The numbers can tell you what is happening in the economy, but they rarely tell you why.
For example: among college-educated women in their prime working years, Black women are the most likely to be working or looking for work. Yet they make up about 2% of private-sector managers, according to an analysis from economist Valerie Wilson, published last month by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
In other words, showing up is not the same as moving up.
Adams is host and senior editor of Marketplace Morning Report. She joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss who carries the economy, who gets to lead, and when those two overlap.
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro onApple Podcasts,Spotify,YouTube, orNPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.
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In Michigan, it’s never a bad idea to boost your relationship with auto workers — or ties to the auto industry.
Republican Mike Rogers spent 14 years in Congress, but before that he was an FBI agent and worked on cars.
“I started out in a car factory building Chrysler LeBaron convertibles. It’s a really good car. I love that car,” Rogers told reporters in Madison Heights this week.
Republican U.S. Senate Candidate Mike Rogers campaigns in Michigan in September 2026
Rogers worked in a non-union shop in the early 1980s making modifications to already-assembled cars.
His opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, is more white collar. He holds medical and public health degrees. However, he has blue collar backing — specifically, the United Auto Workers union.
In an interview with Michigan Public Radio, UAW President Shawn Fain explained why El-Sayed is the choice for the union’s nearly 1 million current and retired members.
“We’ve got to elect people that give a damn about workers, and not billionaires and corporate-class people,” Fain said. “I mean, and unfortunately, our political system has been hijacked by the richest people in the world.”
Michigan’s U.S. Senate race could help decide the balance of power in Washington D.C. next year. The ongoing trade war between the U.S. and Canada is just simmering under the surface.
Tariffs aren’t always the bad guy
Fain doesn’t outwardly dislike certain taxes on imports.
“We support strategic targeted tariffs. Blanket tariffs on everything under the sun, or tariffs just to force a country to do something for political reasons? That makes no sense whatsoever,” Fain said.
“And the 50% on Canada, we don’t agree with that. Like Canada is not the problem.”
The Trump administration has placed 50% tariffs on $27.6 billion in Canadian goods and materials. The Canadian government has responded with equal levies.
A strained relationship
Marchers at this month’s Labor Day Parade in Detroit weren’t happy about the tariffs or how we’re treating our closest trade partner. Retired tool and dye man Stan Geis was one of many who carried a sign emblazoned with images of an American flag and the Canadian maple leaf.
The message: “Solidarity. We stand with our neighbor.”
“I liked when we had the trade across the border … with men working in our country from Canada (going) back and forth. It was good. Now it just stinks.”
Sign at the Labor Day Parade.
That’s not to say the relationship between the UAW and the workers of UNIFOR — the Canadian auto workers union — hasn’t hit some potholes.
John D’Agnolo is the president of UNIFOR Local 200 across the border in Windsor. Southern Ontario is home to factories of several major automakers.
He says American autoworkers sometimes have the wrong idea.
“They think that we’re taking from them when we’re not.”
D’Agnolo has just wrapped up a grueling two weeks in contract negotiations with automaker Stellantis.
They’re not going well. Stellantis aims to sell an idled Jeep plant in Brampton, Ontario, to an armored car company.
D’Agnolo said the inconsistent tariffs are making the bargaining process more difficult.
“The challenge with these tariffs and not knowing what you’re going to get from day to day,” D’Agnolo said. “Companies are not going to invest in new programs.”
Uncertainty in Canada
Windsorites get all the Michigan political ads from Detroit-area TV stations. D’Agnolo said the current political climate is only fueling anxiety.
“You have to turn off the TV because you don’t want to hear it because it becomes your life. It becomes now you got mental issues because you’re worried,” D’Agnolo said.
“So yeah, it’s horrible right now.”
Opposite sides
In the U.S. Senate race, the two main party candidates are on opposite sides of the trade war.
El-Sayed doesn’t like that President Trump picked a fight with Canada.
“There’s a way that tariffs could be used to actually protect jobs. This ain’t it. Like all things Donald Trump, it is chaotic, ham-fisted, self-serving,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed points out that his Republican opponent was an advocate for free trade until this latest round of tariffs.
For his part, Rogers told C-SPAN this week he plans to collaborate with Trump in a way El-Sayed will not.
“I will go back to work with the president on tariffs that are working and work with the president on tariffs that are not working,” Rogers said.
“You know, my opponent, all he wants to do is fight with Trump.”
Cost of tariffs
A conservative free market organization, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation — says President Trump’s tariffs are costing Michigan households an extra $5,600 per year.
That’s the third-highest in the nation behind California and Texas.
Steve Grigorian heads the influential Detroit Economic Club. He thinks that could play a role in the election.
“We’re business people, but we go to the grocery store, we go to fill up our gas tank. So it’s definitely top of mind. I think it will definitely be top of mind as people go to the polls”
Ballots for the November election were sent out this week. Election Day is less than six weeks away.
As the Iran war continues, gas prices hit a weekly average of $4.88 in Metro Detroit. The average price of diesel is $2 more than that.
The stock market is strong, but inflation is at least 1% higher than the federal reserve’s target. And the U.S. is in a trade war with Canada.
This hasn’t caused a recession. But all of this does make it harder for small businesses to operate, like the corner bar on your street, and the auto repair shop in your suburb.
Mark Lee runs The Lee Group, where he’s been advising small businesses in this region for nearly 20 years. He explored answers to these questions with The Metro’s Sam Corey
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro onApple Podcasts,Spotify,YouTube, orNPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.
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Detroit’s economy and population are likely to grow over the next five years.
But city residents will also face significant disparities in wages.
That’s the finding from a recent forecast of the Motor City’s financial future compiled by researchers at the University of Michigan.
Highly-regarded expert Dan Manaenkov helped examine Detroit’s economic picture.
He says Michigan’s largest city already has one distinct advantage over the rest of the state: a younger workforce. The wider state is losing workers to retirement.
“Michigan has been losing labor force to the tune of 3% year over year,” says Manaenkov.
In the long term, Manaenkov is less optimistic about Detroit’s economy. “Detroit is not an isolated economy… in the longer run, it is a lot more sensitive to how the over all Michigan is doing.” He also says that Detroiter’s on average make less money, leading to continuing wage disparity.
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Chaos. That’s the trend line in the auto sector of our economy. A war in Iran has raised gas prices. A Trump administration antagonistic to electric vehicles has reshaped the auto industry, causing Stellantis, General Motors and Ford to lose a combined $52 billion as they’ve shifted away from their electric investments.
And through it all, the Trump administration has enacted tariffs. Recently, they’ve gotten steeper.
In August, America enacted new tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel. Canada responded with tariffs on many US goods, including those aforementioned products.
What do these trends mean for auto companies and auto workers? How are customers affected? And, how are both parties trying to adapt to rapidly changing policies?
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro onApple Podcasts,Spotify,YouTube, orNPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.
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Many have an opinion about Detroit’s Renaissance Center.
Some view it as ugly, detached from the city, and with General Motors having moved out, they believe it should be redeveloped.
And then there are people who like the RenCen. They see its tallest towers as an emblem of the city. They’re often the same people who argue that pouring public money into its redevelopment will detract from other priorities — things like schools, public transit, and housing that teachers and nurses can afford.
This question — whether a large public-private project is worth it for the public — has come into sharper focus. That’s because GM and Bedrock are now asking for just under $550 million to subsidize the redevelopment of the RenCen. That’s up from about $350 million when they first announced the plan.
Jared Fleisher is the CEO of Bedrock. He spoke about the plan with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent. Later, Anne Goulet joined the conversation. She is the principal of two firms, ARGitct and Anne R Goulet Architecture and Design.
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro onApple Podcasts,Spotify,YouTube, orNPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.
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Canada is imposing huge tariffs on a variety of U.S. products, as a response to President Trump’s recent series of 50 % tariffs on certain Canadian goods.
And a coalition of business groups says Michigan is feeling the brunt of the trade war.
The Michigan Smart Trade Alliance champions good trade relations with other countries, especially Canada.
The group’s Mark Fisk says, in just one example, some parents got a good taste recently of what the current tariffs meant for returning students.
