Marketplace All-in-One

From the BBC World Service: The European Central Bank’s meeting today is under the spotlight as inflation continues to skyrocket across parts of Europe. Plus, police in Brazil have uncovered a criminal operation to remove nearly a metric ton of gold each year from protected indigenous lands in the Amazon. And, we hear from an experiment on the English coastline to use a sand barrier to protect a gas terminal against sea erosion.

Your regular host Molly Wood has a new podcast, “How We Survive,” exploring solutions to the climate crisis. In the latest episode, “The Resource,” Molly visits the Salton Sea region of California, its mud volcanoes, moving geyser, and lithium-rich brine — lithium, as in the lithium needed for batteries. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams talks with Molly about how getting that brine out of the ground is really challenging.

Last week, we took a deep dive into the world of decentralized finance, or DeFi. And y’all had some follow-up questions! Today we’re answering a few from listeners about possible uses of DeFi, possible risks and how regulation might work.

Here’s everything we talked about on the show:

Read the transcript here.

Our show needs your voice! Tell us what you think of the show or ask a question for our hosts to answer! Send a voice memo or give us a call at 508-82-SMART (508-827-6278).

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: There are issues in the global supply chain. One hiccup in the supply chain is a lack of truck drivers in the United States. Despite hiring bonuses of up to $10,000, fewer truck drivers are finding the stressful work and long hours worth it. And one of their biggest complaints? Difficulty finding a place to park and rest. We’ll also look at why the most iconic brand in the U.S. doubled its marketing budget this year, hear from San Francisco taxi drivers shouldering mountains of debt, and take a trip to a shipping container storage depot.

A record number of workers have been leaving their jobs either voluntarily or for new jobs offering better money or hours. In many cases, it’s been for whole new careers. The restaurant industry has been one of the hardest hit. Lindsey Piegza joins us to discuss how there’s been a drop in the buying of durable goods such as factory machines and home washers and dryers. Appliances are actually becoming harder to get for home builders. Google’s parent company Alphabet is having a good year, reporting its third straight quarter of record profit. 

The pandemic has sparked the phenomenon of millions of people deciding to leave their jobs. Some have called this “The Big Quit,” and if numbers from LinkedIn are any indication, the job exodus is going to continue for quite some time. Marketplace senior economics contributor Chris Farrell helps us parse through some of the data behind this. The Democrats are adding a corporate minimum tax in an attempt to help pay for President Biden’s social spending plan.

From the BBC World Service: U.K. finance minister Rishi Sunak will unveil London’s latest spending priorities today, with details already trickling out including plans for a higher national living wage, new spending on public transport projects and money to tackle backlogs in the National Health Service. Plus, as Russia threatens to suspend gas exports to Moldova, is Moscow using energy as a political weapon?

Some major retailers are pulling some Chinese-made surveillance cameras and equipment off their shelves. That’s due to concerns the companies that make the equipment, Lorex and Ezviz, have ties to human rights abuses in China. They’re believed to be part of the vast surveillance network targeting Uyghurs, an ethnic minority group of over 12 million people in the country. This was brought to Home Depot’s attention by the publication TechCrunch, which also reported that Lowe’s and Best Buy stopped selling these products. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Samm Sacks, a cyber policy fellow at the nonprofit New America think tank and a research scholar at Yale.

How big is your carbon footprint? Do you really know? If it was taxed, you’d find out one way or another. Maybe the cost of carbon gets added on like a sales tax, or maybe the producer gets hit with additional taxes and passes the cost onto you, like a tariff. Either way, you’ll learn something. It’s an idea some Democrats have been kicking around. So has the European Union. Ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, which starts this weekend in Glasgow, we’re going to step back and explain the carbon tax. Joining us to help with that is economist Shi-Ling Hsu, a professor at Florida State University College of Law and author of “The Case for a Carbon Tax.”

Here’s everything we talked about today:

Read the transcript here.

Finally: We need your voice memos! Tell us what you think of the show or ask a question for Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood to answer! Here’s how to do it.