The Rise of Cowboy Boots

All right, fine. We'll tell you what Kevin Warsh is thinking, but it's gonna take more than five words fromr American public media This What is Marketplace In Los Angeles, I'm Ky Risnell. It is Wednesday today, the very first day of July. good as always have you along everybody. We begin in Cintra, Portugal, not far from the capital of Lisbon, but a bit out of the way perhaps to be the center of global central banking That nonetheless is where Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh and his international colleagues found themselves today. for a regular confab on the state of the economic world. Borsch at one point was asked about the risks that he sees out there right now I'm not prepared to sort of make a broad comment denoting risks that are available in the system But I will say this, this is the biggest time of consequence to each of our economies, I think, in our lifetime The global financial crisis of two thousand eight would like a word, but war sighted AI, persistent inflation, geopolitical dyspepsia, and the low highire, low fire labor market. as some of the things he is keeping an eye on at his first press conference a couple of weeks ago, War said he's also keeping an eye onn Wall Street and that is where we're going to spend the first couple of minutes of the program. Financial market prices are probably the most important source of information to guide central bankers. So that was a couple of weeks ago. The relationship between the central bank and the financial markets can be tricky. The Fed doesn't want everybody to think it's worried about asset prices in the lingo But also if those asset prices take a dive Everybody starts getting economically nervous which gets us to something called the Fed in its original iteration the green span put So the Fed port dates back essentially to the start of Alan Greenspan's tenure as Fed chair. One thing that he did was or allegedly did was in response to stock market crashes, intervened in the Fed liquidity markets pretty heavily That's J Kadia at the Katado Institute. Liquidity, just a fancy word for companies being able to get their hands on ready cash. put Just an investing term for a way to cut your losses Teen eighty seven. Tber Monday The dow drops twenty two and a five hf percent in a day. Alan Greenspan two months into his chairmanship The Fed responds, as J Ky has said by helping big banks stay afloat and the Greenspan put was born. And then you had the dot com bubble burst in two thousand one that also led to fed liquidity injections And then of course, you have Bernanke become Fed Chair and then has to deal with the financial crisis. And the Fed stepped in to help markets and calm markets That was the Bernanke put. There was a powell put during the pandemic. thinkink about what was happening in the markets back then They are saying Oh, if markets are signaling something plify something that is going on in the economy, then we should take it seriously. That's Anna Cheslack at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business Here is J Katie one more time with the However come The stock market you know crashes and falls all the time The stock market fell, for instance, last year, once you had President Trump imposeed wide scale tariffs But that was not something that the Fed immediately came in and tried to fix So the question now with a new Fed chairman is what in his mind is going to qualify as serious enough to merit a wharsh. Wall Street on this Wednesday, the markets If it were Traders seemed a bit subdued TBH will have the details when we do the numbers With the observation that we are going to get the June unemployment report tomorrow, a reminder here that the Bureau of Labor Statistics aggregates a whole bunch of different data sets in that report. The dataet we're interested in right now is young job seekers, sixteen to nineteen year olds For whom the unemployment rate has sharply diverged from the national number, going up steadily the past couple of years from just over ten percent in May of twenty twenty three nearly fifteen percent in May of this year Meanwhile, over the past several decades Another thing has been happening in the teenage labor market. F fewer of them have been working or looking for work Back in the nineteen eighties Two out of every three teenagers had paid work in the summertime. That's down to around one in three of lead And that long running decline in teen employment, as Marketplace and Mitchell Hartman reports has consequences for the whole economy. I met Nick Berka at Coney Island Beach on a windy Saturday. He's thirty one and says growing up on New York's upper East side, he had one job I babyset my upstairs neighbor And how many times did you do it? Just once. It was kind of a disaster kid was Really intense and a little scary I didn't get paid and I just never went back. In fact, like many in recent generations, he never had a paying job as a team In college, Burkke worked as a computer science tutor. Today, he runs a small software nonprofit But he feels like he missed something I think all the people I know who work seem more responsible than me We'll get to more consequences a bit later. but first, why are thirty five percent of teens in the workforce now compared to around sixty percent back in the nineteen eighties This is a decision of labor supply fewewer teens are looking to participate in the workforce Hillary Weting at the Economic Policy Institute says part of the reason is a sharp rise in the number of teens headed to college. they just have more competing priorities than previous generations, extxtracurriculars, college prep, or academic programs or internships For middle and upper middle class parents, these options may make more financial sense than pushing their kid to get a minimum wage summer job if it helps