Listen: Michigan business group says US trade war with Canada taxing residents’ patience
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Mark Fisk: For many Michigan families, this time of year means back to school shopping. And, unfortunately, due to the increased tariffs, it also means higher costs. Many basic school supplies, from pencils and crayons to binders and folders, are much more expensive due to the tariffs.
Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: How high of a price increase are we talking?
MF: We’ve seen double digit increases for many, many items. Rubber erasers are up, pencils and crayons are up, backpacks are up, on and on across the board. Scissors, binders, they’re all up. And that is in line with general cost increases due to the tariffs. No state has been hit harder than Michigan because of our current trade policies. That has meant really bad news for families, retailers, farmers and small businesses.
QK: How are you tying the increased tariffs to this increased price in school supplies?
MF: We simply did an analysis of the before and after. The picture that emerges is very, very clear. The tariffs are having a huge increase on not just school supplies but clothing, soccer balls and all kinds of ordinary items that families need as they go back to school. And that is bad news for families, bad news for retailers, and bad news for businesses.
QK: And the data that you’re gathering this from, if I understand you correctly, says that tariffs have increased by “X” percent and these prices have increased as well. So you’re that’s how you’re tying those together?
MF: That is exactly right. And, again, no state’s been hit harder than Michigan by the current trade policy. It’s hurt our tourism industry, Quinn. We’ve had reduced foot traffic because of some of the trade wars and the tensions between ourselves and Canada. And that tourism industry fuels mom and pop businesses like restaurants, hotels, motels, gas stations. The current trade policy has been a disaster for Michigan families.
QK: So, in your group’s view then, what would you see as the remedy for this?
MF: We need Congress to act. We need Congress to take the reins and begin enacting smart, consistent trade policies. That means trade policies that lower costs instead of raise costs, trade policies that create jobs instead of kill jobs. And we need a trade policy that preserves our relationship with Canada. Canada’s a top export partner for the nation and for Michigan. We have a long-standing partnership with Canada and it works better for businesses, for everyone, if we are working together in partnership on trade rather than in a trade war with tensions and higher costs.
QK: Your alliance has been known for trying to protect Michigan’s trade relationship with Canada. It’s no secret things are a bit tense on that front right now, since the president launched new tariffs recently, basically on his own. You mentioned Congress reining them in, but do you see anything truly on a congressional or any other level that can actually affect what tariffs the President wants to impose or doesn’t want to?
MF: We have traveled all over the state with the Smart Trade Alliance. And I think it begins with getting out there and listening to the impact that the tariffs are having on businesses, on agriculture, hotels and restaurants, on the retailers. And then we have to look at working together in a bipartisan fashion to enact trade policies that give our economy a shot in the arm. Instead of the current approach, the erratic approach, which is shooting ourselves in the foot.
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Mark Lee runs The Lee Group, where he has advised small businesses in this region for nearly 20 years. He joins host Robyn Vincent to talk tolls, tariffs, Delray, and whether Canadian visitors are coming back.
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro onApple Podcasts,Spotify,YouTube, orNPR, or wherever you get your podcasts.Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org
Support the podcasts you love.
One-of-a-kind podcasts from WDET bring you engaging conversations, news you need to know and stories you love to hear. Keep the conversations coming. Please make a gift today.
Matthew Nix had driven past the brewery in Sauganash for years, but — not much of a weekday drinker — had never stopped in.
When he finally decided to meet friends at the taproom on a recent Saturday to play some cards, he found bartenders dancing on countertops, dogs wearing sweaters and the last of the beer draining from the tap. It was the farewell party for Alarmist Brewing.
“This is my first time here, first and obviously last,” said Nix, 36, a high school teacher living in the Edgewater neighborhood, about the closure.
In Illinois and across the country, breweries have been struggling as consumers seek healthier drinking habits or have a wider range of options, such as THC-infused drinks, as business costs continue to rise. Many have closed their doors, while others have redefined its meaning as a social space that offers beverage variety and events.
The number of U.S breweries closing outpaced those that opened for the second year in a row in 2025 for a net loss of 179 last year, according to preliminary 2025 data from Brewers Association, a trade group for small American brewers.
It stands in stark contrast from a decade ago — a golden age — for craft brewers when the number of breweries opening was about 10 times higher than those closing, according to Matt Gacioch, staff economist at Brewers Association.
One industry challenge is that Americans are now drinking less. A 2025 Gallup poll showed that only 54% of U.S. adults said they consume alcohol — the lowest percentage in 90 years.
Figures are even lower among young adults with only 50% reporting that they drink alcohol. These numbers fall in line with healthier drinking trends like “sober curious” and “Dry January,” which seek mindful and moderate drinking.
On top of drinking less, consumers are also seeking wider beverage options from nonalcoholic drinks to hard seltzers, which adds pressure for traditional craft breweries specializing in beer.
Sports and music arena United Center is expected to start selling THC-infused drinks Señorita and Rythm at its stands this month — apparently the largest U.S. arena to do so.
“Bringing Señorita and Rythm to the United Center reflects a simple truth: Consumers want nonalcoholic options, and leading venues are responding,” Ben Kovler, Rythm, Inc. chairman and interim CEO, said in a statement last month.
Other music venues that sell cannabis-derived drinks are the Salt Shed, Riviera, Ramova Theatre and Thalia Hall, taking up coveted beverage shelf space.
“There’s just so much more competition in terms of consumer attention and physical retail space,” Gacioch said. “There’s this whole world of other options.”
Rising business expenses and the cost of goods like aluminum have also contributed to the strain, particularly after the pandemic.
“You have the increased cost of just about everything,” said Andrew Heritage, chief economist at the Beer Institute, noting the increase in operating costs, rent and labor.
Some Chicago breweries were unable to recover, with Lo Rez Brewing in the Pilsen neighborhood closing its doors in 2023 in what cofounder Dave Dahl called a “pandemic casualty.” Another staple in the craft industry, Metropolitan Brewing, one of Chicago’s oldest, closed in 2023 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Most recently, award-winning Alarmist Brewing closed on Feb. 1 after years of struggling with falling business after the pandemic.
“The bottom line is we’re just not selling,” said Alarmist owner Gary Gulley. “It just never recovered since COVID.”
Alarmist Brewing owner Gary Gulley, center, receives a hug from Keith Willert at the Sauganash neighborhood brewery and taproom in Chicago, Jan. 31, 2026. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
Illinois lost over 30 breweries in two years after 2020, falling to 218 total breweries, according to data from the Beer Institute. By 2024, the number of Illinois breweries rebounded to 251.
Some breweries have adapted to create third spaces, a place to mingle and play trivia with friends — and pups.
“I like a place where you can bring your dog, you can bring a book,” Nix said, likening these breweries to social spaces where you can play card games.
One brewery that has been bolstering events and activities is Maplewood Brewery and Distillery in the Logan Square neighborhood. The decade-old brewery holds events like its upcoming Pulaski Day Party to celebrate its Pulaski pilsner, trivia nights and beer festivals to cultivate brand loyalty.
“We have our core brand that we make, but we’re always coming out with something new and fun … that’s helped us out,” said Paul Megalis, co-owner and CFO of Maplewood Brewery.
Their expansive beverage options include ready-to-drink rum punch cocktails, in-house coffee liqueurs for espresso martini lovers and seasonal beer concoctions.
“We’ve essentially been a beverage company since Day 1, and so we’ve always had a diversified portfolio. I mean, we just hustle,” Megalis said.
They plan to open a second location in Glen Ellyn slated for this spring.
Despite the changing tides in the craft beer business, experts believe craft breweries are evolving not disappearing.
“Craft beer industry is nothing if not creative,” Gacioch said.
A woman drinks a beer in a packed taproom at Alarmist Brewing, in Chicago’s Sauganash neighborhood on Jan. 31, 2026. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
Around Y2K, the mighty American private sector hit a momentous milestone. For the first time on record, frontline managers – supervisors, team leads, foremen, forewomen, etc. – outnumbered back-office managers.
That seemed significant, especially for the working-class folks for whom these noncommissioned-officer-style positions provided a rare path to the upper reaches of the career ladder. As quickly as the milestone was crossed, the trend reversed, according to our analysis of about 37 million responses to the census and American Community Survey from 1950 to 2024.
