Can the grid take the heat?

Summary

Marketplace: Can the Grid Take the Heat? Release Date: December 10, 2024 | Host: Kristen Schwab

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Inflation Expectations and Economic Outlook

The episode opens with Kristen Schwab addressing the persistent focus on inflation, highlighting that what the Bureau of Labor Statistics labels "inflation week" has effectively become a weekly concern since mid-2021. With upcoming releases of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI), Schwab emphasizes the importance of not just current inflation rates but also consumer expectations for the future.

Stephanie Hughes reports that consumer expectations for inflation have returned to pre-pandemic levels. “To me, this just seems like it's all a return to normality,” Hughes remarks at [01:57]. Alan Detmeister, an economist for UBS, provides insight into consumer psychology, noting that “consumers tend to overestimate where inflation will be. They remember more when prices go up than when they go down” ([02:01]). Nevertheless, long-term expectations are more optimistic, with consumers anticipating inflation to slow over the next three years.

Jo Gaul from the Peterson Institute adds that current optimism stems from positive economic indicators, such as wage growth outpacing inflation. Guillaume points out that younger Americans, who haven't experienced significant inflationary periods, are adapting their expectations accordingly. Hughes encapsulates this sentiment by comparing the consumer adjustment to stages of grief, ultimately leading to acceptance ([03:12]).

Wall Street Performance

Transitioning to financial markets, Schwab notes a sobering day on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 240 points (half a percent) to finish at 44,401, while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 also saw declines ([12:10]). The reported merger between Omnicom and Interpublic Group, intended to form the largest advertising firm globally, significantly impacted the stock prices of both companies, with Omnicom slumping over ten percent ([10:08]).

Advertising Industry Merger

Elizabeth Troval delves into the implications of Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group. She underscores the dynamic nature of the advertising industry, driven by rapid technological advancements and evolving consumer platforms. “New platforms that connect people and products,” explains Troval ([10:16]), highlighting how mega firms like Omnicom can leverage their extensive resources to stay ahead of trends, such as AI-based search and social media algorithms.

John Sharpton from Mintel Consulting emphasizes the advantage of large firms in adopting and experimenting with new technologies, which smaller agencies might lack. Van Graves from Virginia Commonwealth University adds that continuous learning and adaptability are crucial for professionals in the advertising sector to thrive amidst constant change ([10:59]).

TikTok Legal Battle and Content Creation Economy

The episode shifts focus to the uncertain future of TikTok, with its parent company ByteDance seeking a court pause on a US ban. Regardless of TikTok’s fate, the broader economy of content creation remains robust yet fraught with challenges regarding content protection and creator rights.

Mia Sato from The Verge discusses a high-profile lawsuit where content creator Sydney Nicole Gifford sues Alyssa Scheel for copyright infringement, alleging that Alyssa’s similar content has led to lost earnings and commissions ([14:27]). Sato explains the complexities introduced by platform algorithms that promote trending content, often leading to similarities across creators. “Amazon actually suggests to influencers products that they could feature in their videos,” Sato notes, illustrating how algorithms can inadvertently foster content imitation ([15:50]).

This lawsuit could set a precedent, potentially expanding copyright laws to better protect content creators. However, it also raises questions about the balance between protecting intellectual property and nurturing the organic, trend-driven nature of social media ([16:59]).

US Energy Demand and Grid Capacity

Kaylee Wells reports on a concerning surge in US energy demand, projected to increase five times faster than anticipated over the next five years ([19:14]). This unprecedented growth is driven by factors such as electric vehicle (EV) adoption, heat pump installations, and an unexpected surge in AI applications. Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, draws parallels to historic demand surges from the 1950s and 1960s, assuring that the grid can manage these increases once again ([19:28]).

However, the challenge lies in ensuring that this increased demand does not lead to greater reliance on fossil fuels. Michelle Solomon from Energy Innovation argues that utilities’ preference for familiar solutions like gas plants is more a matter of inertia than necessity. Instead, Wells points out that the US will need to more than double its transmission capacity by 2050 to accommodate clean energy goals, a task complicated by lengthy permitting and planning processes ([20:25]).

Santiago Grijalba from Georgia Tech highlights the logistical hurdles in expanding transmission infrastructure, emphasizing that the primary concern is not generating new electricity but effectively distributing it to where it's needed ([20:42]).

