These jobs may be hot in the next 10 years … or not

Summary

Marketplace Podcast Summary: "These Jobs May Be Hot in the Next 10 Years … or Not"

Release Date: December 19, 2024
Host: Kyle Rysdal

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1. Introduction

In this episode of Marketplace, host Kyle Rysdal delves into the intricate dynamics shaping the American economy, from Federal Reserve policies and their impact on the housing market to future job projections and corporate culture. The episode weaves through expert opinions, real-world business challenges, and evolving market trends to provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of what the next decade might hold for various economic sectors.

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2. Federal Reserve's Interest Rate Policy

Jay Powell’s Insights: The Federal Reserve Chair, Jay Powell, provides a cautious outlook on the U.S. economy, emphasizing the challenges in managing inflation and guiding interest rate policies.

• Economic Stability: Powell asserts, “We think the economy's in a really good place and we think policy's in a really good place” (00:43).

• Interest Rate Adjustments: Initially, Fed members anticipated four interest rate cuts in the coming year, reflecting a response to inflationary pressures. However, due to persistent inflation, Powell adjusted this forecast downward to two cuts:

  “I think that the, the lower, the slower pace of cuts for next year really reflects both the higher inflation readings we've had this year and the expectation inflation will be higher” (01:31).

Market Reactions: This shift led to significant volatility in financial markets, with major stock indices experiencing notable declines:

• Stock Market Declines:

  • Dow Industrials: Down 2.6% (12:05)
  • Nasdaq: Down 3.6% (12:05)
  • S&P 500: Down approximately 3% (12:05)

• Mortgage Rates: Despite the Fed’s rate cuts, mortgage rates climbed to about 6.6% for a 30-year fixed mortgage, exceeding the rates when the Fed began its rate-cutting cycle in September (02:34).

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3. Impact on the Housing Market

Lock-In Effect: High mortgage rates have led to a significant “lock-in effect,” where homeowners with existing low rates are reluctant to sell, thus restricting housing inventory and sustaining high prices.

• Real Estate Insights: Jane Urich from the Northwest Illinois Alliance of Realtors highlights the scarcity:

  “We currently have over 900 realtors in our board of Realtors, and with our inventory right around 346 houses and condos available, that makes the competition pretty stiff” (04:17).

• National Impact: Economist Jonah Cost of the Federal Housing Finance Agency explains:

  “This reduction in supply increased prices by 7%” (05:08).

Regional Dynamics: Matt Levin reports on Rockford, Illinois, where housing prices remain attractive in the low to mid-200s, but finding sellers with locked-in rates is challenging:

“There are people that look at that 3% interest rate and aren't giving it up unless life issues come up” (04:43).

Economic Inequality: Darrell Fairweather from Redfin points out the widening gap between homeowners and potential buyers:

“People who had a home or bought a home during the pandemic and people who weren't ready to buy a home quite yet” (05:46).

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4. Labor Market and Job Projections

Occupational Employment Projections: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases annual projections outlining the top growing occupations over the next decade.

• Top Growing Occupations: Home health aides, software developers, cooks, and registered nurses are among those expected to see significant job creation (07:38).

• Fastest Growing by Percentage: Solar and wind turbine technicians, nurse practitioners, and data scientists lead in percentage growth (07:38).

Debate on Projection Reliability: Peter Capelli from the Wharton School critiques the accuracy of long-term job forecasts:

“These forecasts on technology have been spectacularly wrong... They’re driven by people who are building the technology telling you what is possible. They’re not telling you what is practical” (10:06).

Mitchell Hartman emphasizes treating these projections as general directions rather than precise predictions:

“Flores says it's most important to focus on skills and interests that will help a student develop in their career 10 years down the road” (11:27).

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5. The PowerPoint Culture in Corporates

Overuse and Criticism: The episode critiques the pervasive use of PowerPoint in corporate settings, highlighting its drawbacks and the frustration it causes among employees.

