quiet quitting. They're going to see the Batman on the sly. And businesses are turning to temps to keep everything going.

[Matt Levin]

The temp staffing industry grew to record sizes.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Timothy Landeis is VP of research at Staffing Industry Analysts. Now he says the temp industry has come down to earth. One big reason is demand for workers in warehousing and manufacturing to big employers of temps has come down. Also, he says that new app or website a company might bring a temp IT worker on to complete. Not happening right now.

[Kai Rysdal]

Businesses have been sort of bracing for.

[Matt Levin]

A recession the last couple of years, recession that hasn't happened. But because that was anticipated, a lot.

[Kai Rysdal]

Of projects have been delayed or put on hold.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Meanwhile, companies are holding tight to permanent workers and permanent workers are hugging their jobs back. Jason Levrent is one of the leaders of the At Work Group, a commercial staffing firm.

[Matt Levin]

There's issues in the past with ghosting where people would start a job then just disappear. With ghost that has kind of been tempered, I think, because of this uncertainty. Like, you know what? I can't just leave and go get another job.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Temps fill the gaps left when permanent workers leave. And right now there are just fewer gaps. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

The Department of Justice has about three weeks to decide what it wants to do about Google. Antitrust is the cause at issue here whether the DOJ wants to try to break up one of the world's richest and most powerful companies. A federal judge ruled this past summer that Google had indeed maintained an illegal monopoly over searching on the Internet. Google does plan to appeal, we should say. The Justice Department has hinted in filings that they are entertaining the idea of splitting Google up. The thing is, the DOJ has actually tried this before, trying to break up a tech giant it accused of monopolistic behavior. Little company you might have heard of by the Name. Microsoft Marketplace's Matt Levin reports on the lessons learned from the tech breakup.

[Matt Levin]

That wasn't for a hot minute there. On June 7, 2000, it really did seem like Microsoft could be broken up, which was really big news back when the news didn't come from your phone.

[Courtney Brown]

A federal judge orders Microsoft split into two.

[Matt Levin]

The shoe dropped.

[Kai Rysdal]

Today, the federal judge presiding at the government's antitrust case against Microsoft has ruled that Microsoft should be broken up. It's the most important business court ruling of the electronic information age.

[Matt Levin]

Just like Google, Microsoft had been found guilty of acting like a monopolist, mostly by coercing PC makers to pre install one and only one Internet browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Daniel Rubenfeld was an economist in the Clinton administration's Department of justice at the time.

[Kai Rysdal]

The belief was that if we broke Microsoft into an apps company and an operating system company that those two separate companies would compete very aggressively.

[Matt Levin]

DOJ wanted a clean break partly because the alternative ongoing monitoring to make sure Microsoft was playing by the rules was going to be tough to enforce. But Rubinfeld also hoped the split would prevent Microsoft from extending its tentacles into this newfangled technology called the World Wide Web.

[Kai Rysdal]

That was a point in time which we didn't know for sure exactly how the Internet was going to develop other than there was going to be very important. We wanted to see innovation that would be significant as the Internet developed.

[Matt Levin]

Ultimately, the breakup never happened. Microsoft successfully appealed. Some hanging chads in Florida meant a more business friendly Bush administration took over and a settlement was reached. It banned Microsoft from requiring PC makers to exclusively use Microsoft software and also appointed an on site monitoring committee to basically police them. Economist Fiona Scott Morton at the Yale School of Management says at least by one metric, the settlement and public scrutiny mostly worked.

[Courtney Brown]

The Microsoft case stopped the software maker from controlling the Internet and now we have the Google case. And we hope that that's stopping the party that controls the Internet from dominating the next thing that's coming. Maybe that's AI, but with the Department.

[Matt Levin]

Of Justice recommending a similar breakup of Google, a counterfactual looms large. If Microsoft had been carved up, would we have gotten a better Internet or better, better technology generally?

[Courtney Brown]

Would we have phones that could do yet more stuff? Would we have an Internet that enabled us to be even better? Would AI have appeared 10 years earlier? I mean, we just can't know.

[Matt Levin]

Underlying the government's pro breakup argument is the logic that multiple smaller companies mean more competition to develop the best new technology at the cheapest price. Joseph Coniglio doesn't buy that premise. He's the director of antitrust policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank we should say is partly funded by big tech.

[Kai Rysdal]

Large firms are the ones that have the resources and they have the incentives to be able to make those big investments that it takes to create these.