The Evolution of Office Tools: Filing Cabinets

Craig Robertson, a media historian at Northeastern University, offers a nostalgic exploration of the filing cabinet’s role in office efficiency and its eventual symbolism of inefficiency. He traces the filing cabinet’s emergence in the 1890s as a revolutionary tool allowing for the storage of loose papers and the adoption of numerical filing systems ([21:17]).

Robertson discusses how the filing cabinet influenced office work dynamics, particularly the employment of women for their perceived dexterity. By the 1970s and 1980s, the proliferation of paper led to the filing cabinet becoming emblematic of information overload ([24:17]). He draws a parallel to modern digital practices, such as leaving browser tabs open, illustrating the enduring legacy of the filing cabinet in how we manage and perceive information ([25:06]).

Housing Market Sentiment

Concluding the episode, Schwab presents data from Fannie Mae’s latest Home Purchasing Sentiment Index. The report indicates a gradual increase in consumer confidence regarding the housing market, with 45% of respondents expecting mortgage rates to decrease in the coming year and a slight decline in those anticipating home price hikes to 38% ([25:06]). Although a majority (77%) still view it as a challenging time to buy a home, this marks a modest improvement from the previous month. Schwab underscores the significance of consumer expectations in shaping economic realities ([25:06]).

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Notable Quotes:

• “Consumers tend to overestimate where inflation will be. They remember more when prices go up than when they go down.” – Alan Detmeister, UBS ([02:01])

• “New platforms that connect people and products.” – Jeremy Goldman, eMarketer ([10:16])

• “Amazon actually suggests to influencers products that they could feature in their videos.” – Mia Sato, The Verge ([15:50])

• “Gas plants still need to jump through the same siding and supply chain and connection hoops as clean energy plants.” – Michelle Solomon, Energy Innovation ([20:12])

• “There’s nothing quite like that creative spark that happens human to human.” – Van Graves, Virginia Commonwealth University ([11:24])

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Conclusion

In this episode of "Marketplace," Kristen Schwab navigates through a spectrum of economic and technological topics, from the nuanced landscape of inflation expectations and their impact on consumer behavior, to significant shifts in the advertising industry driven by mega mergers. The legal challenges facing content creators on platforms like TikTok highlight the evolving nature of digital economies, while the surge in US energy demand underscores the critical need for infrastructural adaptation to support sustainable growth. Additionally, the historical perspective on filing cabinets serves as a reflective interlude on how tools shape and mirror our information management practices. Finally, the nuanced sentiments in the housing market offer a glimpse into consumer confidence and its broader economic implications. This comprehensive exploration provides listeners with a multifaceted understanding of the current business and economic climate.

Transcript

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[Kristen Schwab]

Expectations of the Economy they matter because they aren't just shaped by our past, they actively shape our future. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace in New York. I'm Kristen schwab in for Kairisdahl. It's Monday, December 9th. Thanks for being here. We are entering what some people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics call inflation week, though I'd kind of call every week since like mid-2021 inflation week. But maybe that's just me. Anyway, the reason why it's called inflation week is because of the amount of inflation related data that's coming out in the next few days. On Wednesday we'll get the latest Consumer Price Index. Then on Thursday comes the Producer Price Index, both readings on where inflation has been. Today's reading, though, it is on where people think inflation is going. The New York Fed survey of consumer expectations says Americans think in a year inflation will be around 3%, and in three years it'll be around 2.6%. Both of those numbers are above the Fed's target of 2%. But there might be a silver lining.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes reports consumers inflation expectations today look very similar to the way they looked before the pandemic.

[Kristen Schwab]

To me, this just seems like it's all a return to normality.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Alan Detmeister is an economist for ubs. He says consumers tend to overestimate where inflation will be. They remember more when prices go up than when they go down. That's why they might be predicting that a year out inflation will hit 3%, even though today it's around 2.6%. But he says if you look at their inflation expectations three years from now, consumers are expecting it to slow down.

[Kristen Schwab]

And people are realizing we're now starting to get wage growth that's growing faster than inflation, and things are starting to turn around.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Consumers are also more optimistic about the future of the stock market, availability of credit, what they'll earn. Jo Gaul, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, says this is people feeling good about a good economy, which means they don't think as much about the old economy.