• Jane Urich’s Perspective:

  “It is a software that for I think almost 30 years has come with every personal home computer and every business computer... It was designed to get rid of presentation jitters and instead it's just sort of made bloated presenters of us all” (20:02).

• Alternatives Advocated by Leaders:
  Leaders like Jeff Bezos advocate for alternatives, such as the Amazon 6-pager, which promotes concise, narrative-driven documents:

  “It's a memoir and there's no specific format. You sit down, you write what the business problem is and everyone has to read it before” (22:43).

Balancing Use: Jane Urich suggests maximizing PowerPoint’s effectiveness by embracing minimalism:

“If I'm being forced to use it, I'm gonna embrace the low density quality... each slide can only contain one thing” (22:29).

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6. Financial Markets Overview

Stock and Bond Market Movements: The episode provides a snapshot of the financial markets in reaction to Fed policies:

• Stock Indices:

  • Dow Industrials: -2.6% (12:05)
  • Nasdaq: -3.6% (12:05)
  • S&P 500: -3% (12:05)

• Corporate Stocks:

  • Loan Depot: Down 7.5% (12:05)
  • General Mills: Down 3.1% after adjusting profit outlook (12:05)
  • Birkenstock: Up 2% with a 21% revenue increase (12:05)

• Bond Yields:

  • 10-year Treasury Note: Yield up to 4.52% (12:05)

Fed’s Broader Policy Considerations: Kyle Rysdal touches on broader economic policies influencing interest rates, including potential tariffs and tax cuts, which may sustain higher inflation levels (13:00).

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7. Impact of Interest Rates on Businesses

Construction Sector: High interest rates deter new construction projects as developers like John Kirk of Light Path Company in Texas become more selective:

“They're still too high for a lot of construction projects to make economic sense” (14:12).

Commercial Borrowers: High rates affect borrowers with maturing loans, leading to scaled-back plans or canceled projects:

“Borrowers are likely going to scale back their plans, maybe cancel a new project or new hiring” (15:08).

Restaurant Industry Adaptation: Restaurants are adapting to higher costs by modifying menus and enhancing the customer experience to maintain profitability:

“He modified his menus to keep quality high but prices reasonable. Think chicken instead of veal or featuring family style meals instead of individual entrees” (15:48).

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8. Housing Market Trends: Exurbs and Remote Work

Zillow’s Insights: Data from Zillow indicates a shift toward exurbs and smaller cities, driven by affordability and the rise of remote work.

• Most Popular Areas: Manchester, New Hampshire tops the list, followed by cities in Connecticut, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, Maryland (17:09).

• Affordability Factor:

  “Affordability in general has become a nationwide issue” (17:55).

Remote Work Influence: The ability to work remotely allows individuals to relocate to more affordable areas without the burden of long commutes:

“The rise of remote work has made more people feel like they can move further out” (17:55).

Potential Trend Reversal: With companies increasingly calling employees back to the office, there may be a resurgence in demand for housing closer to urban centers:

“People are looking to be a little bit closer to the office” (18:50).

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9. Federal Reserve and Bitcoin Reserves

Powell’s Stance on Bitcoin: In response to a query from Neil Irwin of Axios regarding the Federal Reserve building a reserve of Bitcoin, Jay Powell firmly states that the Fed is not seeking to own Bitcoin and is awaiting Congressional action on such matters:

“We're not allowed to own bitcoin... We are not looking for a law change. That's the kind of thing for Congress to consider” (24:43).

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10. Conclusion

The episode of Marketplace provides an in-depth exploration of the current economic landscape, highlighting the Federal Reserve's cautious approach to interest rate adjustments amidst persistent inflation, the constrained housing market due to the lock-in effect, and the evolving job market influenced by technology and demographic shifts. Additionally, it critiques the overreliance on PowerPoint in corporate environments and examines the shifting preferences in housing driven by remote work and affordability. Through expert interviews and real-world business insights, the podcast paints a nuanced picture of the economic challenges and opportunities that may define the next decade.