Once ascendant, supervisory jobs crop up all over our lists of the hardest-hit jobs of Americans’ working lives, even as white-collar management soars to new highs. What happened?
Having been burned by data-collection changes before, our first instinct was to take a long, hard look at how the Census Bureau classifies jobs. Or, more accurately, to spend 15 seconds emailing an extraordinarily talented economist and hoping they’ve already done the work for us.
We were in luck. Utrecht University economist Anna Salomons responded within an hour, even though the hour in question was already a wee one in the Netherlands. For her blockbuster 2024 analysis, Salomons and her collaborators collected and analyzed detailed Census Bureau job descriptions from 1930 to 2018 to figure out how our economy had evolved, mutated and automated.
She first mentioned that the change in occupational definitions around the 2000 Census was “notoriously large” and, like us, wondered if that might cause some of the shift we saw in the numbers.
But two factors argue against that thesis. First, as Salomons suggested, we’re using a system from our friends at IPUMS that carefully adjusts for all those changes in the raw census definitions.
Second, the changes come gradually after the inflection point – if a census definition change was the culprit, you’d expect a sudden swerve. But what if, Salomons suggested, those changes in definition took place outside of the friendly confines of the Census Bureau?
Specifically, she suggested we look at title inflation, which immediately blew the case wide open. Or at least blew it ajar.
It seems quite possible that, over the past few decades, jobs that were once called some variation on “supervisor” were now called some variation on “manager.”
A fancier title (and no change in pay) may, at least temporarily, fool a worker who’d been angling for a raise or promotion. But could it really fool the almighty Census Bureau?
We fear the answer must be “probably.” The American Community Survey’s superpower – that it hears directly from about 2 million U.S. households each year – is also, in this case, its Achilles’ heel. Because it must rely on what those households say.
The census crew does its utmost to elicit clean answers, but even the most carefully designed questions would struggle to distinguish a manager from a “manager.”
The survey asks not just for your occupation but also for your most important work activities or duties. That detail, plus answers to other questions throughout the survey, such as education level, give the clerks at the National Processing Center – and the government robot that handles the easiest cases – as much information as possible when they’re determining which job a respondent really performed.
But not everybody fills out those activities. And not every manager-in-name-only will provide enough information to reclassify them as a supervisor or even as an individual contributor. So, a certain percentage of inflated titles will slip through.
But that would mean census surveys still reflect a real trend toward title inflation. And why are titles inflating? Based on a lifetime of observation, we’d guess some of corporate America’s brightest minds have noticed that a title upgrade allows you to give a worker a “promotion” without a change in responsibility – or in pay.
Particularly crafty economists may even have found a way to measure one narrow instance of this. Salomons points to an analysis forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies. In it, economists analyzed about 450,000 online job postings with salaries near the cutoff that makes you eligible for management under the Fair Labor Standards Act. (The postings came from 2010 to 2018, when the cutoff was $455 a week. It currently sits at $684.)
The authors – Lauren Cohen at Harvard University, and Umit Gurun and Bugra Ozel at the University of Texas at Dallas – found that jobs paying just above the legal cutoff are about five times more likely to have managerial titles than are similar jobs with pay just below it.
Why? Well, even a dubious title such as calling a barber a “grooming manager” or a front-desk clerk a “director of first impressions” could provide cover for employers looking to claim that person is exempt from overtime pay. The economists estimate such spurious classifications save employers about 13.5 percent on the pay of each “manager.”
To be sure, as Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told us, the definition for overtime-exempt employees says nothing about titles – it’s purely about job function. Faux-promoting a worker to “manager” shouldn’t change anything. But in reality, she said, bosses often use these titles as a smoke screen.
“Titles can still matter a lot in practice,” Ozel said. “A ‘manager’ label can shape expectations about whether overtime is available and can muddy the record for anyone trying to assess the role from the outside. … Job duties are hard to observe and document without access to internal records and day-to-day work.”
But this dynamic, while suggestive, applies only to a narrow slice of the workforce. In any given year, less than a tenth of the workforce earned enough to put them within fudging distance (20 percent) of the cutoff.
What else might drive this title inflation?
Our best clue came in a call from Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University management expert who longtime readers may recognize is also a remote-work data impresario.
Bloom pointed out the rise of managers coincides with what he calls the overeducation of the American workforce. College graduates once made up a tiny, elite minority. Now, America’s colleges churn out so many that they outnumber the share of young people who never made it past high school.
As a result, Bloom said, there aren’t enough highfalutin’ positions for all those brand-new baccalaureates. Of course, employers would still love to attract these talented young grads to their unfilled lower-falutin’ positions. But to do so, they’d need to get creative.
“How do you get a college graduate to do a job that’s honestly probably better suited to a noncollege graduate?” Bloom asked. “You just shove the word ‘president’ into the title!”
When we took Bloom’s hint and charted the rise in managers by education, the fallout of his observation became clear. The increase in managers with a bachelor’s degree or higher drowns out any other trend. If we explain that segment, we explain the whole thing.
We started by looking at where all those college-educated managers worked.
As we should have guessed, they’re in the industries with the most-educated workers overall. In almost every major industry, as more educated workers roll in, the number of educated managers rises at the same rate.
Let’s look at an appropriate example: the industry of higher education. In that business, a four-year degree (or something fancier) gave you almost a 5 percent chance of being in management in 2000. By 2024, the share of educated workers in that sector had more than doubled, but your chances of being a manager conditional on having a college degree didn’t really change.
Many industries – banking, real estate, hospitals – follow this pattern. The exception? Computer services, which added more jobs than all but a handful of (mostly low-wage) industries over this time period, also saw your odds of becoming a manager double.
That matches what we heard from Ben Hanowell, an anthropologist who now helps direct ADP Research, the research arm of the outfit that probably processes your paycheck each month. The company’s endless piles of proprietary payrolls allow Hanowell to produce metrics that us mere civilians can’t match.
In his analysis, Hanowell found that U.S. teams got slightly smaller after the pandemic – an average manager went from 7.4 direct reports to about 7.3. But over that time, tech firms have gone from 6.5 workers per manager to about 5.3, with much of the drop coming after the pandemic.
So, while there are some situations where individuals became more likely to be managers, the much more common story is: People with college degrees had the same odds of becoming a manager as they always did, so as we got more people with college degrees, we got more managers.
But are these Potemkin promotions, or do they signal a change in the economy?
It hinges on whether the new boss, the “manager,” is truly the same as the old boss, the “supervisor.” We don’t have enough data right now to compare their actual duties, but we can at least look at their pay.
And sure enough, when we compare managers to similarly paid supervisors since the turn of the millennium, a clean pattern pops out. At every step of pay scale, managers rose, and supervisors fell in roughly equal quantities (after accounting for workforce growth over that time). To us, that looks a lot like replacement.
To be sure, they may not all be simple swaps in which a firm hires a college graduate to be a glorified supervisor with a cool title. We could also be seeing centralization. Perhaps work that once fell to supervisors – say, scheduling or coaching – now shifts to a central, college-educated staff of trainers and human resources professionals.
Around the edges, we expect those trends have been exacerbated by the decline of small businesses, since a megacorp in search of efficiency will centralize more functions. Similarly, the rise of outsourcing and perhaps gig work means jobs that were once done by small teams with supervisors inside the company are now handled by huge outside contractors.
And of course the increasing reliance on gig workers and outsourced workers that such a model implies might also help explain why tech’s managers now seem to manage so few employees – many of the folks they’re managing are now working outside the company.
But experts like Shierholz confirmed our hunch that the dominant force seemed to be the simplest: Job titles are getting a college-friendly makeover even if the jobs themselves don’t change much. Cory Stahle, senior economist at Indeed, agreed this seemed plausible based on his impressions from the online job site’s vast archives of job postings.
“We’re seeing a lot of jobs that have manager in them, but they are doing these more direct manager or direct supervising type of jobs,” Stahle said. “They are managers who are more directly involved in the day-to-day operations rather than a higher-up.”