them get into a better college or land of scholarship For lower income teens, Wething says, a lot of summer employment opportunities have dried up since a key federal jobs program for youth was weakened in the nineteen nineties students for which maybe college is not possible benefited the most from something like a federal jobs program in their area. Now that doesn't exist either in certain parts There's also been a decline in demand for teen workers, says Peter Capeelli at the Wharton School. employers are just not as willing to take on new people even in the summer. Also, employers can now use staffing agencies to find temps and seasonal workers without tapping the teen market, says Carl Van Horn at Rutgers' Center for Workforce Development All things being equal, you'd rather hire a somewhat older person there's squeeziness or concern on the part of some employers about hiring young people who there may be insurance issues, perceptions about what young people are like such as always on their phones, not showing up on time or at all Manny Rodriguez has a front row seat for all this. He's the founder of Revolution Workshop a nonprofit on Chicago's South S side that promotes skills training for young people in manufacturing and the trades. And here's what he's been seeing for years now Those numbers are in decline, Youth engage in sports, employment opportunities, anything that has them leaving the house and away from a screen. All this makes his job harder. It is a problem when we're getting them right out of high school trying to make them job ready teaching them good work habits, what it is to hustle and communicate and how to take constructive criticism And I would tell you with the trades, it's att teendus just getting people to come on time and stay off their phones The decline in teen work is particularly damaging for the demographic groups Revolution Workshop tries to serve, says Carl Van Horn Hving fewer job opportunities is especially difficult for lower income individuals are stigmatized They don't have the connections, they don't have the money disadvantages them Because finding entry level jobs, then move up jobs and eventually embarking on a career path will likely start slower and take longer, reducing future earnings, retirement savings and the like. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace The Census Bureau reported this morning that overall construction spending in this economy in the month of May was down year on year If you dig a little bit, you'll find spending on single family home construction was off four percent from May a year ago. So, with months of war driven economic uncertainty and mortgage rates in the sixes seemingly in charge places Elizabeth Trovall calls of home builders Affordability is a challenge for homebuilders. Robert Detets with the National Association of Homebuilders says that's a result of some major headwinds. Ogoing elevated mortgage interest rates an elevated price to income ratio There are bright spots like Midwestern markets. Will Ruter is with the Homebuilders Association of Greater Kansas City Homebuilding permits are up in Kansas City year over year. Anything under five hundred thousand dollars in the Kansas City market is still moving with a relatively quick pace He says there's a lot of demand in the area and available land both the kind of the greenfield new development side as well as the redevelopment side Meanwhile, in Richmond, Virginia, people are moving to the area, but new home sales are lacklusters, says Dana Markland with the Homebuilding Association of Richmond It's a result of an affordability ceiling we've hit. We have a scarcity of land that we haven't seen in decades For Minnesota builder Rebecca Remick with City Homes, she says things are picking up for builders in the twwin cities We definitely had a slow spring She says land and construction costs are high. Zoning is an issue add in economic uncertainty and it's like the trifect of keeping people from moving forward. And in Northwest Arkansas, E.J Johnson runs the Lance Johnson Building Company. He says back in the beginning of the year, he was looking at a nice selling season then we We decide to go to war. We're still moving houses, but We're not moving at the rate that we should be today This is after the war started, mortgage rates jumped, as did the cost of transporting building materials like lumber I'm Elizabeth Trovall for Marketplace. Here's today's marker, not that we necessarily needed another one That late stage capitalism is the gift that keeps on giving prediction markets, it seems have entered the natural disaster business. You can now bet on the probability of tornadoes and earthquakes and hurricanes Some new reporting out from highigh country news also shows that there was Briefly, a prediction platform focused just on wildfires in California. It's tagline and I am not making this up was can't predict fire You can trade on it ethically murky Yeah. Also though possibly useful. Metplace like Caitln Tan has more When Caitlin Trudeau read that people are betting money on how fast wildfires might spread and what cities they'll reach. Honestly, my first reaction was Just yesterday, Treau's friend in El Dorado County, California was almost evacuated after a fire broke out the human cost. On the other side, people just like Pisate kind of totally betting on their phone about, you know whether omeone's house is going to burn down. She worries it could lead to people starting fires to make more money. But one could flip that argument. Coleman Strump is an economics professor at Wake Forest University. If you could incentivize enough people to clear brush and take preventative actions, you could use these markets and bet on that as well. It's just another way markets can potentially change behavior And with natural disasters, prediction