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For more insights and detailed discussions, listeners can access the full episode on Marketplace’s website or their preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Kyle Rysdal]

Lest you think that running this economy.

[Jay Powell]

Is easy, it's not unlike driving on a foggy night or walking into a dark room full of furniture.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Happy Fed day, everybody. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace in Los Angeles. I'm Kyle Rysdal. It is Wednesday today, the 18th of December. Good as always to have you along, everybody. What is the first thing you think of when you hear the guy most responsible for running the American economy say this?

[Jay Powell]

Let me start by saying that we think the economy's in a really good place and we think policy's in a really good place.

[Kyle Rysdal]

If you're a regular consumer of economic news, you might think, yeah, the economy's okay, inflation's still a tad hot and prices are higher, but generally, you know, good. If you are a Wall street consumer of economic news, though, clearly this is the end of the world because Powell also said this.

[Jay Powell]

Two cuts next year compared to four in September.

[Kyle Rysdal]

That is back in September, with inflation a tad less sticky than it is now, guesses among the members of the Federal Reserve was that they would cut interest rates four times next year. Now, with the aforementioned stickiness holding inflation higher than the Fed and the rest of us want it to be, the central bank is banking on just two cuts next year.

[Jay Powell]

I think that the, the lower, the slower pace of cuts for next year really reflects both the higher inflation readings we've had this year and the expectation inflation will be higher.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Two and a half percent is where the Fed thinks inflation is going to be come the end of next year. Cue the market sell off. It is almost a footnote to point out, I guess, that they did cut inflation interest rates today, another quarter percentage point, the third cut this year. And two things specifically to mention here.

[Jay Powell]

Number one, look at the labor market. It's cooler by so many measures now, modestly cooler than it was in 2019, a year when inflation was well under 2%. So it's not a source of inflationary pressures. Not to say there aren't regional and particular professions where labor is tight, but overall, you're not getting inflationary impulses of any significance from the labor market.

[Kyle Rysdal]

And number two and related, the story.

[Jay Powell]

Is still just we're unwinding from these large shocks that the economy got in 20, 21 and 22, which is kind.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Of amazing because it's been like three years, you know, Wall street on this Fed Day. Everything was fine until Jay Powell started talking. We'll have the details when we do the the federal funds rate, which is the rate the Federal Reserve controls, is a powerful if Blunt economic tool, but it is by no means all powerful. Exhibit A, the American housing market. Last week, the average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage was about 6.6%, which is higher than when the Fed started its rate cutting cycle back in September. So that's not great for the housing market. But the bigger problem is that according to the Federal Housing Finance agency, something like 60% of people who are paying on mortgages right now have rates below that gets us something called the lock. In effect, homeowners who don't want to give up those cheap rates, which means they don't want to sell, which means housing inventory stays low and housing prices stay high. Marketplace's Matt Levin has more now on the housing market's new normal.

[Matt Levin]

Hopefully there'll be more than enough eggnog at today's holiday office party for the Northwest Illinois alliance of Realtors, because there definitely aren't enough houses to go around.

[Jane Urich]

We currently have over 900 realtors in our board of Realtors, and with our inventory right around 346 houses and condos available, that makes the competition pretty stiff.

[Matt Levin]

Jane Urich has been a real estate agent in the Rockford, Illinois area for 38 years. It's about 90 miles northwest of Chicago. Homes are priced attractively in the low to mid-200s. The problem is finding interested sellers.

[Jane Urich]

There are people that look at that 3% interest rate and aren't giving it up unless life issues come up. Estate sales, divorces, job relocations.

[Matt Levin]

According to research from the Federal Housing Finance Administration, the lock in effect resulted in 1.7 million fewer home sales nationally between 2022 and 2024. Jonah Cost is an economist with FHFA.

[Jonah Cost]

This reduction in supply increased prices by 7%.

[Matt Levin]

That's part of the reason when the Fed was raising rates to fight inflation, housing prices stayed high. And unless rates somehow dropped dramatically, which feels unlikely, cost doesn't see the lock in effect dissipating.