[Matt Levin]

New products, coniglio says. If Microsoft was broken up in the early 2000s, maybe it doesn't become a big innovator in cloud computing, he says, especially for tech products, it's size and scale that often produces the next big thing.

[Kai Rysdal]

If you were to break up Google, how would that affect the company's ability to invest in artificial intelligence and these new next generation of technologies?

[Matt Levin]

The Department of Justice has floated slicing off the Android phone operating system in the Chrome browser from Google, arguing those products reinforce Google's search monopoly. Daniel Rubenfeld, the economist in the Clinton administration, doj says regardless of whether Google gets broken up, consumers should know the rate of technological progress isn't exclusively dictated by Silicon Valley.

[Kai Rysdal]

I think it's wrong to think that the path of innovation is predetermined and that it can't be influenced by actions taken by the unit trust agencies.

[Matt Levin]

Although he still uses Windows for his operating system and Google for his search engine. Hi, I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

[Hannah Berniske]

Coming up, it was just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it was like the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

[Kai Rysdal]

Sometimes the classics really are the best, right? First though, let's do the numbers. Dow industrials up 288 today. 7. 10% closed at 42,052. The Nasdaq increased 144 points, about 8. 10%. 18,239. The S&P 500 picked up 23 points, about 4, 10%. 57 and 28. For the week, the Dow slid about a tenth of 1%. The Nasdaq subtracted a percent and a half. The S&P 500 down 1.4%. Intel posted earnings, reporting a $16.6 billion net loss last quarter. Company pointed recent restructuring and lower than expected demand for its products. Intel nonetheless because capitalism spiked 7 and 8. 10% today. Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10 year t note rose to 4.38%. You're listening to Marketplace. You turn to Marketplace for up to the minute news for stories that show you the connections between global events and your personal economy. And you're not alone. Marketplace is the most widely consumed business and economic news program in the the country. We're proud to make fact based journalism freely accessible and Marketplace investors make it all possible. Your year end donation today will make a real difference in our nonprofit newsroom and in the lives of millions of Marketplace listeners every single day. So please contribute what you can [e-mail] donate. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rysdal. California was, as you may or may not be aware, the first state in the union to ban single use plastic bags at grocery and liquor stores. Should you happen to move out here or even visit, you might be surprised then to see that in stores there are still lots of plastic bags. So clearly the bag ban didn't work the way it was supposed to. But California is trying again. There is a new law that promises to solve the problem and end those plastic bags once and for all. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells reports on what went wrong with the first try and whether the second try is going to go any better.

[Courtney Brown]

The first volunteers arrive at a bank of the LA river at 8am on a Saturday morning to pick up trash. Louisiana is huge and full of eco conscious people and its namesake river is awesome, but also notoriously gross sometimes. So thousands of people show up. Dan Mott is an environmental educator with Friends of the LA river, which is the nonprofit that puts this cleanup event on every year. He says out of all the stuff they pull out of the river, the.

[Hannah Berniske]

Most common item is plastic bags.

[Courtney Brown]

Because when California's first ban went into effect in 2016, the companies making plastic bags found a loophole. If you make them thicker and prove they can be reused a certain number of times, they don't count as single use bags anymore. The loophole worked spectacularly and Mott saw the evidence in the river's trash.

[Hannah Berniske]

All of a sudden they just became very prominent again. And they're sometimes like the thicker ones with that ridiculous notion that we would be reusing those.

[Courtney Brown]

We for the most part do not reuse those. California's plastic grocery bag waste actually increased after the first ban went into effect, according to the state's Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery. Partly because even though some bags say they're recyclable, a lot of recyclers can't process them. And partly because even the kind of people who live in LA and show up at 8am to pick up trash don't reuse bags.

[Kai Rysdal]

Often.

[Neal Richardson]

I forget it in the trunk in my car.

[Hannah Berniske]

I mean, I forget bags every once in a while, right?

[Neela Richardson]

So I'm like, shoot. And I always ask for a paper.

[Hannah Berniske]

Bag and they never have paper bags, so I always have to get those plastics.

[Courtney Brown]

Those were volunteers. Todd Smith Carly Mischke and Alexis Brunko. This new law aims to close that loop loophole. It says shoppers can either bring in their own bag, buy a paper bag, or walk out with no bag at all.

[Kai Rysdal]

Gosh, I hope we got it done. I mean, it's like third or fourth times the charm in terms of making this happen.