Hiring sign is displayed at a grocery store in Arlington Heights, Ill., Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
NEW YORK (AP) — It’s been a confusing time for people with student loans. Collections restarted, then were put on hold. At the same time, borrowers had to stay on top of changes to key forgiveness plans.
Last year, the long-contested SAVE plan introduced by the Biden administration ended with a settlement agreement. President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” introduced new borrowing limits for graduates and raised challenges to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. While several changes for student loan borrowers will take effect this summer, other key questions remain unresolved.
More than 5 million Americans were in default on their federal student loans as of September, according to the Education Department. Millions are behind on loan payments and at risk of default this year.
Borrowers “genuinely struggle to afford their loans and then to hear that the administration is making it more expensive and taking away some of the tools and resources that help folks afford their loans is really, it’s panic-inducing,” said Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director at Protect Borrowers.
Last month, the Education Department announced that it would delay involuntary collections for student loan borrowers in default until the department finalizes its new loan repayment plans. The date for this is still unclear.
If you’re a student loan borrower, here are some key things to know:
If you were enrolled in the SAVE plan
The SAVE plan was a repayment plan with some of the most lenient terms ever. Soon after its launch it was challenged in court, leaving millions of student loan borrowers in limbo. Last December, the Education Department announced a settlement agreement to end the SAVE plan. What is next for borrowers who were enrolled in this repayment plan is yet to be determined.
“Seven and a half million borrowers who are currently enrolled in SAVE need to be moved to another plan,” Berkman-Breen said.
As part of the agreement, the Education Department says it will not enroll new borrowers, deny pending applications, and will move all current SAVE borrowers into other repayment plans.
The Education Department is expected to develop a plan for borrowers to transition from the SAVE plan, yet borrowers should be proactive about enrolling in other repayment plans, said Kate Wood, a lending expert at NerdWallet.
If you are looking to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan
Borrowers can apply for the following income-driven plans: the Income-Based Repayment Plan, the Pay as You Earn plan, and the Income-Contingent Repayment plan.
“They all have similar criteria, and they function similarly. Your payment is set as a percentage of your income, not how much you owe, so it’s usually a lower payment,” Berkman-Breen said.
The payment amount under income-driven plans is a percentage of your discretionary income, and the percentage varies depending on the plan. Since many people are looking to switch plans, some applications to income-driven repayment plans might take longer to process, said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
You can find out which repayment plan might work best for you by logging on to the Education Department’s loan simulator.
If you’re working toward your Public Service Loan Forgiveness
There are no changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program yet. Last year, the Trump administration announced plans to change the eligibility requirements for participating nonprofits.
The policy seeks to disqualify nonprofit workers if their work is deemed to have “substantial illegal purpose.” The Trump administration said it’s necessary to block taxpayer money from lawbreakers, while critics say it turns the program into a tool of political retribution.
The proposal says illegal activity includes the trafficking or “chemical castration” of children, illegal immigration, and supporting foreign terrorist organizations. This move could cut off some teachers, doctors, and other public workers from federal loan cancellation.
“This is something that obviously is very stressful, very nerve-wracking for a lot of people, but given that we don’t know exactly how this is going to be enforced, how these terms are going to be defined, it’s not really something that you can try to plan ahead for now,” Wood said.
While this policy is currently being challenged by 20 Democrat-led states, it’s expected to take effect in July. In the meantime, Wood recommends that borrowers enrolled in the PSLF program continue making payments.
If your student loans are in default
Involuntary collections on federal student loans will remain on hold. The Trump administration announced earlier this month that it is delaying plans to withhold pay from student loan borrowers who default on their payments.
Federal student loan borrowers can have their wages garnished and their federal tax refunds withheld if they default on their loans. Borrowers are considered in default when they are at least 270 days behind on payments.
If your student loans are in default, you can contact your loan holder to apply for a loan rehabilitation program.
“They essentially come up with a payment plan where you’re making a reduced payment,” Woods. “After five successful payments on that rehabilitation plan, wage garnishment will cease.”
If you’re planning to attend graduate school
Trump’s “ Big Beautiful Bill ” has changed the amount graduate students can borrow from federal student loans. Graduate students could previously borrow loans up to the cost of their degree; the new rules cap the amount depending on whether the degree is considered a graduate or a professional program.
Wood said that if you’re starting a new program and taking out a loan after July 1, you will be subject to the new loan limits.
Under the new plan, students in professional programs would be able to borrow up to $50,000 per year and up to $200,000 in total. Other graduate students, such as those pursuing nursing and physical therapy, would be limited to $20,500 a year and up to $100,000 total.
The Education Department is defining the following fields as professional programs: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry and theology.
If you want to consolidate your loan
The online application for loan consolidation is available at studentaid.gov/loan-consolidation. If you have multiple federal student loans, you can combine them into a single loan with a fixed interest rate and a single monthly payment.
The consolidation process typically takes around 60 days to complete. You can only consolidate your loans once.
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The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.
FILE – In this May 5, 2018, file photo, graduates at the University of Toledo commencement ceremony in Toledo, Ohio. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
Lansing — Several of Michigan’s public university leaders gathered last week to reveal the results of a study analyzing the positive economic impact their institutions have on the state, generating $45 billion annually.
As public scrutiny of higher education and its mission has grown over the last five years, the speakers, including Michigan State University President Kevin Guskiewicz and Grand Valley State University President Philomena Mantella, explained on Tuesday how Michigan’s public schools are continuing to improve the lives of all Michigan residents.
It’s been 10 years since the last report on the economic impact of Michigan’s universities, said Britany Affolter-Caine, executive director of Research Universities for Michigan, an organization of the four Michigan research universities.
The report, done by the East Lansing-based Anderson Economic Group, shows that Michigan’s public universities contributed $45 billion in net new economic activity through operations, student spending and alumni earnings for the state. The report pointed out that this revenue was more than 28 times the amount given in state appropriations for the 15 universities.
“This is economic impact that would not exist in Michigan if these institutions were not here,” said Dan Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association for State Universities.
However, about 70% of Americans now say higher education is going in the wrong direction, a poll by Pew Research released in October showed, up from 56% in 2020.
Guskiewicz and Mantella agreed that the public perception of higher education is something they’re trying to repair. Graduates coming out of college with jobs in their field, more affordable tuitions so students have less debt and showing the impact of universities in local communities are all ways the institutions can rebuild public trust, the speakers said.
Perception of higher education
Americans were losing confidence in higher education because they believe it’s too expensive, doesn’t provide the skills needed for today’s jobs and is “indoctrinating” students, Guskiewicz said.
The misinformation regarding the value of a degree conflicts with the real data that shows, Guskiewicz said, the social upward mobility and the opportunity that come with a degree, along with the improvements to quality of life in all sectors that touch a university.
“We have to do a better job of telling our story, just like we are today,” Guskiewicz said.
But negative perceptions of higher education held by lawmakers, federally and statewide, can hurt a university’s finances. In the past year, President Donald Trump’s administration has cut millions of dollars from Michigan universities, according to Treasury Department data compiled by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group.
Michigan House Republicans toyed with the idea of cutting $291 million from the University of Michigan’s and MSU’s state appropriations to redistribute among the other state universities. This was rejected by the Democratic-led Senate and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and all universities saw an increase in their state appropriations in the budget approved in October.
File photo from the campus of Central Michigan University. (Stephen Frye / MediaNews Group)
“That was an effort by one caucus in one chamber, which is a pretty distinct minority in the entire public body that ultimately is responsible for passing the state budget,” Hurley said. “All of our universities need to have reinvigorated state investment. … We are thankful for what the Legislature has done in recent years. … But we are conservatively at least 41st out of 50 in this country as it involves per student state support for public universities.”
The worth of a degree
Pew’s poll showed that about 80% of adult respondents said colleges and universities aren’t doing enough to keep tuition affordable, and about half said higher education wasn’t doing enough to prepare students for well-paying jobs.
The speakers acknowledged the longstanding problem of graduates struggling to find employment in their degree’s field, or any meaningful employment at all.
“This is not a new challenge,” Affolter-Caine said. “It happens to maybe be exacerbated in the current cycle.”
However, the report shows that graduates from Michigan universities make double what high school degree holders earn and, on average, about $20,000 more than what graduates from out-of-state public institutions make.