[Kyle Rysdal]

We don't find any evidence that simply time is going to do much to.

[Matt Levin]

Alleviate this, this new normal. So many homeowners with dramatically cheaper mortgages compared to market rates is basically unprecedented, says economist Darrell Fairweather at Redfin. And that's widening the gap between the have nots and have homes.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Well, there's definitely this unfortunate inequality between.

[Darrell Fairweather]

People who had a home or bought a home during the pandemic and people who weren't ready to buy a home quite yet.

[Matt Levin]

Sure, location matters a lot with real estate, but so does timing. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

[Kyle Rysdal]

If because of timing in your life you miss us on the actual air. We've got a podcast, you know, just in case you can find [e-mail] or just follow us on the platform of your choice. The jobs report that we get the first Friday of every month. The Employment Situation Summary, it's called. That's the official name. It tells us where the labor market in this country was the month prior. Less remarked upon is another data set the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out. It's called the Occupational Employment Projections, and it's done annually with a window 10 years into the future. In its most recent edition out this past summer, the Department of Labor says the top growing occupations, I.e. those with the most new jobs being created include home health aid software developer, cook and registered nurse. The fastest growing occupations that's by percent increase in jobs include solar and wind turbine technicians, nurse practitioner and data scientist. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman explains what's driving job growth and loss and not to be forgotten how much trust we really ought to put in labor market predictions A.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Whole decade out the folks at Portland State University's Career center really want to know what the BLS's hot jobs of the future are.

[Kyle Rysdal]

I am Giovanna DeFalco, Employer Relations Manager Marissa Miller. I'm the internship coordinator.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Their students career ideas range from clearly defined to impressionistic at best, says Miller.

[Kyle Rysdal]

For some people it is a job title. For some people it is.

[Jane Urich]

Well, this is a thing that I.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Learned in class this week that I didn't know was a possibility.

[Jane Urich]

That's what I'm interested in today.

[Mitchell Hartman]

DeFalco says to point students down plausible career paths.

[Darrell Fairweather]

Data like this it is helpful to have an idea of where the labor.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Market might go, where demand is going to be.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Demographics are one structural factor shaping future labor market demand. Michael Wolff is in charge of employment projections at bls. He says health care will be the fastest growing option occupational sector driven by the needs of aging baby boomers. Meanwhile, the older generation of carpenters, welders, machinists and the like are aging out of manufacturing and construction, those skilled trades.

[Kyle Rysdal]

They may not be growing rapidly, but if a lot of the workers are retiring, it can still be creating a whole lot of opportunities for new workers.

[Mitchell Hartman]

There's less opportunity in K12 education as the birth rate and school age population fall. Wolf says the other big driver of job change is new technology, renewable energy and EVs, robots and artificial intelligence causing job loss and growth.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Computer mathematical are the second fastest growing occupational group.

[Jane Urich]

A lot of that is being driven.

[Mitchell Hartman]

By big data and the flip side.

[Kyle Rysdal]

The fastest declines office and administrative clerical type workers primarily being impacted by automation.

[Mitchell Hartman]

There's already evidence of technological unemployment as AI is rolled out in marketing and back office operations, says economist Joe Bruceuelis at consulting firm rsm.

[Kyle Rysdal]

You can see in places like finance sophisticated technologies being deployed, causing very talented, very expensive white collar workers to have problems finding employment.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Meanwhile, he says, lower skilled office workers are looking more and more like the telephone operators of a past generation.

[Kyle Rysdal]

I think the population most at risk.

[Jay Powell]

Are women, 25 to 54.

[Kyle Rysdal]

For less than two years of education, those jobs are just going to be automated out of existence.

[Peter Capelli]

I will rant for just a minute here.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Peter Capelli directs the center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.

[Peter Capelli]

These forecasts on technology have been spectacularly wrong. Remember driverless cars? By 2019, the prediction was that truck drivers would be obsolete.

