Marketplace All-in-One

The Federal Reserve upped its key interest rate by half a percentage point today, a smaller move than the previous four. Today, we’ll unpack what consumers can expect from the Fed going forward and how the slowing pace of rate increases will ripple through the economy. Then, the health impact of antibiotics overuse and, from Marketplace’s “How We Survive” series, what happens when climate change forces communities to resettle?

The Fed is expected to raise interest rates again, but not by as much as before. Susan Schmidt explains what that could mean. Sticking with the Fed, we look into another tool it has that can affect your mortgage. The number of H-2B seasonal worker visas being offered has sharply increased.

First, lawmakers are closing in on a federal budget deal to avoid government shutdown. For the next chapter in our series on the transistor, we examine the device’s entry into mainstream culture.

From the BBC World Service: Hundreds of thousands of workers across swathes of the U.K.’s infrastructure have begun walkouts, which are set to stretch right through the Christmas period. It’s part of a wider picture – frontline workers feeling the cost-of-living squeeze who feel their pay needs to rise to meet those costs. Also, as part of our series on the invention of the transistor, we look at the significance of the transistor radio to Africa.

You’ve raised your house up on stilts and your town has added higher seawalls and pumping stations, but sea level rise is relentless. Eventually, you may have to consider the ultimate solution: Leaving your home, giving the land back to nature and starting over somewhere else. There’s a jargony sounding name for this solution: Managed Retreat.

In our season finale, we head to a small island community off the coast of Louisiana that has lost 98% of its land to rising seas and sinking land. Now residents have to decide if they’re ready to leave the place most have called home their whole lives, or be swallowed up with it. Later in the episode, we unpack what managed retreat might mean for the rest of us, even those of us who don’t think we’re at any risk.

After more than 60 years of work, scientists have made a breakthrough that could potentially change the future of energy. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy announced this week that they had successfully achieved energy-producing nuclear fusion that produced more energy than they put into it. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called it a huge achievement for science and for clean energy. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Carolyn Kuranz, an experimental plasma physicist at the University of Michigan’s department of nuclear engineering about how the experiment worked.

Hey smarties! We’re on a break for the holidays and revisiting some favorite episodes from 2022. We want to say a big thank-you for being part of the “Make Me Smart” family this year — every voicemail, question and donation made a huge difference. None of us is as smart as all of us, and we couldn’t do this show without you. There’s still time to help Marketplace reach its end-of-year fundraising goal. If you can, please donate here. Thanks, happy holidays and we’ll see you in the new year.

On Make Me Smart, we often turn to economists, professors and policy wonks to make us smart about some big topics that need explaining. Today, we’re turning to a different kind of expert, sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson.

His latest book, “Termination Shock,” is about climate change, geoengineering and what happens when a billionaire decides to take matters into his own hands.

“I’m past trying to convince people that climate change is real. What I was more interested in was, for an audience that believes that climate change is real, what are some outcomes that we might see, in the near future, as different people in different countries begin to try to come to grips with that problem, because opinions differ as to what the right approach might be. And whenever you get differing opinions, you’ve got conflict, and whenever you’ve got conflict, you have the potential for a good story,” Stephenson said.

We’ll talk with Stephenson about how he thinks about big, complex issues like climate change and what this genre can teach us about the future and solving problems in the real world. Speaking of the future, Stephenson, who coined the word “metaverse” in 1992, weighs in on all the hullaballoo over the metaverse today.

In the News Fix, what’s behind all the news, or lack thereof, that we’re not getting from Tonga after this weekend’s volcano eruption? Also, you can get your free rapid COVID-19 test now.

Then, a listener drops some facts on the James Webb Space Telescope and what a former Google researcher was really wrong about.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

Following the implosion of crypto exchange FTX and the arrest of its former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto seems to be losing its mojo. Is this just a setback for crypto or is it the beginning of the end? Plus, the factors driving the inflation slowdown, a history of the Fed’s split with the Treasury, and the complicated combination of remote work and holiday family time.

First, Jeffrey Cleveland of Payden & Rygel discusses some possible good news when it comes to inflation. A breakthrough in fusion energy is announced. We take a look at the birthplace of the transistor, Nokia Bell Labs, and where it stands today.

The charges come shortly after the former FTX chief was arrested in the Bahamas. Elsewhere, in the second installment of our series on the invention of the transistor, we take a look at Nokia Bell Labs and its innovative history.