On average, the report said, Michigan university alumni ages 25-24 earn $91,073 yearly.
Mantella said Grand Valley, like other universities, has embraced and strengthened “experience-based learning.” This includes ensuring all students have access to an internship, project-based learning or other professional workforce experience while still in college.
“This is not only an opportunity to accelerate to the workforce,” Mantella said. “It’s so (students) come into the workforce at the appropriate levels, in the appropriate roles. … It also links the individual to a Michigan employer, so there’s a higher probability that they will, in fact, stay in the state and contribute to the state rather than go somewhere else.”
Hurley said about 84% of the top 50 most in-demand jobs over the next few years will require at least a bachelor’s degree.
“(Those jobs) are our state’s economy, our private sector, our non-private sector, our health care sector speaking,” Hurley said. “And so for us to be competitive in the future, we have to continue generating that talent. And of course, it’s the role of the state government to make sure that college remains affordable.”
File. University of Michigan campus. (Stephen Frye / MediaNews Group)
NEW YORK (AP) — The shopping rush leading up to Christmas is over and in its place, like every year, another has begun as millions of people hunt for post-holiday deals and get in line to return gifts that didn’t fit, or didn’t hit quite right.
Holiday spending using cash or cards through Sunday has topped last year’s haul, according to data released this week by Visa’s Consulting & Analytics division and Mastercard SpendingPulse.
But growing unease over the U.S. economy and higher prices in part due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs have altered the behavior of some Americans. More are hitting thrift stores or other discounters in place of malls, according to data from Placer.ai. The firm tracks people’s movements based on cellphone usage.
And they’re sticking more closely to shopping lists and doing more research before buying. That may explain why returns so far are down compared with last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics.
Here are three trends that defined the holiday shopping season so far:
A weaker holiday season for traditional gift giving
Americans are still spending on gifts, yet increasingly that shopping is taking place at thrift and discount stores, according to data from Placer.ai.
That’s likely forcing traditional retailers such as department stores to fight harder for customers, Placer.ai said.
Clothing and electronics that traditionally dominate holiday sales did have a surge but struggled to grow, according to Placer.ai. Both goods are dominated by imports and thus, vulnerable to tariffs.
For example, traffic doubled in department stores during the week before Christmas, from Dec. 15 through Sunday, compared with the average shopping week this year. But traffic in the week before Christmas this year fell 13.2% compared with 2024.
Traffic surged 61% at traditional sellers of only clothing in the week before the holiday compared with the rest of the year. But again, compared with the runup to Christmas last year, sales slid 9%.
Some of that lost traffic may have migrated to the so-called off-price stores— chains like TJ Maxx. That sector had a sharp seasonal traffic bump of 85.1% and a gain of 1.2% in the week before the holiday.
But it was thrift stores that were red hot, with traffic jumping nearly 11% in the week before Christmas compared with last year.
“Whether hunting for a designer deal or uncovering a one-of-a-kind vintage piece, consumers increasingly favored discovery-driven experiences over the standardized assortments of traditional retail,” Shira Petrack, head of content at Placer.ai, said in a blog post Friday.
Thrift stores broaden their appeal
In the past it may have seemed gauche to gift your mother a gently used sweater or a pair of pants from a local thrift store, but seemingly not so amid all of the economic uncertainty and rising prices, according to Placer.ai.
Through the second half of 2025, thrift stores have seen at least a 10% increases in traffic compared with last year. That suggests that environmental concerns as well as economic issues are luring more Americans to second-hand stores, Placer.ai said. Visits to thrift stores generally do not take off during the holidays, yet in the most recent Black Friday weekend, sales jumped 5.5%, Placer.ai. reported.
In November, as customer traffic in traditional apparel stores fell more than 3%, traffic in thrift stores soared 12.7%, according to Placer.ai.
The thrift migration has altered the demographics of second-hand stores. The average household income of thrift customers hit $75,000 during October and November of this year, a slight uptick from $74,900 last year, $74,600 in 2023 well above the average income of 74,100 in 2022, based on demographic data from STI:PopStats combined with Placer.ai data.
U.S. sales at thrift chain Savers Value Village’s rose 10.5% in the three months ended Sept. 27 and the momentum continued through October, store executives said in late October.
“High household income cohort continues to become a larger portion of our consumer mix,” CEO Mark Walsh told analysts. “It’s trade down for sure, and our younger cohort also continues to grow in numbers. ”
Fewer returns, so far
For the first six weeks of the holiday season, return rates have dipped from the same period a year ago, according to Adobe Analytics.
That suggests that shoppers are doing more research before adding something to their shopping list, and they’re being more disciplined in sticking to the lists they create, according to Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights.
“I think it’s very indicative of consumers and how conscientiously they’ve purchased,” Pandya said. “Many of them are being very specific with how they spend their budget.”
From Nov. 1 to Dec. 12, returns fell 2.5% compared with last year, Adobe reported. In the seven days following Cyber Week — the five shopping days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, returns fell 0.1%.
From the Nov. 1 through Dec. 12, online sales rose 6% to $187.3 billion, on track to surpass its outlook for the season, Adobe reported.
Between Dec. 26 to Dec. 31, returns are expected to rise by 25% to 35% compared with returns between Nov. 1 through Dec. 12, Adobe said, and it expects returns to remain elevated through the first two weeks of January, up 8% to 15%.
This is the first year that Adobe has tracked returns.
Still, the last week of December sees the greatest concentration of returns: one out of every eight returns in the 2024 holiday season took place between Dec. 26 and Dec 31, a trend expected to persist this year, Adobe said.
Post-holiday shoppers pass a Christmas tree and festive display at Calef’s Country Store, Friday, Dec. 26, 2025, in Barrington, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
By JAMES POLLARD and LINLEY SANDERS The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Most Americans aren’t making end-of-year charitable giving plans, according to the results of a new AP-NORC poll, despite the many fundraising appeals made by nonprofits that rely on donation surges in the calendar’s final month to reach budget targets.
The survey, which was conducted in early December by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that about half U.S. adults say they’ve already made their charitable contributions for 2025. Just 18% say they’ve donated and will donate again before the year is over. Only 6% report they haven’t given yet but will do so by December’s end. The rest, 30%, haven’t donated and don’t plan to.
But weaker income gains and steep price inflation meant that lower-income households had less money to redistribute. Other surveys have also found a yearslong decline in the number of individuals who give.
December still serves as a “very important deadline” for donors, according to Dianne Chipps Bailey, managing director of Bank of America’s Philanthropic Solutions division. She cited estimates from the National Philanthropic Trust that nearly one-third of annual giving happens in the final month.
“December 31 does provide a target to make sure that they’ve given what they intended to give before the year is over,” Bailey said.
Few donate on GivingTuesday
Perhaps no day is more consequential for fundraisers than GivingTuesday. Beginning as a hashtag in 2012, the well-known celebration of generosity now sees many nonprofits leverage the attention to solicit donations on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Americans donated an estimated $4 billion to nonprofits this most recent GivingTuesday.
But Americans were much more likely to make a Black Friday purchase than a GivingTuesday gift this year. Just under half say they bought something for Black Friday, according to the poll, compared to about 1 in 10 who say they donated to a charity for GivingTuesday.
“Black Friday gets the lion’s share of things,” said Oakley Graham, a 32-year-old from Missouri. “And then you’ve got GivingTuesday a couple days later. Most people have probably spent all their spending money at that point.”
Graham said his family has “definitely tightened the financial belt” in recent years. He and his wife are dealing with student loan debts now that the Trump administration suspended their repayment plan. Their two young children are always growing out of their clothes. It’s good if there’s anything left for savings.
He still tries to help out his neighbors — from handiwork to Salvation Army clothing donations.
“Not that I’m not willing to give here and there,” he said. “But it seems like it’s pretty tough to find the extra funds.”
Checkout charity proves more popular
Another avenue for nudging Americans to give is more widely used, even if individual donations are small. The AP-NORC poll found that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they donated to a charity when checking out at a store this year.
Graham is among those who reported giving at the cash register. As an outdoorsy person who enjoys hunting and fishing when he can, he said he is “always susceptible to giving for conservation.” He said he likely rounded up once or twice at Bass Pro Shops for that reason.
