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Okay, serious question. What is a dollar anyway? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. in los angeles i'm kyle risdahl it is monday today this one is the 18th day of may good as it always is to have you along everybody our dollar discussion in just a minute but retail earnings are the macroeconomic metric oh the week we are going to get in no particular order Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx, Home Depot, Lowe's and a bunch of others telling us how their first quarters went. As you know, the markets have been on a tear and investors are pretty pleased. But consumers, in addition to their usual crankiness, are actually showing some signs of economic strain. So Marketplace's Kristen Schwab gets us going today with what those earnings calls

might be able to tell us. There's been a phrase economists, analysts and companies have used to describe consumers month after month and at this point year after year. Resilient but still choiceful. Mari Shore is a retail analyst at Columbia Threadneedle Investments. And I think

that those words are still going to be used to describe the consumer. She says big picture,

consumers are still spending, but look closer and it's mostly just the more moneyed Americans keeping retail sales strong.

So when we look at the high-level economic data, a lot of that is reflecting strength at the high end and not necessarily across the income spectrum.

It's why even a stellar earnings season doesn't necessarily equal a strong consumer economy. Sonia Lipinski is a managing director of the retail practice at Alex Partners.

When we say they're still spending, it's a pretty macro view that I think it's blended across a lot of things and kind of just suppresses some noise.

The noise is where the real information is right now. What will companies say about the spending categories people are pulling back on? What types of stores are consumers shopping at?

If consumers are really stretched, they're going to buy the necessities and they're going to go where they think they can get the best deal.

But these first quarter earnings might not give us the full economic picture. It covers some time before the war started, and it includes tax season. Returns this year were, on average, 10 percent higher. It's why Mark Sandy, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, will pay attention to what retailers say about future pricing.

You know, what kind of pricing power retailers have? Can they pass through? Are they passing through?

As in passing through higher costs if companies think consumers can handle paying more. Because he says from ongoing inflation to higher borrowing rates to gas prices, lower income consumers might not have much more room to keep spending.

I mean, they're hanging tough. They're hanging in there. Those tax cuts really bought them some time, but they're running out of time.

Zandi says if the economy keeps on the path it's on, we could see a shift from consumers in the coming months or even weeks. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

Wall Street today, a funny thing happened on the way to the close. Stocks were down, oil was up, bond yields were up, and then the White House got interested. President Trump put off his new threatened attacks on Iran. Wasn't enough to turn things around, but he did stop the slide. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

We'll be right back.

The U.S. dollar is the overwhelmingly dominant global reserve currency. More than half of the foreign currency reserves sitting in central banks around the world are in U.S. dollars. It is just really hard to overstate the role that the dollar plays in the global economy. But why? The more history-aware among you will, of course, think of the financial system that was built in large part by the United States after the Second World War. And you're right, it is part history, but it's also part policy and part, stay with me now, the philosophy of money. And that gets me to Brendan Greeley. He's a financial journalist turned academic who's out with a new book called The Almighty Dollar, 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money. Brendan Greeley, welcome to the program. Good to have you on. Good to be here. With the understanding that you just wrote a 350-ish page book about the question that I'm about to ask you, I kind of have to start with, what is a dollar?

That's actually a really good question to start with. When we take economics in college, what we're taught is that money used to be gold and that it was paper that represented the gold, and now it's just a social convention because the gold is gone. That has always felt like a cop-out to me. You know, and it's odd to me that macroeconomists, who are very hard-nosed analysts of data, will say when it comes to the question of money, I don't know, man, it just kind of works. I can define for you what a dollar is. It is a deposit in a commercial bank. That's how almost all of our dollars are made. When a bank gives you a loan, it is marking up your deposits with brand new dollars. It did not get those dollars from the Fed. Nobody arrived with a briefcase of $100 bills to hand over to the bank to hand to you. They marked it up on their balance sheet. What they get in return, because they're not giving you that for nothing, is what they think of as an asset. That's your mortgage. You will pay them back over time. So that's all that a dollar is. It is credit that is generated when you borrow from an American bank. That's how it works right now.