[Kristen Schwab]

The longer the economy stays good over time, people will gradually forget that eggs used to cost, you know, much less.

[Stephanie Hughes]

Guillaume points out Americans under the age of 50 haven't really lived through an inflationary period like this before, so they're kind of learning what to expect.

[Kristen Schwab]

We do know that after the inflationary 70s, consumers came to accept the new price level and just moved on.

[Stephanie Hughes]

It's almost like consumers have to move to the next stage of grief over the loss of those old prices past denial, anger, all the rest, and eventually landed acceptance. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace.

[Kristen Schwab]

Wall street today matched the gloominess of the weather here in New York. We'll have the details when we do the number Inflation is a tricky thing. On a week like this one, it can feel like we're squinting at every data point to tell us something about where it's headed. And inflation expectations, as Stephanie Hughes was just talking about, they're tricky, too. Our feelings about prices are shaped by a trip to the gas station, a walk down the grocery aisle, and they're also shaped by who is in the Oval Office or who's about to enter it. All this got me thinking about a conversation I had a little while ago with Carola Binder, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. She just finished a book called Shock Values, Prices and Inflation in American Democracy, and we talked about the way politics and inflation interact. So with this being a big week for inflation and with big changes coming to economic policy, we decided to give her a call and get a more grounding sense of what's going on. Carola, thanks for coming back on the show.

[Carola Binder]

Of course. Thanks for having me.

[Kristen Schwab]

So I think the last time we talked was in May, and a lot was going on back then. The election was still a few months away. CPI was, was above 3%. Now it's hovering somewhere around 2, a little above 2. What is your read on where inflation is right now and where it might be headed?

[Carola Binder]

Well, I think we've made a lot of progress on inflation, or I should say the Fed has made a lot of progress on inflation, but I don't think we're all the way there yet. The most recent PCE inflation report still showed PCE inflation above the Fed's target and higher than it had been the previous month. It's better than it was a year or two ago, but there's still a little ways to go.

[Kristen Schwab]

How do you think the Fed feels? Do you think it expected to be where we are now?

[Carola Binder]

I think the Fed probably feels pretty good, and I think they probably deserve to feel that way Inflation has come down with a lot less pain than, you know, frankly, I would have expected. The economy is pretty strong and we're not back at the inflation target, but it seems like it's within sight. At the same time, they, of course, might be a little nervous about just how this last mile will go and, you know, especially with all the attention that's on them and that's on inflation right now. Like any little blip upwards could cause people to get worried about another inflation surge. So I'm sure that's something that's weighing on policymakers all the time.

[Kristen Schwab]

Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about also how the Fed feels now about what's to come. You know, Powell has said over and over that the Fed is independent from politics, but I guess I'm wondering how much he's thinking about whatever fiscal policy is coming up under the new Trump administration and if there's some way he's actually preparing for that with monetary policy now.

[Carola Binder]

Yeah. So the Fed being independent from politics certainly doesn't mean that they don't or shouldn't take fiscal policy into account. Things like tariffs, things like regulatory changes, immigration changes, all of those things, to the extent that they affect price stability, are something that the Fed has to incorporate into their policymaking. I'm not sure that we yet have a clear sense of what fiscal policy is going to be like under the new administration. But I think as that becomes more clear, that's when the Fed will have to start incorporating that into their forecasts. So the staff, the economists at the Fed who are making forecasts of future inflation and future unemployment, they are the ones who are taking fiscal policy into account and then the policymakers respond to those forecasts.

[Kristen Schwab]

Well, how might, you know, if Trump does go in on day one or two or three or sometime in the near future and put in place those tariffs he's talking about.

[Carola Binder]

Right.

[Kristen Schwab]

How might that affect inflation and give us a sense of how much it might affect it?

[Carola Binder]

I mean, that's a really difficult question. Tariffs affect the prices of some goods a lot more than others, depending on how much those goods are being imported or they are made up of things that are imported. But the Fed doesn't respond to relative price changes or to the price of a particular good rising. They have. They respond to aggregate price changes. If tariffs were to have a one time effect on the price level, that would be like we'd have one kind of short burst of inflation, but then it would level off. That wouldn't be something that the Fed would necessarily want to respond to, but if somehow they were to lead to persistently higher inflation, the Fed would want to respond to that. And I guess personally I'm a little reluctant to try to forecast what the effects would actually be.