[Mitchell Hartman]

BLS now predicts there'll be 200,000 more of them by 2033.

[Peter Capelli]

The reason that they're always spectacularly wrong is that they're driven by people who are building the technology telling you what is possible. They're not telling you what is practical.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Capelli isn't a big fan of making job projections for a decade in the future either.

[Peter Capelli]

Forecasts stopped working out very well about 50 years ago and we really, really want to have them. It's hard to get people to accept the fact that maybe you got to just deal with a lot of uncertainty.

[Mitchell Hartman]

At Portland State's career center, the BLS's long term job predictions are treated like general directions on a map, says director Greg Flores. He offers an example. Ten years ago, BLS listed cartographer among the fastest growing occupations. Flores hasn't sent a lot of students down that specific career path.

[Jane Urich]

But the skill behind that cartography is a program called ArcGIS, and there are lots of jobs that use it. But the job title isn't what the projection said it was going to be.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Flores says it's most important to focus on skills and interests that will help a student develop in their career 10 years down the road. I'm Mitchell Hartman for MarketPL.

[Jane Urich]

You sit down, you write what the business problem is and everyone has to read it before now.

[Kyle Rysdal]

That is a productive use of company time. First though, let's do the numbers. Yeah, the WAWAS feels like it's been a while. The Dow Industrials tumbled 1,123 points today 2.6% 42,326. The Nasdaq sank 716 points. That is 3.6% 19,003 9 or 2s and P 500 off 178 points, about 3%, 5,872 there. Matt Levin was talking about mortgage rates. So let's look at some lenders. Rocket companies subtracted four and a half percent. Loan Depot slid seven and a half percent. Guild holdings company off one and four, 10% today. General Mills down 3.1%. That's after the snack and cereal company adjusted down its 2025 profit outlook in its most recent earnings report. Birkenstock reported strong profits year over year. The sandal company saw a 21% jump in revenue. Shares walked nay they ran, hard as that may be to do In Birkenstocks, up 2% today. Bonds just cuz prices down. Yield on the 10 year T note up 4.52%. Thank you, Jay Powell. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rysdal. We've been talking a whole lot about the bond market on the program this week, which is mostly a way to talk about interest rates, the cost of borrowing money. The Federal Reserve, as we said up at the top of the program, just cut that cost by a quarter of a percentage point. But it has become clear since Election Day mostly that rates might not fall much farther given the possibility of new tariffs, more tax cuts, mass deportations, and the higher inflation those policies are likely to trigger. And if interest rates don't fall or if they go up, businesses are going to have to figure out how to deal with higher for longer interest rates. So Marketplace's Justin Ho called a couple of those businesses to see how they're getting ready.

[Jonah Cost]

One sector that's really sensitive to interest rates is construction. John Kirk, the founder of the Light Path Company, an apartment construction firm in New Braunfels, Texas, says even though rates have started to come down, they're still too high for a lot of construction projects to make economic sense.

[Kyle Rysdal]

So that's why you're not going to see a huge robust pipeline of supply hitting the market again.

[Jonah Cost]

Kirk says he and other developers still have to make money. But if rates stay elevated throughout the next 12 months, he says they are going to be pretty choosy when it.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Comes to site selection and what deals do they believe in and how do you raise capital and really get it across the finish line to start construction?

[Jonah Cost]

Even though interest rates have been slowly coming down, there are plenty of commercial borrowers that are about to get hit with much higher rates. Dominic Miartin, CEO of American Pride bank in Macon, Georgia, says that's because they're sitting on loans they took out a few years ago back when rates were really low.

[Kyle Rysdal]

And if those loans were originated with three to five year terms, then those loans are maturing right about now, yartan says.

[Jonah Cost]

That means those borrowers are likely going to scale back their plans, maybe cancel a new project or new hiring.

[Kyle Rysdal]

So there's a chilling effect. Even though the rates have come down recently, they're still much higher than they were three or four or five years ago.