betting could act as an informal type of insurance Robin Hansen is an economist with George Mason University. If I had a beachfront property or something where there was a flood risk, then I might consider that because it actually tends to be pretty hard to get flood insurance. Another possible benefit Prediction betting could help forecast where wildfire might spread Yeah, but We already have that. We already know. Craig Clements leads a team that does that kind of forecasting at the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. It gets very complicated very quickly when we're trying to model fires and mountains terrain and complex fuels Changing weather patterns. And he's not betting that people using Kowhi or Polymarket are doing all that work. I'm Caitln Tan for Marketplace Coming up. The investment worth the money, could run a marathon in these things I mean if you had to, I guess. But first Let's do the numbers. D Industrial is off thirteen points, just less than a tenth percent, fifty two thousand three hundred six. The NasdAq subtracted one hundred seventy three points. That's about two thirds of one percent twenty six thousand to forty, the S andP five hundred down fifteen points two th percent seventy four and eighty three. Facebook and Instagram parent Meta is setting up a cloud computing business to sell excess AI capacity. That's according to a report from Bloomberg Meta shares up eight and eight tenth percent. That helped push cloud provider Core weave down thirteen and nine th percent. A quarter over in Sweden has ordered Google to pay about a billion and a half dollars for a price comparison business owned by Karna rather to a price comparison business. The payments platform accused Google of favoring its own shopping service in its search results, Klarna rang up one percent. Google's parent alphabet climbed one and a ten percent bonds down yield on the tenure tenote rose four point four eight percent on the tenure. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizol Turns out in this post pandemic economy, you can now get stuck in traffic or find yourself in an overcrowded subway car pretty much any time of day. Because as Julianna Kaplan wrote in Business Insider the other day Rush hour. It's kind of all the time now 'l, and welcome to the program. G good to have you Thank you so much for having me. Tell tell you what, I love, hate the title of this piece, the headline, Revenge of the Cute. It's worse out there now than it's been in a very long time, isn't it Oh yeah. I mean, I'm here in New York and the subway has been getting pretty gnarly too So what's going on? I mean, clearly it's an after effffect. It's an artifact of the pandemic It's sort of a few different things converging to create this revenge of the commute. So we saw obviously post pandemic or mid pandemic migration patterns, which is a lot of people moved further away from their offices And then at the same time the pandemic made it so that when folks did return to the office, People aren't really doing the strict nine to five as much anymore, at least in a lot of nology industries. And because of that, that means that they're able to travel at staggered times, run an errand, midday, so on, which is dominitely good for people's quality of life. It does mean, however, that now everybody is commuting all the time rather than these concentrated blocks. I confess, as you point out in this piece, I'm one of those who goes out to run an errand at like, you know, Nonish or something. And I'm like, where what are all these people doing out here? donon't they have jobs? And of course, they do, but they're doing exactly what I'm doing U I had thought though, what was going to happen after the pandemic was that all this working from home stuff was going to make the traffic lighter. And in point of fact, that is not what's happening at all Yeah, I think you are far from alone. This is something I heard from a lot of folks that I spoke to who really like the newfound flexibility.. And I think a lot of people kind of made that like douil's bargain where it's like, okay, cumulatively, I'm still commuting less if I'm only going in two days a week, but I am commuting like an hour and a half. Oh One One way Ohuh? Oh yeah. Oh, you need to move. I'm sorry. Oh no, not Nam me, but the people I spoke to. Oh. All right. okay. all right Also, weekends are now a rush hour thing You know, that one is really interesting to me. And I think something that I heard from folks that makes sense is like, if you're running your errands at noon, as you were talking about and you're like, don't all these people have jobs, but you have a job donon't really have to run as many errands on the weekend anymore. And that means that maybe you have more flexibility to like do a day trip. Maybe you were running errands a little closer to your house before. And again, that flexibility is kind of this double edged sword because it's like, okay, I'm gonna to drive out to the beach that's a little further away or out to like outlet mall or whatever. and now all of a sudden everyone is doing the same thing again So what are the solutions here? Scale up mass transit, I imagine some kind of congestion pricing in urban centers, but still there's traffic outside urban centers as well. This is I mean, it's going to be a lasting challenge because the pandemic changed the way we work, but it also changed how we get to and from work and generally out in society Yeah, you know, unfortunately, there's not one silver bullet solution Perhaps carpooling is something we could think about, obviously scaling up mass transit actually One of my own subway lines moved some of their scheduled times in the morning to reflect better the new peak commuting hours. And then yeah, one that also came up too is this idea of Dynamic congestion pricing. So