Student of history, though, I consider myself. I did learn through this book in the opening pages, actually, that there were dollars before there was America. And then, in fact, America didn't invent the dollar. That said, the U.S. dollar now is the dollar. And I guess in some radio interview appropriate length, how did the dollar become what it has become?

We tend to think of global currencies as coming from great empires. And it's a very simple equation, a powerful country, a powerful currency. I don't think that's actually how it works. After the Second World War, yes, absolutely, America was the only sort of remaining functioning industrialized economy. But to understand why American bank dollars had value, we have to go back a little farther. We had banking panics every 15 years or so in the 19th century. After each one of these banking panics, we end up with regulation, having a controller of the currency, making sure bank notes are backed one-to-one with treasuries. So now when we get to the 50s and 60s, what starts to happen is countries in the rest of the world, and particularly foreign banks working with each other in the city of London, start to see American bank deposits, these absolutely secure things that now have federal deposit insurance, as having value outside of the country. And so we refer to this now as the euro dollar system, which is a really complicated way of saying these are offshore dollars that are being used by foreign banks. Then they innovate on top of that. And this is how the dollar became the global currency. Foreign banks make up their own dollar deposits. They're making loans to foreigners outside of our own shores. They're making those loans in brand new dollars that those banks created. There are about $14 trillion in offshore brand new dollars created by foreign banks. To give you a sense of scale, there are only $19 trillion created by the Federal Reserve and American banks. they're within the same ballpark. That's the global dollar system. You are not doing anything

to reassure me or anybody listening to this that our money is a real thing. I mean, honestly,

right? It is. Well, okay. If you tell me that money is just a social convention, my answer is, well, yeah, but so is the bond market and so is your mortgage, right? These are all acts of finance. These are all promises that sit on bank ledgers. They are very real. We can analyze them.

we can measure them. But I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can't pull it out of my wallet,

you know? Well, no, you can't. But the thing is, this question of sort of virtual money is very old. Any historic market that you look at, and I will not make you look at all of them with me in this radio interview, you end up finding a lot of the same things. Colonial bars, for example, if you look at the ledger on a colonial pub.

What you see is people owe money to the pub, and they will owe money to the pub for six months, a year. Then they'll take the money they owe to the pub and use it to pay each other. So I can pay off your bar debt, and in doing so, I'm paying you. We can see these transfers on that ledger. That starts to look a lot like a bank. So this idea that money is something you can't touch, and that's weird now, I don't think is correct. I think money was often, in the past, something you couldn't touch. It's just that people in the past sort of understood this a lot better than we do now.

I'm going to flip to the back of the book, and, you know, it's got those bullet points, and this is the greatest book ever on anything, you know, in this ambition, groundbreaking history, blah, blah, blah. Talking about the origins of our money. Don't blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, no, you're right. Sorry. Brendan Guerrillo makes a new argument about the origins of our money and the people and nations who have surrendered to it, which gets me to the dollar dominance of the global economy today. And I guess I want to value judgment from you. Is that a good thing? Is that a good thing for America? Is it a good thing for the world?

I think it can be a good thing and it could have been a good thing, but we have to be aware of it and understand what it means. So we figured out in the 80s in America that we could borrow on global markets and that there was absolutely no visible bottom to the amount of money that we could borrow in global markets.

And it still sort of seems like that, right? I mean, look, the national debt, you know, right?