[Jonah Cost]

High rates also have an indirect impact on industries that rely on consumer spending. Spiro Papadopoulos, CEO of SHLO Restaurant Group, says when car loans and credit cards and mortgages are expensive, it affects the.

[Matt Levin]

Restaurant business earlier than it would something.

[Jane Urich]

That is less able to be cut.

[Jonah Cost]

Out, like, for instance, gas or groceries. Papadopoulos says he made plenty of changes to his restaurants while interest rates and inflation were even higher. He modified his menus to keep quality high but prices reasonable. Think chicken instead of veal or featuring family style meals instead of individual entrees.

[Jane Urich]

Really just trying to offer more value during that period of time and amping.

[Matt Levin]

Up the experience, the hospitality.

[Jonah Cost]

Papadopoulos says even if interest rates fall more slowly next year, his restaurants are still in a position to give consumers what they want. I'm Justin Ho from Marketplace.

[Kyle Rysdal]

No matter how much mortgages might be costing, when people gotta move, they gotta move. And according to new data from Zillow, the most popular housing markets of the year were exurbs and small cities, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. We're talking places with lower housing prices than the nearby big cities that are within long but still reasonable commuting distances. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has that one what.

[Darrell Fairweather]

Does it mean for a city to be popular in this case? Skyler Olson, chief economist at Zillow, says it means places where home prices have appreciated significantly.

[Jane Urich]

And where do we see the most attention and traffic?

[Darrell Fairweather]

On Zillow.com? this year, Manchester, New Hampshire, tops the list. Four cities in Connecticut also made it, as did Allentown, Pennsylvania and Columbia, Maryland.

[Jane Urich]

Really the exurban cities, right? So think of these as ones within 90 miles from, you know, that major city core.

[Darrell Fairweather]

This tracks with general trends we've been seeing for the last few years, people moving away from big metro areas and towards smaller and medium sized cities and rural areas. Rudin Frost at the Joint center for Housing Studies says the biggest factor for most people is cost.

[Jane Urich]

Affordability in general has become a nationwide issue. And so I could really see that driving people to move out, especially if they're trying to purchase a home and.

[Darrell Fairweather]

The rise of remote work has made more people feel like they can move further out, says Richard Greene at the USC Lusk center for Real Estate.

[Mitchell Hartman]

Work from home has changed where people want to live. And if you don't have to go into work, you can live wherever you like.

[Darrell Fairweather]

But he says the ability to work from home is key if you are moving for affordability.

[Mitchell Hartman]

If you don't work from home, I don't think the exurbs are particularly affordable because the cost of commuting is expensive.

[Darrell Fairweather]

Especially if you have to drive a long distance. And a lot of companies are calling people back to the office, whether a few days a week or full time.

[Kyle Rysdal]

And that's going to make closer in locations more popular.

[Darrell Fairweather]

Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright mls, says she's already seeing that in Mid Atlantic markets.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Recently it has been the first ring Suburbs of D.C. and of Philadelphia where homebuyers have been most active. Which suggests to me that people are looking to be a little bit closer to the office, a little bit closer.

[Darrell Fairweather]

To transportation, even if it's a little bit or a lot less affordable. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

[Kyle Rysdal]

I'm gonna go not too terribly far out on a limb here and say that there is not a person among us who hasn't had to sit through a meeting that most certainly should have been an email watching somebody read to you every wor of their 25 page PowerPoint. And yet here we are. PowerPoint is somehow a staple of corporate culture. Matt Alston wrote about PowerPoint's hold on us and Business Insider. Matt, thanks for coming on.

[Jane Urich]

How are you?

[Kyle Rysdal]

I'm well. How did. But I've been to too many PowerPoint presentations. How did it come to pass that we are now living in the tyranny of PowerPoint?