[Courtney Brown]

Mark Murray is the executive director of an environmental group called Californians Against Waste. He's hopeful, but the new law isn't perfect.

[Kai Rysdal]

This legislation is regulating what happens at.

[Courtney Brown]

The check stand, meaning the point of sale, no plastic at checkout or at the curb for pickup or from the delivery person.

[Kai Rysdal]

But this legislation does not regulate what can be sold in the aisles of the store.

[Courtney Brown]

So theoretically, you could just stick those thick bags in an aisle a few steps away from the checkout lanes.

[Kai Rysdal]

We're hoping that grocery stores will abide by the spirit of the law because we don't want to do this again two or four years from now.

[Courtney Brown]

Other states have managed to actually ban plastic bags. Kayla Montani is an environmental program specialist with New York's Department of Environmental Conservation.

[Hannah Berniske]

We were able to kind of see what was going on in California, and so here in New York State, they were never allowed to qualify as a.

[Courtney Brown]

Reusable bag, just like California's. The New York law doesn't apply to everybody. The mom and pop restaurant can still use plastic. So can the butcher in the grocery store. But Montani says New York City still saw a massive decrease once the ban went into effect.

[Hannah Berniske]

Between 2017 and 2023, there was over a 50% decrease in the amount of plastic bags in the waste stream.

[Courtney Brown]

California won't know whether its new law is successful for more than a year. Stores have until January of 2026 to comply. In Los Angeles, I'm Kayleigh Wells for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

It's been a little more than a month since Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast, devastating lives and livelihoods in its path. Western North Carolina, as you know, is especially hard hit. In a press conference last week, Governor Roy Cooper said damage and recovery costs have come to an estimated $53 billion. That's infrastructure, people's homes and businesses small and large. Here's one business owner story.

[Hannah Berniske]

My name is Hannah Berniske, and I am the owner of Cold Mountain Art Collective, located in Canton, North Carolina. So Cold Mountain Art Collective is a local art gallery where we host 40 local artists to sell their work. And we also have a community ceramic studio. The day of the flood, Friday, September 27th, my family and I drove down to downtown Canton, which is just less than a mile from our house. And they had the roads closed, which was to be expected. This isn't the first time we've flooded. And so we kind of. We had an idea in our mind what it might look like. When I turned the corner and saw my building and the water level up to the. The top of my windows, it was just far more than I could have anticipated. I was not expecting it to get that high. I just kind of collapsed in on myself, I guess, at the visual of it, knowing that all of my equipment in there, all of the things I'd been working on was just gone. My contents, all my furniture, equipment, my materials, sits right around $35,000. That includes my kilns and my wheels and then my building materials. So all of the work that I'm going to have to have done to replace plumbing, electrical, drywall, trim, flooring, all of that is going to be right at 100,000. I have received a few small grants, $500, which isn't much, but it does help. And those have been sort of locally funded through Asheville Arts Group. I've applied for a few other larger grants. I'm crossing my fingers for those because my insurance, while I do have it, it doesn't cover enough of the contents. So I'm still very actively seeking any and every grant. It's inspiring to see this community continue to come out and support despite what's happened. I will see. One day I was working, cleaning up, cleaning up the shop, just, you know, looking so grungy, and somebody came up with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and like a little Kool Aid pouch in this bag. And they're like, it's not much, but, you know, you look like you could use some sustenance. And it was just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it was like the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich because it was homemade with love. And somebody was just like, you should have this. It was just. It's so. It's so nice. Those moments have just been what keep you going, you know.

[Kai Rysdal]

Hannah Berniske, the owner of Cold Mountain Art Collective, she's in Canton, North Carolina. This final note on the way out today saw this in Bloomberg. A financial and economic data point to go out on this Friday before election day. So far this cycle, 11,000 political groups have spent. Come on, take a guess. What do you think? However much it is, think higher. $14.7 billion on federal races. Our theme music was composed by BJ Lederman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargoli. Donna Tam is the executive editor. Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager. And I'm Kai Rysdal. Have yourselves a great weekend, everybody. We will see you again on Monday. All right. This is apm. You turn to Marketplace for up to the minute news for stories that show you the connections between global events and your personal economy. And you're not alone. Marketplace is the most widely consumed business and economic news program in the country. We're proud to make fact based journalism freely accessible, and Marketplace investors make it all possible. Your year end donation today will make a real difference in our nonprofit newsroom and in the lives of millions of Marketplace listeners every single day. So please contribute what you can [e-mail] donate.