[Kristen Schwab]

Last question, we get November's Consumer Price Index on Wednesday. What are you looking for in that reading?

[Carola Binder]

Yeah, for the November report, I'm mainly going to be looking at core cpi, looking at where the core has moved. So as opposed to looking at headline, which includes the more volatile food and energy prices, core gives you a good sense of the underlying trends and where inflation could be heading. So mainly just seeing it steady and seeing no major upward surprises is what I'm hoping for.

[Kristen Schwab]

Carola Binder is an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. Carola, thanks again for catching up.

[Carola Binder]

Thanks for having me.

[Kristen Schwab]

Today has been a big, buzzing day in the world of advertising. Omnicom announced it would be acquiring its rival, Interpublic Group. The merger will create the largest ad firm in the world. It comes at a time when marketing is making a huge shift. In its press release, Omnicom says that through the merger it will be well positioned to grow under the, quote, new era of marketing. What does that mean exactly? Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval takes a closer look.

[Elizabeth Trovall]

After 25 years in advertising. Northeastern University professor Kuhn Powles says the constant change keeps him young.

[Kristen Schwab]

Every year we have new technology, we have new platforms that consumers engage with.

[Elizabeth Trovall]

New platforms that connect people and products, says analyst Jeremy Goldman with eMarketer.

[Kristen Schwab]

You see the search industry, let's just say it's not quite moving away from Google, but the way in which people discover products has changed in a number of different ways, including social search, AI based search.

[Elizabeth Trovall]

So staying ahead of the curve is vital, and that can be an advantage of being a mega firm like Omnicom, says John Sharpton with Mintel Consulting.

[Kristen Schwab]

Often those companies have an opportunity to sort of adopt and trial new technology that maybe smaller firms don't have the.

[Elizabeth Trovall]

Ability to, whether people work at large or small agencies. Van Graves, who leads Virginia Commonwealth University's advertising program, says it's important this labor force keeps learning.

[Kristen Schwab]

You can't as an individual stagnate. And so whether it's upskilling or reskilling in times of change like this, you have to work on you.

[Elizabeth Trovall]

But he says things like AI and social media are just tools. There's nothing quite like that creative spark that happens human to human. I'm Elizabeth Trovall for Marketplace.

[Kristen Schwab]

If you want to learn more about what's driving the economy. Check out our Econ 101 course. It walks you through all the fundamentals in a way that's digestible and, dare I say, fun. Learn more and sign [e-mail] econ on.

[Craig Robertson]

Coming up, this symbol of efficiency became a symbol of inefficiency.

[Kristen Schwab]

It's funny how that happens, isn't it? But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 240 points, half a percent to finish at 44,401. The Nasdaq dropped 123 points, 6. 10% to close at 19,736. And the S&P 500 lost 37 points, also 6. 10% to end at 60:52. We heard from Elizabeth Troval about a probable merger between ad companies Omnicom and Interpublic group. Omnicom slumped ten and a quarter percent. Interpublic ascended 3.5%. Bloomberg News reports that snack giant Mondelez is considering an acquisition of Hershey's. Shares of Hershey's sweetened 10, 8, 10%. Mondelez soured two and a quarter percent. Bonds fell. The yield on the 10 year T note rose to 4.19%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab. The fate of TikTok is becoming more uncertain today. The app's owner, ByteDance, asked a federal court to pause a law that would ban the app in the US that's after a court on Friday upheld an earlier ruling that will shut down the app by January 19th. Regardless of what happens to TikTok, though, social media and the creators on it, they are here to stay. Thing is, the economy of content creation, it's relatively new. There are very few rules about how creators work and how much their content is protected. Those are the ideas at the heart of a recent lawsuit between Sydney Nicole Gifford and Alyssa Scheel. They're popular content creators who promote something called the Clean Girl aesthetic. Think freshly manicured nails and homes full of beige, Mia Sato at the Verge wrote about the lawsuit. Mia, thanks for coming on the show.

[Mia Sato]

Thank you so much for inviting me.

[Kristen Schwab]

So tell me, who is suing who in this copyright infringement case and what's going on? What's the evidence there?