“With the finances, I don’t do a lot of buying these days. But a couple cents here or there is like — I can do that,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like much. But I know if everybody did it would make a difference.”
The poll found that older adults — those over 60 — are more likely than Americans overall to donate at store checkouts.
One Texas architect’s unusual process for year-end donations
About one-quarter of Americans plan to donate in the last weeks of the year, and Chuck Dietrick is one of them. The 69-year-old architect applies what he calls a “shotgun approach” as the year comes to a close.
He and his wife give monthly to Valley Hope, a nonprofit addiction services provider where their son did inpatient rehab. And then there are eight or so organizations that they support with end-of-the-year gifts.
“We’re doing our own thing,” he said. “I don’t do Black Friday or Cyber Monday, either … So, I don’t do the GivingTuesday thing.”
Dietrick estimates their household donated somewhere between $501 and $2,500. The Dallas-Fort Worth area couple mostly contributes to organizations that have touched their lives or those of their friends.
There’s the Florida hospice that Dietrick said did a “super job” caring for his mother. He has relatives and friends who served in the military, so he also gives to the Disabled American Veterans and the Wounded Warrior Project.
“I would rather give a smaller amount of money to a variety of institutions that I care about rather than giving a big chunk of money to one,” he explained.
Giving plans went unaffected by federal funding cuts or the shutdown
Most 2025 donors say the amount they gave wasn’t affected much by this year’s federal funding cuts or the government shutdown, according to the AP-NORC poll, although about 3 in 10 say those situations did impact the charities they chose to support.
The survey suggests that, while private donors mobilized millions to fill funding gaps and hunger relief groups saw donation totals spike last month, many Americans did not respond with their pocketbooks to the nonprofit sector’s newfound pressures this year.
Jeannine Disviscour, a 63-year-old Baltimore teacher, is among 2025 donors who say the cuts prompted them to give more.
“I did not donate on GivingTuesday,” she said. “But I did donate that week because I was feeling the need to support organizations that I felt might not continue to get the support they needed to get to be successful.”
She estimates her household gave between $501 and $2,500. That included support for National Public Radio. Congress eliminated $1.1 billion allocated to public broadcasting this summer, leaving hundreds of NPR stations with some sort of budget hole. She said she wanted to ensure journalism reached news deserts where residents have few media options.
Living in an area that is home to many refugees, Disviscour also donated her time and money to the Asylee Women Enterprise. She said the local nonprofit helps asylum-seekers and other forced migrants find food, shelter, clothing, transportation and language classes.
“There is a gap in funding and there’s more need than ever,” she said. “And I wanted to step up. And it’s in my community.”
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Sanders reported from Washington.
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,146 adults was conducted Dec. 4-8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Chuck Dietrick poses for a portrait at his home in Anna, Texas, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
MARIENBERG, Germany – In a workshop tucked into the rolling hills of eastern Germany’s Ore Mountains, rows of wooden soldiers stood at attention. Their red coats gleamed and their square-jawed mouths – designed to crack nuts but mostly decorative – formed the trademark stiff grin of Steinbach Nutcrackers.
For decades, these handmade figures have sailed across the Atlantic and into American homes, filling mantels and collectors’ shelves and appearing in countless Christmas card photos. Alongside gingerbread houses and fir trees with all the trimmings, they are one of the most recognizable German exports of the holiday season.
This year, however, tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump have given the stern-faced ornaments a new reason to grimace: About 95 percent of sales by the family-founded manufacturer, Steinbach Volkskunst, come from the United States and the company’s most reliable market has become its biggest bureaucratic headache.
Under a deal between Trump and the European Union reached earlier this year, most exports to the U.S. are subject to a 15 percent tariff. Separately, the Trump administration also ended the “de minimis” exemption – a rule that had allowed small parcels under $800 to enter duty-free.
The move was aimed at curbing low-cost imports from Chinese e-commerce giants such as Temu and Shein. But for niche businesses that rely on direct-to-consumer shipments, like Steinbach, that change hit even harder than 15 percent tariff.
“The biggest concern wasn’t price – it was instability,” CEO Rico Paul said, standing in front of a glass cabinet filled with colorful nutcrackers. “Policies changed depending on political mood. For us, planning ahead is essential. One day, the rules were one way, the next day they changed.”
For six months after Trump’s inauguration, confusion reigned. Initially, the president threatened tariffs of 30 percent or more on most goods, prompting the E.U. to ready plans for retaliation. The deal on 15 percent tariffs, reached in late July, ended that uncertainty.
But in late August, Trump issued an executive order ending the “de minimis” exemption, meaning a slew of new paperwork and bureaucracy.
Costs rose and delays mounted as Customs and Border Protection grappled to keep up with the surge in new parcels requiring clearance. With the holiday season approaching, Steinbach faced the possibility of its nutcrackers getting stuck in customs warehouses.
More than half of Steinbach’s business comes from online orders shipped directly to American doorsteps, and customers soon felt the increase. Prices are up roughly 25 percent compared to last year, because of the tariffs and customs costs, as well as rising wages.
“In the United States, our name is extremely well known,” Paul said. “We’re practically synonymous with the word nutcracker.” The outsize U.S. demand for Steinbach products, he added, “was always an advantage – until the tariff dispute.”
American affection for Steinbach’s products seems undiminished by the price increases. “We were worried Americans wouldn’t pay more,” Paul said, pulling up a fresh order from Monticello, Florida, on his phone. “But the loyalty is incredible. They’re still buying, even if it’s more expensive.”
That loyalty stretches back to the 1950s, when U.S. service members stationed in postwar Germany discovered the nutcrackers and brought them home as souvenirs. They quickly became a cultural shorthand for authentic European Christmas.
The nutcracker legacy itself is older. In Saxony’s Ore Mountain region, miners began carving these wooden figures in the 1600s, meant to bring protection and keep evil spirits at bay during the darkest months of winter.
French author Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” later inspired Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet “The Nutcracker.” The ballet, initially a flop in Russia, became an American holiday institution in the mid-20th century – catapulting the nutcracker to global fame as a Christmas icon.
On a late November morning at the Steinbach factory, about 40 artisans carved, sanded and painted wooden limbs, while sewing machines upstairs stitched miniature outfits. Outside, snow settled on fir branches as workers packaged the finished products for their long journey.
One detail is new: a bright yellow sticker on every box, addressed to the person who will decide if the toy enters the United States smoothly: “Dear U.S. Customs Officer,” it says, “Thank you for keeping the trade flowing.”
It may be wishful thinking. In October, U.S. news outlets reported that thousands of packages had stalled in customs hubs under the new rules. Some carriers reportedly disposed of abandoned shipments.
“Because of changes to U.S. import regulations, we are seeing many packages that are unable to clear customs due to missing or incomplete information,” UPS, the shipping company, said in a statement. “Our goal is to speed every package to its destination, while complying with federal customs regulations.”
In late November, UPS said that its brokerage team was clearing more than 90 percent of packages on the first day – but not without complications.
Still, Steinbach nutcrackers continue to sell well, particularly those with pop culture and political themes.
Last year, Steinbach introduced a pair of nutcrackers dubbed “Republican” and “Democrat,” bearing more than a passing resemblance to Trump and Kamala Harris. The Republican model sold out before Election Day.
Prices for the smallest nutcrackers start at about $150, while the largest and most intricate figures cost more than $700. Alongside traditional soldiers and Santas, Steinbach has embraced the American appetite for nutcrackers in all forms, including Star Wars stormtroopers, “Wizard of Oz” characters and even Pope Leo XIV.
But the tariffs and customs delays have prompted Steinbach to seek a work-around. “We are building a warehouse in Pennsylvania and hiring staff,” Paul said.
The nutcrackers will still be made in Germany – local craftsmanship remains a central selling point – but pre-shipping and storing finished goods in the United States stands to insulate the business from further regulatory whiplash. The tariffs and additional costs of maintaining and staffing the warehouse will be passed on to customers, but the move should eliminate paperwork and delays for shipments to individual buyers.
Steinbach is not alone. Across Germany, exporters large and small are recalculating.