Come on. Yeah. What we're seeing in America is something that looks honestly a lot like the resource curse, except our resources, we can manufacture dollars. And what that does is when we look at all the literature on resource curses in other countries, what we find is it breaks down governance because it becomes very easy to just pay off elites with this brand new money that you're getting from the resource. And so I think we can say that's something comparable to what happened in America. it's very easy to just sort of pass tax cuts or pass stimuli without thinking about sort of how

we pay for it. Because in America, we don't have to think about it. There is a line or a train of thought through parts of this book. You talk about, you know, we have a zillion different kinds of dollars, petrodollars, euro dollars. There's this amazing thing called the Amanda dollar in the epilogue, which I encourage everybody to read about. The thing you point out, though, is that all of these dollars don't serve everybody equally, which seems to me to be

a problem. Yeah, there's an old theory about coins, which says that there's big money and little money. They work very differently. Big money is large value coins that are sort of used by merchants and the wealthy and for international trade. Small money is used for retail purchases of just wheat and beer and bread. I think that carries over to now as well. It is much cheaper for the bank to produce big loans, to take big deposits, to make big transfers than it is to make lots and lots of little loans, little transfers, little deposits. And for that reason, the American banking system favors large depositors, large borrowers. If you are not, then your money is poor quality in America. You have to pay for transfers to move small amounts of money from one bank to another. If we can understand that money isn't magic, that it's not all just fiat, then we can start to look at how it's produced, for whom it's produced, and who gets the high quality money and who gets the poor quality money. And I think we don't take seriously enough, the problem of small depositors and people outside of the banking system in America.

There is a series of questions, Terry, I could ask you about the dollar as the global reserve currency, exorbitant privilege, strong dollar, all that. I'm not going to. What I am going to ask you, though, is whether you think the global economy would be what it is today without the

dollar. Oh, God, that's a question I haven't encountered before that I'll actually have to think about. You're welcome. I think that the dollar system enabled rapid globalization in a way that we hadn't seen before. You know, the oldest problem in finance is how do you pay someone in another country in another currency? Very difficult to solve this. You have lots of banks and lots of companies with access to American dollars, deposits in American banks, brand new dollar loans from those banks in the city of London. That creates this vast pool of what we call liquid dollars that can very easily move back and forth. And I don't think that global trade would have grown as quickly as it did at the end of the 20th century without that pool.

It is a book called The Almighty Dollar, 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money. Brendan Greeley wrote it. Used to be a journalist covering, among other things, the Federal Reserve. Now he's back in academia. Brendan, thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

We'll be right back.

coming up you know what's worth a lot of money tools that mean companies don't have to hire so

many cyber techs i mean great unless you're a cyber tech but first let's do the numbers Dow Industrial is up 159. Today, a third of 1%, 49,686. The NASDAQ went the other way, subtracted 134 points, about a half percent, 26,000 to 0,9 or 0. The S&P 500 down five points, just under a tenth of 1%, ended things at 74 and 3. So retailers, where we started, Walmart rang up 1 and 4 tenths percent. Today, Target collected 1 and a half percent. And TJX, which is the parent of TJ Maxx, founded one and nine-tenths of one percent. Home Depot, up about three-quarters of one percent. Hey, where has Warren Buffett been putting his money? His company, Berkshire Hathaway. Yes, I know, Buffett's retired, but work with me here. Berkshire Hathaway reports it's invested more than $2.5 billion in Delta Airlines and upped its stake in Google's parent Alphabet, both of which today basically unchanged. Bonds up, yield on the 10-year, T-note down 4.58%. You're listening to Marketplace.

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The economy is a lot right now. We can't control interest rates or tariffs. As a business owner, you can only control how efficiently your business operates. Payroll is also a lot of late nights, double-checking numbers, worrying about missing tax filings, or costly mistakes. That's where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. With automatic payroll tax filings, simple direct deposits, and built-in tools for offer letters and onboarding documents, Gusto helps reduce administrative workload and streamline day-to-day operations. When every hour counts, having systems run smoothly can make a meaningful difference. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash marketplace and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash marketplace. Gusto.com slash Marketplace.