this is different than what we see in New York where the goal of that flat tax is like fewer cars downtown as much, which is a New Yorker Great. It's certainly been really nice. But instead, it's to keep roads moving at a clip where, okay, if you have that flexibility and you know that maybe I can get a much cheaper toll if I do This weird time Other than that, we are time That can keep the roads moving. A lot of folks also say this is really good for road maintenance. That's something that came up a lot as we see this record congestion like The roads are getting a lot of wear and tear, but Yeah, I think also part of it too is maybe we just all have to get comfortable beingose together. I think that's exactly. Yeah. We just gotta get used to it G Jiulianna Kaplan at Business Insider. Giuliana, thanks a lot. Good peace Yeah, thank you so much The summer dress code by large, and in the eastern half of this country this week in particular, tends toward the minimal T shirts and tank tops, shorts and sandals. You might want to think twice about your footwear, though, should you happen to find yourself in Nashville, Tennessee? because you're going to stand out among the tourists even more if you're line dancing in something other than a pair of cowboy boots Blake Farmer reports from WPLN, those boots are having a moment that extends far beyond Music City There's a joke among locals in Nashville that you can spot the tourists. They're the ones in new cowboy boots Every girl walking around seems like they got boots on. I'd like to want some boots Brent Taylor of New Orleans is a good dad, so like many visitors, he and his daughter Morgan went on a little shopping spree, sprinkled among the dozens of honky Tonks of Lower Broadway are boot shops It was worth looking. I found a few hair that I like and he got them. so I've been breaking them in At first they were painful. toe green with silver sparkles. She put him on immediately and joined the high heeled stampede. In truth, it's not just out of towners. Kayla Kessinger is a local rocin calf skin knee highs with intricate stitching. This is my first pair of like invvestment boots, if you will, like my first pair of like legit Cowboy boots. U worth the investment, worth the money. couldould run a marathon in these things Nowot my first choice for twenty six miles, though the brand she's strutting can run more than one thousand dollars, and with boots, you're often paying for comfort The global market for Western boots has topped a billion dollars by some estimates and is growing by nearly five percent a year publicly traded boot barn has surpassed five hundred stores, its value has more than quadrupled in the last five years So what's going on? someome call it the Yellowstone effect. Taylor Sheridan's popular cowboy drama got people dressing like they do on the Dutton Ranch. You also have the conffluence of Beyonce's Cowboy Carter album that brought country music and style into the mainstream pop world. Lately, traditional country music has been reaching a wider audience. Holly George Warren is the author of How The West was worn But here in New York City, where I am right now, there's a humongous billboard right at Times Square with Ella Langley, sitting on a haybell looking real chic in her cowboy boots Just withw Ella Langley's hit song broke Taylor Swift's record for a female country artist being atop the mainstream charts kind of crossover brings attention to her style too, though George Warren says it's been building over the years But the music and the look have become global and it's been a kind of a gradual process The roots of the cowboy boot can be traced to Mexican cowboys Vaceros. Country music artist Angie Kay, who was born in El Salvador, has been a daily boot wearer since she was young and says the fashion statement is strong everywhere she performs in the Americas. The sea of cowwi boots and hats. And not just Hispanic people like every type of person, all in cabbo boots, all in hats, all in buckles. And Angie Kay can't recall the last time she played a show not in her boots. It's primarily fashion, not function. But Lisa Sarerel says the cowboy boot has become the functional equivalent of the country music uniform She's a high end boot maker in Guthrie, Oklahoma, who's also writing a history of the cowboy boot I honestly wonder what would have happened if Cowboy boots hadn't become stageware and remained visible and in the public eye for so long. I wonder if they would have gone back to being just a part of a cowbooy's functional gear You'd still have boots walking around, but not so much on stage and screen, and almost certainly not on a honky tunk bar crawl In Nashville, I'm Blake Farmer for Marketplace This final note on the wayay out today, we started with the Federal Reserve. So shall we end? The Fed's got lots of other jobs besides just setting interest rates, One of which is processing payments for basically the entire financial system, literally helping move money around the economy Anyway, as part of that, they put out a report every three years about how money moves around this economy, and here's the tidbit that caught my ey In twenty twenty four There were three point four billion withdrawals from ATM's That is down from five point two billion withdrawals at ATMs a decade ago, which makes sense, right? We're using way less cash Every time we go to the ATM now, we are taking out more money two hundred and ten dollars per visit in twenty twenty four, one hundred and thirty four dollars for a visit in twenty fifteen. Inflation? yes, but still Interesting I think, anyway. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Folk, Montana Johnson, Drew Johston, Gary O'Keefe and Charltontorp. Alex Simpson is the manager of media productduction. and I'm Kai Rizdal. We will see you tomorrow everybody. This is APM.