“The escalation of U.S. import duties – now effectively averaging 15 percent on key industrial goods – has hit Germany particularly hard,” said Andreas Baur, foreign trade expert at the Munich-based Institute for Economic Research. “If you take January to September and compare it to the previous year, we have a decline [in exports] of about 8 percent, and for cars around 14 percent.”
OTTENDORF-OKRILLA, GERMANY – NOVEMBER 26: Baker Marlon Gnauck carries a board of traditional Dresden Christmas stollen in the Gnauck bakery on November 26, 2025 in Ottendorf-Okrilla, Germany. The Gnauck bakery is a fifth-generation family business. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)
But beyond automakers, chemical giants and heavy industrial goods, the regulatory shift has quietly reshaped the fate of artisans whose exports trade more in memories than volume.
On the outskirts of Dresden, a 90-minute drive northeast of the nutcracker workshop, the sweet smell of raisins and butter filled Bäckerei Gnauck in the district of Ottendorf-Okrilla.
Bäckerei Gnauck is one of about 100 bakeries permitted to bake true Dresdner Christstollen – a dense fruitcake that is tightly regulated by the Dresden Stollen Protection Association.
Here too, the lifting of the de minimis rule has left fifth-generation baker Marlon Gnauck kneading frustration into this year’s cake loaves.
Stollen, another German Christmas tradition that has gone global, has deep roots in and around Dresden, where it first appeared in the 14th century as a simple, butter-free loaf made under strict Advent fasting rules.
That changed in 1491, when Pope Innocent VIII issued the “Butter Letter,” allowing bakers to enrich the dough. Spices, candied fruit and almonds followed and, by the 18th century, Dresden bakers were presenting enormous loaves to royalty, securing the bread’s vaunted holiday status.
OTTENDORF-OKRILLA, GERMANY – NOVEMBER 26: A traditional Dresden Christmas stollen is packaged at the Gnauck bakery on November 26, 2025 in Ottendorf-Okrilla, Germany. The Gnauck bakery is a fifth-generation family business. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)
Today, mass-produced versions fill German supermarkets, but only a small group of certified bakeries may call their loaves Dresdner Stollen. Dotted with raisins, and carefully folded together before being baked and doused in confectioners sugar, Stollen is supposed to represent the image of a swaddled baby Jesus.
Every holiday season since 1999, Gnauck, a fifth-generation baker in his family, has shipped some of his stollen to Americans – half as corporate gifts, he estimates, and a quarter to families with German ancestry.
He has enjoyed hearing from happy customers, even those who make him wince with their “American innovations” such as toasting stollen or spreading it with peanut butter.
“Just a good slice of stollen, with a cup of coffee – that’s it, ” he said. “That’s how it should be enjoyed.”
But now a single two-kilogram shipment, with postage and duties, costs more than $170, he said as he attached the required documents to parcels bound for Dorchester, Massachusetts; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Houston.
“You’re looking at paying between $60 and $70 in import charges for a two-kilo stollen,” Gnauck said. “The product costs 50 euros [about $59]. Shipping is almost another 50. And then roughly $70 of customs and administrative fees.”
Only about 2 percent of Gnauck’s sales are to the United States, but the time required for paperwork and the additional costs for longtime customers have tainted the festive cheer. Gnauck’s verdict: “The Grinch lives in the White House,” he said. “Because what he’s actually doing is completely ruining the gifts.”
In October, after the first seasonal orders were shipped across the Atlantic, Gnauck temporarily stopped shipping to the U.S. after customers complained about unpredictable costs.
“We called the next 50 customers who had placed an order,” he said. “A quarter of them canceled. Another quarter of them reduced their order to a 1 kg, and the rest said they’d pay no matter what.”
Sending stollen to America was never economically logical, he said. “It was emotional. A gesture. And now that gesture is expensive.”
Some Dresden bakeries have stopped exporting to the United States altogether. But like Paul, the Steinbach CEO, Gnauck isn’t ready to quit. Both men said they simply want one thing from Trump: predictability.
Paul said a limited-edition nutcracker resembling Trump at the Resolute Desk – with a price tag of $399 – has nearly sold out. “The president is sitting at his desk and is signing a declaration, granting the Steinbach company duty-free status for all eternity,” he quipped.
For now, that remains fantasy: a wooden wish for stability in a season built on nostalgia – and customs logistics.
MARIENBERG, GERMANY NOVEMBER 26: Wooden nutcrackers stand on a shelf at Steinbach Volkskunst in Marienberg, Germany, on November 26, 2025. Steinbach Volkskunst is a family-run business that produces traditional nutcrackers as well as modern versions featuring characters such as Darth Vader, Sherlock Holmes, and Uncle Sam. Located in the Ore Mountains of Saxony, a region known for its Christmas crafts, Steinbach Volkskunst exports 95 percent of its production to the USA. (Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty Images)
By SEUNG MIN KIM, JOSH FUNK AND DIDI TANG, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is planning a $12 billion farm aid package, according to a White House official — a boost to farmers who have struggled to sell their crops while getting hit by rising costs after the president raised tariffs on China as part of a broader trade war.
According to the official, who was granted anonymity to speak ahead of a planned announcement, Trump will unveil the plan Monday afternoon at a White House roundtable with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, lawmakers and farmers who grow corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, rice, cattle, wheat, and potatoes.
Farmers have backed Trump politically, but his aggressive trade policies and frequently changing tariff rates have come under increasing scrutiny because of the impact on the agricultural sector and because of broader consumer worries.
The aid is the administration’s latest effort to defend Trump’s economic stewardship and answer voter angst about rising costs — even as the president has dismissed concerns about affordability as a Democratic “hoax.”
Upwards of $11 billion is set aside for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program, which the White House says will offer one-time payments to farmers for row crops.
Soybeans and sorghum were hit the hardest by the trade dispute with China because more than half of those crops are exported each year with most of the harvest going to China.
The aid is meant to help farmers who have suffered from trade wars with other nations, inflation, and other market disruptions.
The rest of the money will be for farmers who grow crops not covered under the bridge assistance program, according to the White House official. The money is intended to offer certainty to farmers as they market the current harvest, as well as plan for next year’s harvest.
China purchases have been slow
In October, after Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, the White House said Beijing had promised to buy at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans by the end of the calendar year, plus 25 million metric tons a year in each of the next three years. Soybean farmers have been hit especially hard by Trump’s trade war with China, which is the world’s largest buyer of soybeans.
China has purchased more than 2.8 million metric tons of soybeans since Trump announced the agreement at the end of October. That’s only about one quarter of what administration officials said China had promised, but Bessent has said China is on track to meet its goal by the end of February.
“These prices haven’t come in, because the Chinese actually used our soybean farmers as pawns in the trade negotiations,” Bessent said on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” explaining why a “bridge payment” to farmers was needed.
During his first presidency, Trump also provided aid to farmers amid his trade wars. He gave them more than $22 billion in 2019 and nearly $46 billion in 2020, though that year also included aid related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump has also been under pressure to address soaring beef prices, which have hit records for a number of reasons. Demand for beef has been strong at a time when drought has cut U.S. herds and imports from Mexico are down due to a resurgence in a parasite. Trump has said he would allow for more imports of Argentine beef.
He also had asked the Department of Justice to investigate foreign-owned meat packers he accused of driving up the price of beef, although he has not provided evidence to back his claims.
On Saturday, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to look at “anti-competitive behavior” in food supply chains — including seed, fertilizer and equipment — and consider taking enforcement actions or developing new regulations.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed the connection to tariffs to a White House official.
Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump walks the red carpet before the 48th Kennedy Center Honors, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Bitcoin and companies tied to cryptocurrencies extended a nearly two-month swoon Monday, tracking with a broader market sell-off in technology companies that many see as overvalued.
Bitcoin slid 6.5% after being down nearly 12% earlier in the day, settling in just above $85,000. The most-traded cryptocurrency is down about 33% since hitting a record $126,210.50 on Oct. 6, according to crypto trading platform Coinbase. Bitcoin had soared since April in line with the stock market and driven partly by a more crypto-friendly tone in Washington.