This Marketplace podcast is supported by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. America is an aspirational idea, one we're still working to fulfill. Shaped by enlightenment ideals, reason, liberty, and freedom of conscience. The belief that power comes from we the people, not a divinely appointed ruler. And while these ideals have not yet been fully perfected, they created something powerful. A framework that has expanded rights and freedoms over time. Now those freedoms and your rights are under attack. We're seeing growing efforts to blur the line between church and state, public funds to promote religion, Ten Commandments in classrooms, and pushing a version of America that leaves out too many people. As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is working to protect the Constitution, defend secular government, and ensure that freedom continues to expand for everyone. Because America isn't just where we started, it's what we choose next. Go to ffrf.us slash america or text america to 511-511. America to 511-511. Text fees may apply.

This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. If it seems like we've been talking about housing a lot lately, I mean, it's because we have biggest asset most people own and all that. We are supposed to be right now smack and peak home buying season. A huge time not only for buyers and sellers, but agents and lenders and the many, many people whose livelihoods depend on people fixing up and furnishing the homes that they have just bought. This is overall a light week, data-wise. Housing accepted. We're going to get pending home sales and new home starts and a reading on builder confidence out today from the National Home Builders Association. Spoiler alert, builders are a teensy bit more confident, but still pretty dejected. Marketplace of Carla Javier got back on the phone with some of the realtors she's been talking to. to hear how things are going in their local markets.

Builders' expectations of current sales conditions, sales expectations, and potential buyer traffic ticked up a few points in May after dropping in April, according to the National Home Builders Association. In Bellevue, just across Lake Washington from Seattle, Michael Urbino with Team Foster at Compass says he follows national numbers like these, but it's been a tough month.

market for the builders he works with. There isn't a lot of land to expand into, and material and

labor costs are high. All at the same time, the buyers are, I think, finally saying, and they have been saying for a couple of years, that these prices are just getting too high, combined with the high property taxes, high insurance costs, and high interest rates. He says builders are

squeezed and are rethinking what they can afford to build, if they can build at all, which may mean

smaller projects. Anything that's not out of the ground yet at this moment, it's likely we're going to be redrawing it for a future economy that maybe is, you know, the prices are lower

than where they have been. Over in Miami, Joanna Jimenez of the Opus Group at Compass says most of the transactions her team works on are resales of existing homes. And she's noticed that two

different markets are emerging. In neighborhoods where buyers are heavily reliant on financing, We are seeing they are taking longer to make decisions. They're touring more properties. They're very price sensitive. So a lot of those buyers are asking for credit to help upset the higher borrowing costs.

Jimenez says in the other market, where a significant number of the transactions are in cash, buyers are moving much faster. She says it's good to be aware of what's happening across the country, but she's focused on the local picture.

What are the cash sales share in your zip code? How many months of inventory do we have? What is the median sales price? Did it go up? Is it going down?

Because she says it's these hyper-local numbers that help the most when navigating the market with her buyers and sellers. I'm Carla Javier from Marketplace.

There are those who sing the praises of artificial intelligence, of all the incredible things it can or will be able to do. And then there are those who are anticipating all the harm it can do. There's the whole Mythos thing, the latest model from Anthropic, which the company very publicly has declined to release to the public because of worries it could be a super hacking tool in the wrong hands. But even before Mythos, AI was already helping bad guys automate bigger and faster and more sophisticated attacks. FBI data shows cyber crime losses in the United States were up more than 25 percent last year. Yes, AI is being used to defend cyber systems, but a lot of organizations have been chronically underinvested in security and industry groups have long pointed to a shortage of people with the skills needed to defend against all that hacking. And to top it all off, as Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino reports, a lot of job seekers trying to break into that field are hitting a firewall.

Megan Osteen has wanted to work in tech pretty much forever.