[Mia Sato]

So in this case, Sydney Nicole Gifford is suing Alyssa Shiel, her competitor. So part of the documents that Sidney filed to the court include something like 70 pages of side by side screenshots of like, here's my video and here's Alyssa's video. Here is My post on Amazon, and here's Alyssa's post, here's my photo on Instagram, and here's Alyssa's photo. And it's meant to sort of show the similarities between the two women's content. But also Sydney says that Alyssa's posts were always coming after hers. So a few days or a few weeks or a few months after, and this happened allegedly for months, over and over and over. And Sydney's suit says that she actually experienced a loss in sales, a loss in earnings and commissions because Alyssa was making content that was very similar to hers.

[Kristen Schwab]

Yeah. I guess the counterargument here though is, you know, this is how social media works. It's about trends. Once you see one thing on your Instagram or TikTok, you see it over and over. Tell me about how the algorithm complicates this story in this case.

[Mia Sato]

So in the piece I write about, like several different algorithms that I think are at play, at least partially. One is obviously the Amazon recommendation algorithm. If you browse on Amazon for beige things, the platform will show you more beige things.

[Carola Binder]

Right.

[Mia Sato]

It thinks that you like that. And so there's that shopping element. There's also the social media recommendation system where if you again watch videos from Amazon influencers that say, here are my five favorite fall sweaters, the algorithm will show you more content like that. That is sort of the essence of how platforms like TikTok or Instagram or Facebook work right now. I also want to point out that Amazon has a guiding hand in all of this. Amazon actually suggests to influencers products that they could feature in their videos. So Amazon certainly is not just like a hands off entity on the sideline. They tell influencers what's trending. So the algorithms, you know, they're working from various angles and all sort of guiding creators towards the type of content that they end up making.

[Kristen Schwab]

Right. Well, this case is really about protecting influencers work. So how could a ruling change what they do, how they create content, and what we actually see when we open up our phones?

[Mia Sato]

So Sydney's lawsuit includes several really interesting and novel claims. For the purposes of this piece, I wanted to drill, drill in on Sydney's claim that Alyssa infringed on her copyright. But in this case, Alyssa never reposted Sidney's content. She just posted images that looked similar. And Sydney's argument is that this is infringing on my copyright. Now, if Sydney is successful in this, it's likely or very possible that there would be a wave of other lawsuits like this where influencers are going after someone else. But I think the takeaway of the story is really that this suit sort of gets at a complaint that a lot of content creators have. It's not rare where content creators sort of, you know, have disputes going back and forth, saying you copied my style or you copied my content, or you are mimicking what I'm doing. But there's not really much of a legal avenue, and I think this lawsuit is maybe Sydney's effort to try to find a way to solve this problem. However, it could significantly expand copyright law.

[Kristen Schwab]

Really interesting story about content creators and that content and what we see on our own social media channels in the Verge by Miya Sato, a reporter there. Mia, thanks so much for sharing your story.

[Mia Sato]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Kristen Schwab]

One asterisk on the journey towards a greener future is that as we shift away from fossil fuels, we are using more electricity more than we thought we would. A new report out from the power consulting firm Grid Strategies says over the next five years, energy demand in the US will increase five times faster than we thought it would just two years ago. That adoption rate might sound alarming, but as Marketplace's Kaylee Wells explains, we've handled way bigger surges before.

[Kaylee Wells]

We already knew about EV adoption, heat pump installations, and more domestic chip manufacturing. But then there's the big energy drain we didn't plan for.

[Craig Robertson]

The potential application of AI has grown so much that that demand was not.

[Kristen Schwab]

Really expected at all two years ago.

[Kaylee Wells]

Rob Gramlich is president of the power consulting firm Grid Strategies, which predicts that demand growth in the next five years will be five times higher than we expected. Demand growth was more than twice this much in the 60s and nearly three times as high in the 50s, which.

[Craig Robertson]

Indicates we should be able to handle it again.

[Kaylee Wells]

That was back when homes were installing air conditioning and electric stoves for the first time. Problem is, higher demand could mean higher reliance on fossil fuels. But it doesn't have to. Michelle Solomon is policy analyst at the think tank Energy Innovation.

[Kristen Schwab]

Utilities aren't proposing to build these new gas plants because they're the only solution that they can build. It's just because it's what they're used to, she says.

[Kaylee Wells]

It is still possible to meet demand and meet the US's clean energy goals.