Companies that enable investors to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, as well as the growing number of companies who have made investing in bitcoin their main business focus, were hammered in Monday’s sell-off.
Coinbase Global fell 5.4% and online trading platform Robinhood Markets lost 4.4%. Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms dropped 2.8%.
Strategy, the biggest of the so-called crypto treasury companies that raises money just to buy bitcoin, tumbled 10%. The company has reported holding 649,870 bitcoin. As of 1 p.m. ET Monday they were worth about $55 billion.
American Bitcoin, in which President Donald Trump’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. hold a stake, fell 8.1% and is now down more than 41% since Sept. 30.
Other Trump-related crypto ventures have seen declines as well. The market value for the World Liberty Financial token, or $WLFI, has fallen to about $4.14 billion from above $6 billion in mid-September, according to coinmarketcap.com And the price of a meme coin named for President Donald Trump, $TRUMP, is $5.67, a fraction of the $45 asking price just before his inauguration in January.
One popular way of investing in bitcoin is through spot bitcoin ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, which allow investors to have a stake in bitcoin without directly owning the cryptocurrency. According to data from Morningstar Direct, investors pulled $3.6 billion out of spot bitcoin ETFs in November, the largest monthly outflow since the ETFs began trading in January 2024.
Bitcoin futures are down nearly 24% in the past month. At the same time, gold futures are up almost 7%.
Analysts point to a number of factors that have led to the sell-off in bitcoin and other crypto investments, including a broad risk-off sentiment that has gripped markets this fall, sending investors toward safer havens such as bonds and gold.
In a research note to clients last week, Deutsche Bank analysts also attributed the recent declines in crypto to institutional selling, other long-term holders collecting profits and a more hawkish Federal Reserve. Stalled crypto regulation has also contributed to the uncertainty, Deutsche Bank said.
“While volatility remains inherent, these conditions indicate Bitcoin’s portfolio integration is being tested, and raises questions of whether this is a temporary correction or a more prolonged adjustment,” the analysts wrote.
On the regulatory front, the crypto industry received a boost in July when Trump signed into law regulations that set initial guardrails and consumer protections for stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar to reduce price volatility compared with other forms of cryptocurrency.
But a bill that creates a new market structure for cryptocurrency remains stalled in the Senate. The bill has been a top priority for the crypto industry since it spent heavily to elect Trump and install other allies in Washington.
FILE – Bitcoin tokens are seen on April 3, 2013, in Sandy, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
President Donald Trump over the weekend floated an idea that took real estate agents, mortgage brokers and housing experts by surprise: the 50-year mortgage.
On Saturday, Trump posted an image on Truth Social titled “Great American Presidents.” It included a photo of President Franklin D. Roosevelt under the words “30-year mortgage” and a photo of Trump beneath the words “50-year mortgage.” (Mortgages were extended to 30 years in the 1940s as part of Roosevelt’s push to make home buying more affordable.)
Housing economists say the longer time frame could save buyers a couple hundred dollars a month, depending on the size of the mortgage and other details. But it would be costlier in other ways, including with more interest paid over a longer period of time. Implementing such a policy would also require tedious changes from regulators, plus buy-in from lenders and the broader housing finance industry.
So far, there’s little sense of how popular a 50-year mortgage would be. Here’s what we know so far.
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What has the Trump administration said?
After Trump’s Truth Social post on Saturday, Bill Pulte, the administration’s top housing finance official, posted on X that “we are indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage – a complete game changer.” Pulte is the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who also made himself chair of mortgage behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies that have been under government control since the 2008 housing crisis. Fannie and Freddie are essential to the smooth functioning of the U.S. mortgage market and together guarantee about half of existing home loans.
In a statement, a White House official who declined to be named said Trump “is always exploring new ways to improve housing affordability for everyday Americans. Any official policy changes will be announced by the White House.”
An FHFA spokesperson who also declined to be named said, “We are studying, and have not finalized, a wide variety of options related to multi year loans, including the ability to make mortgages transferable or portable. If banks can sell someone’s mortgage, we should at least explore if there are opportunities for regular Americans to have flexibility.”
One person close to the White House said the announcement came after Democrats swept in last week’s elections, in part on pledges to boost affordability for housing and more. But that person, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly, said Trump’s social media post had no substantial policy behind it yet.
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Would 50-year mortgages save buyers money?
With a longer timeline, home buyers have much more time to pay back a loan. And they would have lower monthly payments along the way. For example, let’s assume a home sells for $400,000. A buyer puts up 10 percent – or $40,000 – for a down payment. The buyer gets a 6.25 percent interest rate, slightly above last week’s 30-year fixed rate average of 6.22 percent.
That buyer would owe about $2,300 each month on a 30-year mortgage. On a 50-year loan, they would owe about $2,000. They might pay more than that, though – that math assumes a buyer gets the same rate for both mortgages, which is unlikely, since shorter loans typically have lower rates. So rates on 50-year loans could be higher than on 30-year ones.
A lower monthly payment could be beneficial for new buyers looking to get a foothold in the market. But it might also work against them if they are only planning on living in the house for a few years, or if they don’t know how their needs will shake out across decades.
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What about potential drawbacks?
Buyers’ monthly payments may be lower, but they’ll end up paying much more interest over two more decades. With a 50-year loan, total interest on that $400,000 home would amount to $816,396, compared with $438,156 on a 30-year loan. That’s 86 percent more interest over the life of the loans, said Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com.
And it will take much longer for owners to build equity. Ten years into paying off a 30-year mortgage on that $400,000 home, an owner would have a 24 percent stake in a house, setting aside rising home values. With a 50-year mortgage, that would be 14 percent.
Berner said addressing the nation’s affordability problems will take lots of ideas, including how to generate more construction so there are enough homes to meet Americans’ needs. But a new mortgage offering could juice demand before supply can catch up – which would push prices even higher.
“This is a creative way to solve this problem,” Berner said, “but I don’t think it addresses the fundamental issues that we have.”
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What would it take to offer a 50-year mortgage?
Establishing a new kind of mortgage could be possible, albeit complex, wrote Jaret Seiberg, managing director at TD Cowen, in a Monday analyst note. The Dodd-Frank Act – the landmark legislation that reformed the financial system after the 2008 financial crisis – says mortgages that exceed 30 years do not meet the definition of a qualified mortgage, which also means Fannie and Freddie can’t buy them.
But regulators have the ability to alter those qualifications to keep mortgages affordable. All told, the process could take at least a year to implement, Seiberg wrote, and it’s unlikely that lenders would originate 50-year mortgages without clear policy changes first.
Without changing the qualifications, the new loans could be hard to find – and more expensive. Lenders may be less willing to offer 50-year mortgages if they know Fannie and Freddie can’t buy them, a spokesperson for the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a statement. Limited interest from investors could also push interest rates up.
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What’s next?
Any details from the White House or FHFA would be needed for the market to prepare for such a change. Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, said that for now, the administration’s posts appear to be more about messaging than substantial policy. But, Brusuelas said, younger generations “may look at this differently.”
“If they think they’re saving $300 or $400 a month, then that’s a big deal,” he said. “That covers the car payment, maybe.”
Home under construction in a new neighborhood in Washington Township. (Stephen Frye / MediaNews Group)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government shutdown likely means there won’t be an inflation report next month for the first time in more than seven decades, the White House said Friday, leaving Wall Street and the Federal Reserve without crucial information about consumer prices.
“Because surveyors cannot deploy to the field, the White House has learned there will likely NOT be an inflation release next month for the first time in history,” the Trump administration said in an email.
Some of the inflation data is collected electronically, but most is gathered in person by government employees who visit stores across the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which prepares the inflation report, has already reduced the data collected each month because the Trump administration’s hiring freeze left some cities without surveyors.
The announcement follows Friday’s release of September inflation data, which showed prices ticked higher but remained lower than many economists had expected. That report, which was delayed by nine days from its originally-scheduled release, was based on data that was collected before the shutdown began Oct. 1.
In past shutdowns the consumer price index — the government’s principal inflation measure — was compiled based on partial data. But it may be too late to gather even that level of information, the Labor Department said.
A woman looks at shoes at a Sam’s Club, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025, in Bentonville, Ark. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
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