My dad, he was a software engineer. And I just remember like a lot of my childhood, I would sit in his office with him and he would explain to me what he was doing, like how it

worked. Life sort of got in the way of her plans. She left college when she became a mom and grabbed the work she could, most recently as a behavioral therapist for kids with autism. When her dad died a few years ago, she decided it was time to make a career leap, and she kept hearing cybersecurity was the way to go. Because of the projected job growth and the demand within the field, it seemed promising. She took online courses and in February earned her first cybersecurity certification. She's been looking for jobs but not finding many opportunities. I'm trying to

find ways to keep pushing forward and not get stuck in the mud, but it has been truly very difficult. I just feel like it was false advertisement. Cybersecurity jobs have been

the focus of a decades-long workforce development push. Learn to code, but with the urgency of a National Security Imperative. It spawned a cottage industry of federal and state programs, for-profit boot camps, certifications, and online career coaches like Evan Lutz.

The thing that initially gave me rise on social media is that I can speak very quickly with concise ideas. He's not joking. If you want to start your cybersecurity career with 90 days, making $90,000 a year, the first thing you're going to need is certification. Lutz quit his

job teaching high school math in 2019 to get into cyber and now advises others on his roadmap for

success. I've never seen this fail in the U.S. and it works every time. Which at the time was true.

Through the early 2020s, Lutz says, demand seemed insatiable. Interest rates were near zero, tech was booming, and workers were in short supply coming out of the pandemic. You could literally

have a security plus IT certifications in a month or two and no experience and get a job

making $60,000 a year. But workers weren't the only ones who got the message, says Joseph Fuller

at Harvard Business School. If you are an innovative company, you're looking out there and saying, you know what's worth a lot of money? Tools that mean companies don't have to hire so many cyber techs because they're hard to get and they're expensive. AI is increasingly taking over

the routine tasks that junior workers once handled, like monitoring systems for anomalies and deciding which ones to prioritize for response. And you're going to see that again and again and again. Anywhere, the labor market is signaling high demand. It makes it nearly impossible for workers to plan for a secure future, says Lisa Countryman-Kiros at JVS, a job training nonprofit

in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's almost a generation of people for whom the rug has been

pulled out from under them. When entry-level IT jobs started drying up, JVS pivoted to cybersecurity training last year. But Countryman-Kiros says employers seem to be hiring for senior roles, people with the experience to be the boss of AI. The market is tough for people starting out, and she's not sure if they'll continue the program.

We are focused on moving people from poverty to the middle class. And, you know, there have been, for decades, really a declining number of opportunities that allow you to do that.

Job seeker Megan Osteen says she might have to go back to her old job in behavioral therapy while she plans for her next steps.

There's a lot of weight on it, financial weight, especially because I am a single mom and I did, you know, pause my career, pause everything in order to pursue this. I want to, you know, prove that I can do it to like my dad, you know, and there is a lot of weight on it.

In the meantime, she's putting her skills to practical use. She used AI to build a system that flags job scam phishing messages, which she's been getting a lot of during her search. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out, I don't think we've touched on energy at all today. So there is this more evidence if you needed it, which regular listeners to this program do not, that oil trades in a global market. Saw it in The Wall Street Journal today that late last month, the United States was exporting 14.2 million barrels of crude and crude derivatives every single day. As the journal points out, before the presidents were with Iran, that was basically one out of every seven barrels consumed on the entire planet. Amir Babawi Caitlin Ash John Gordon Noyakar Steve Mullis and Stephanie Seek are the Marketplace editing staff Kelly Silvera is the news director and I'm Kai Risdahl we will see you tomorrow everybody this is APM

I'm Rima Jerez, host of the Marketplace podcast. This is Uncomfortable. And this week on the show, we talk to Canadians boycotting the United States. We've had economic war declared on us. So it just feels like I am fighting for Canada as a soldier every single day. Plus, a financial therapist explains why aligning our spending with our values can feel so emotionally powerful.

It's one of the core needs that we have as humans is connection and connection to something bigger than us. And a boycott is something bigger than us.

Be sure to listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.