[Kristen Schwab]

There's not necessarily a reason why adding something like a gas plant is going to be faster than clean energy, for.

[Kaylee Wells]

Instance, because gas plants still need to jump through the same siding and supply chain and connection hoops as clean energy plants. Santiago Grijalba isn't Worried about generating new electricity as much as getting that power where it needs to go. He teaches electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech.

[Kristen Schwab]

It is very difficult to build new transmission lines. It can take more than a decade to get all the permits and all the rights of ways and all the planning, et cetera, to build a new line.

[Kaylee Wells]

And there's a lot of work left to be done. The Department of Energy says the US Will need to more than double its transmission capacity by 2050. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

[Kristen Schwab]

Offices. They look and feel a little different these days. I don't come to the office five days a week anymore, though, for the record, I am here right now. I don't think I've used my work landline and I don't know how long, and I don't print stuff nearly as often, which is all to say, some of the tools we've traditionally used at work, they're just not as relevant anymore. Take the humble filing cabinet and this story on its history.

[Craig Robertson]

Craig I'm Craig Robertson. I'm a professor at Northeastern University and the author of the Filing Cabinet, A Vertical History of Information. Oddly, when I came to write and research the filing cabinet was around the time I got rid of all the filing cabinets in my life. It wasn't so much a reaction to studying it, it was just the way that technology was developing. I was actually doing another research project, and I found myself at National Archives looking through reels and reels of microfilm. It was a long, arduous struggle until I hit 1906. Suddenly my research could be done so much faster. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. Like, what's happened here? The State Department had adopted a numerical filing system. Previous to this, in businesses and government departments, you would bind all your correspondence into a book, right? So what the filing cabinet allowed you to do was to store loose paper. It was promoted as giving your office an automatic memory. People were surprisingly excited by it. I mean, it was seen as this radical change. The filing cabinet emerged in the 1890s. And so women come into the office not solely because of the filing cabinet, but because office work becomes this set of specialized tasks. And women are the people brought in to operate the machines because of this idea that women have smaller and more nimble fingers than men. You know, there's no truth to this, right? But their future employers would ask them, you know, do you crochet? Do you knit? Do you play the piano? Right? All these things that could ensure that you have these nimble fingers that will allow you to quickly retrieve a file from a file drawer. By the 1970s and 1980s, this symbol of efficiency became a symbol of inefficiency. The concept of information overload starts to take off, and information overload is usually represented by piles of paper stacked on top of filing cabinets on the floor in front of filing cabinets. Right. So there's just too much paper. And the filing cabinet comes to represent that inefficiency because, you know, it's the place where paper is stored. Information has a history, and the filing cabinet plays an important role in that history. Right, because it allows people to understand information as this discrete unit that exists in the world that can be at your fingertips. And so that obviously still lingers on today even if people don't quite understand the history of the file or appreciate how the tab is linked to a file that was linked to a filing cabinet. We just leave our browser tabs open. But it's that idea of a tab that marks information that's one of the important legacies of the filing cabinet. So although I don't own a filing cabinet, I do believe that as an invention we should definitely appreciate the filing cabinet a lot more than we do.

[Kristen Schwab]

Craig Robertson is a media historian at Northeastern University, and because there really is an expert for everything, he's an expert on filing cabinets. This final note on the way out today, we started with how consumers are feeling, and we'll end with how consumers are feeling. Fannie Mae released its latest Home Purchasing Sentiment index today. The takeaway is consumers are slowly becoming more confident about the housing market. 45% of respondents expect mortgage rates to fall in the next year. The percent who expect home prices to go up fell a bit to 38%. And the percent of people who think it's a bad time to buy sits at 77%. But that's a few percentage points lower than last month's reading. And like I said earlier, expectations matter. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillaume, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry and so Thea Terenzio. I'm Kristen Schwab. We'll be back tomorrow. This is apm.

[Julie]

Hi, this is Julie from Centennial, Colorado. I listen to Marketplace on my drive home from all my 3 to midnight ER shifts. Kai and the gang keep me awake and interested for my 30 minute drive. For someone not in the financial field, it's a fantastic synopsis of all things business and economics. I love the commitment to showcasing a steady stream of brilliant and articulate women who are experts in their field. Join me in supporting Marketplace with a gift today. Go to marketplace. Org Donate.