[Jane Urich]

It is a software that for I think almost 30 years has come with every personal home computer and every business computer. It's become the standard mode of person made presentation. Any single person has a software that makes it very easy for them to create 6, 8 or sometimes 40, 50 slide presentation. It was designed to get rid of presentation jitters and instead it's just sort of made bloated presenters of us all.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Yeah, I get the jitters thing because it kind of does make sense. But, but look, one, one hates to give Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and bajillionaires too much credit for anything right now. But it does seem that they're onto something in trying to get rid of PowerPoint as a, as a kind of A crutch, Right.

[Jane Urich]

They're not wrong. The difference between them and the rest of us is that when they get annoyed with something, they have more power to make it go away.

[Kyle Rysdal]

That's right.

[Jane Urich]

You and I have both sat in those presentations and been like, I just wish my boss would say, shouldn't this be an email? Or shouldn't this be, you know, some something else? Well, you know, in 2004, Jeff Bezos had that response and turned to people he worked with and said, is there some way to make this go away? And they said, yes, there is.

[Kyle Rysdal]

I don't even know what to say. But here's the actual next question. So why? Obviously it's useful, I get that. But it has now been abused. Why do you suppose it is that we're all just still stuck? Is it just middle managers not having the courage to say, cut it out, don't do that anymore.

[Jane Urich]

I think that because it's easy to use and because it turns conversation into presentation, because it's low density, you don't have to put all of the information.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Oh, but people always do, Matt. You know that. Come on, man.

[Jane Urich]

Well, yeah, you know.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Yeah, let me repeat it to you.

[Jane Urich]

Well, I think that PowerPoints and presentation tools often appeal to two specific types of vices. Either the very, very, very over prepared or the badly under prepared. But being in the room for either type of presentation stinks. If you're, if you're a bad presenter, it can help you. If you're a good presenter, it's not a, it's not a crutch you need.

[Kyle Rysdal]

And right there, right there is why we're having this conversation, right? And that's why we've all been in those, those PowerPoint presentations. I get that. Is there a, is there a substitute? Is there. I mean, PowerPoint's not going away anytime soon, I guess, is the question, right?

[Jane Urich]

PowerPoint isn't going away. There Bezos at Amazon and many of his is, you know, his sort of NFL coaching tree of VPs and now CEOs who've worked under him swear by the Amazon 6 pager. It's a memoir and there's no specific format. You sit down, you write what the business problem is and everyone has to read it before. Some companies even have silent reading time at the beginning of meetings where you digest, right? You digest everything and then you address the question or the single order of business. Lots of CEOs like that, right?

[Kyle Rysdal]

Where are you on the spectrum? Are you one of those users who kind of slaps a sentence on seven different things and wings it. Or do you overstuff?

[Jane Urich]

I like pictures. I like the TED Talk. A writer who likes pictures, now I like the TED Talk. I like the the right question to ask is not what is the correct PowerPoint use for this presentation, but should PowerPoint be used at all? And if I'm being forced to use it, I'm gonna embrace the low density quality. You know, each slide can only contain one thing. Well, then it might contain a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip or, or just a one liner or a quote. Because like you said, when the person is reading what's on the page that you're looking at, you know, you're, you're headed for the edge of the waterfall.

[Kyle Rysdal]

Amen. Matt Alston at Business Insider writing about PowerPoint. Matt, thanks a lot. Appreciate your time.

[Jane Urich]

Yes, sir. This was a ple.

[Kyle Rysdal]

This final note on the way out today. One last item from Chair Powell's press conference in which the lines are best read between Neil Irwin from Axios asking the question, do you see any value.

[Jonah Cost]

Or benefits in the US Government building a reserve of bitcoin?

[Jay Powell]

So, you know, we, we're not allowed to own bitcoin. The Federal Reserve X says what we can own and we're, we're not looking, looking for a law change. That's the kind of thing for Congress to consider, but we are not looking for a law change at the Fed.

[Kyle Rysdal]

And there you have it. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Justin Dueler, Drew joustadgarrio, Keith Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Tirado, and Becca Weinman. Jeff Peters is the manager of media production, and I'm Kyle Rysdal. We will see you tomorrow. Everybody, this is APM.