Since 1940, Social Security has provided a modest amount of money every month to retirees from a fund that collects payroll taxes on those who are still working. But the ratio of people who are employed to people who are retired has shrunk significantly in recent generations. According to the Social Security Administration, the fund will be depleted by 2035, eliminating any reserves, meaning retiree benefits will be paid directly from incoming taxes. That won’t be enough to satisfy all obligations to retirees, and their benefits will drop by an estimated 17%.

Joey Graziano was a senior vice president for the NBA with global responsibilities when he began working with Pacers Sports & Entertainment on the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis. The way he tells it, Graziano soon became convinced that the Indiana Pacers, Indiana Fever and the city of Indianapolis on the whole presented enormous potential for growth. Six months ago, he left the NBA and became the executive vice president of strategy and new business ventures for Pacers Sports & Entertainment. Just to refresh your memory, that’s the company controlled by the Herb Simon family that owns the Pacers and Fever.

Scott Lingle grew up in Indianapolis with parents who were always looking for a side hustle and ways to eliminate debt. Their entrepreneurial pursuits included flipping  houses—"I lived in 20 houses growing up," Lingle says—and rehabilitating a host of other products for resale. Scott Lingle knew early on that he wanted to be in sales. After a distinguished career in the insurance industry, he took a big entrepreneurial leap. In 2015, he co-founded Remodel Health, which after initial growing pains became one of fasting-growing firms in Indianapolis throughout the early 2020s. It was ranked 13th on IBJ’s list in 2024, with a 123% increase in annual revenue between 2021 and 2023, topping out at nearly $15 million.

Based in Indianapolis, the Schahet family has been managing and developing hotels since the 1960s. The family firm Schahet Hotels currently has nine properties in its portfolio, mostly in central Indiana, with a 10th hotel under construction in Muncie and an 11th in the final planning stages. There’s still room in the lodging industry for mom-and-pop hoteliers—although in this case it was father and son—who can amass significant holdings in particular niches and geographic areas. Family operators like the Schahets are an integral part of the Indy area’s hospitality fabric.

It is NOT an industry for the meek. Ask Greg Schahet, a third-generation Schahet hotelier who joined the family firm a few months before 9/11 and has since helped the company navigate the Great Recession, the pandemic and the current economic crunch from inflation and interest rates. As president and chief financial officer, he’s guiding development of the downtown Muncie project called The Cantio, a $43.5 million boutique-style hotel that represents a departure for the firm.

In this week’s edition of the podcast, Greg Schahet shares financial war stories from moments in the last three decades when it seemed like the industry had turned upside-down. He also talks strategy, including explaining why Schahet has such a high concentration of hotels near Indianapolis International Airport and why it went outside its comfort zone with the high-profile Cantio.

Indiana has been a national leader in historic preservation for decades. Hoosiers have a strong record for studying, cataloguing and saving homes, churches, farms, factories, covered bridges, monuments, courthouses, hotels, libraries and even entire commercial districts and neighborhoods deemed to have historic value. Since being founded in 1960, the nonprofit group Indiana Landmarks has promoted and supported historic preservation efforts, often positioned at or near the center of major projects or helping bring the right parties to the table and acting as an adviser. It has 43 full-time employees and nine field offices around Indiana and is considered the largest statewide historic preservation organization in America.

Podcast listeners might remember about three months ago when regular guest Pete the Planner predicted that President Donald Trump’s plans for tariffs could have a pronounced effect on some elements of Indiana’s economy. Trump wasted little time once his second term began last month, imposing or thratening to impose a barrage of tariffs on many of America’s trading partners—and in particular Canada, Mexico and China, who are among Indiana’s top six importers of goods. For example, on Feb. 1, Trump said he would implement a 25% additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10% additional tarif on imports from China. On Feb. 3, he agreed to a 30-day pause on tariffs against Mexico and Canada. On Feb. 9, Trump said he would impose 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. Those tariffs aren’t set to go into effect until March 12. However, as IBJ has learned from Indiana companies in the last several weeks, simply the threat of tariffs against a trading partner can be disruptive for American companies.

You don’t need to be too technically savvy to pick up on the charged atmosphere surrounding large-scale data centers. Various technology-heavy industries need data centers as a kind of way station and storage point for all the electronic information they generate and process. As technology evolves at a breakneck speed, the size of these centers grows. In October, the financial firm Blackstone forecast that over the next five years, the United States will see $1 trillion in data center investments.

Indiana really wasn’t on the map of the big tech firms, at least in terms of building centers, until very recently. In the last 14 months, seven data center projects have been announced for the state representing more than $15 billion in potential investment. Some Indiana legislators see them as huge economic development opportunities. Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, has said, quote, “I want every data center that we can get in the state of Indiana.” But the sudden surge in announced centers has generated a lot of concern as well about their drain on Indiana utilities and, in some cases, their water-intensive cooling systems.

Indiana lawmakers are considering a spate of bills regarding data centers in the current legislative session. IBJ technology reporter Susan Orr is our guest this week on the IBJ Podcast to get us current on the demand for data centers and how that’s manifesting in Indiana.

Founded in central Indiana, Marsh Supermarkets Inc. at its peak operated well over 100 stores, with a critical mass in the nine-county Indianapolis metro area. In 2017—11 years after a private equity firm took ownership—just 63 stores remained. Marsh declared bankruptcy in May 2017. From those 63 stores, Marsh closed the majority and sold 26 to Kroger and Needlers.

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It’s time to unpack the latest developments in Mayor Joe Hogsett’s plan to establish a Major League Soccer team in downtown Indianapolis. Among other things, the team needs a stadium to play in. The city earmarked about 16 acres in the southeast quadrant of the Mile Square and held discussions with MLS officials. We were left with a cliffhanger: Can the city get state approval for the taxing district that would help pay for the stadium? 

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The official release date of this episode is Jan. 20, which not coincidentally is Inauguration Day. President Trump will outline his vision for second term, but we already have a sense of what to expect in terms of economic policy. Four of the biggest themes are prioritizing tax cuts, decreasing regulation in several major industries, increasing tariffs on imported goods from trading partners Mexico, Canada and China, and cracking down on illegal immigration. And in fact, podcast host Mason King discussed a few of these in an episode after the election in November with IBJ finance columnist Pete Dunn. What’s interesting is how quickly some of Pete’s predictions have come true in just two months. At the same, some of the market-moving elements of the economy have shifted enough in two months that Pete is open to a second look. And then there’s the event with huge economic implications that few could have predicted: the devastating wildfires that have wiped out parts of Los Angeles and its immediate environs. So Pete is back this week to discuss what we can expect to see in at least the next year or two in a free-wheeling conversation hitting rising inflation, stubbornly high costs for consumer goods, the meandering stock market, mass deportations and what could be the biggest economic story of 2025—the impact of the LA fires on the housing industry.

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