At the Federal Reserve I do think it's an interaction between monetary policy and trade policy that's terrace and Claire she's a George Washington University and there's the sense that it with lower interest rates from the Fed There might be more room for the economy to accommodate the trade policy and the trade war and the economic stresses the trade war has brought To be fair there is news a trade deal could be on the rise and maybe I don't mean to be flippant about it but it is true that you know I haven't checked Twitter in the last 5 minutes and therefore I might not know what's going to happen next with trade policy which is fair recessions not the word of the economic moment anymore because the economy is chugging along just not as fast as it had been terracing clear one more time the numbers that we're seeing they do look like a slowdown that is not. Bad news in the cyclical sense like this isn't suggesting that we're seeing in a clear recession so those are the recession indicators that have changed in the past 6 months the context if you well and that's all well and good save for this fact it's people who make this economy go around people and businesses who have to figure out what the savings they are going to make based on what the indicators are Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman checked in with some business owners and consumers that he's been keeping up with lately to see what their personal recession gauges are telling him right now here's an economic signal that doesn't sound anything like a recession is upon us or coming soon. New construction. Is small business owner from Bend Oregon and when he travels for his company selling scientific instruments he hears the same thing almost every city I go you see cranes and building and neighborhoods popping up all over overall the economy I think is holding fairly steady dolo is worried about the ongoing trade war when I spoke to him back in August he was losing export sales because of trying. Tariffs I called them today with news of possible progress and we've seen this pattern for some time where there's there's supposedly progress on the trade war and then nothing happens or maybe it escalates we're trying to grow but it's difficult to do with these headwinds of losing you know a portion of your sales Tim Reynolds runs an Ohio software company that serves manufacturing cost immerse we're having a good year not quite as good as last year but even with signs of a manufacturing slowdown nationwide he's not worried what is slowing down is for traded catastrophic terms one slowdown in growth not necessarily recession consumers have been getting a little more positive about the economy Sam one Bergen his wife for government workers in New Mexico and when I talked to him last spring he was feeling nervous lately though that has a couple of minor paid were starting to buy furniture started talk to real store look at houses feeling Ok about dropping money here and there for something we're going to be able to hold on to of course the economy could still fall apart and deliver up or recession next year just saying it's the future full of unknown unknowns I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace I think terracing Claire was saying about having been off Twitter for 5 minutes and not being up to speed on trade policy in this country well here's the latest the Chinese have said both Washington and Beijing have agreed to roll back tariffs as part one of that phase one deal that in the works Reuters However comma reports that is not a universally shared view within the White House so more to come on that one whatever the actual case may be traders went with the more economically promising version We'll have the details when we do the numbers. This is been a busier than usual couple of weeks for big name mergers and acquisitions Xerox we told you yesterday wants to buy age piano cash and the stock deal last Friday Google said its buying Fitbit for 2 point $1000000000.00 all cash there before that it was the luxury giant l.v. Image paying 14 and a half 1000000000 cash for Tiffany as Marketplace's Justin ho reports cash or stock or some combination thereof says a lot about the deal itself and where those companies think the broader economy might be headed it's a lot easier to buy a company with cash than it is with stock no dilemmas about how to value your stock no hand wringing about whether your shares will drop before the deal closes the tail arena at Marquette University says cash deals are also faster it's more likely to be approved by the shareholders of the company more quickly plus companies have had a lot of cash on their balance sheets recently thanks in part of the $27000.00 tax reform law and with interest rates so low it's cheap to borrow cash to buy companies Arena says cash deals also make sense when the size of the acquiring company like l.v. M.h. Or Google dwarfs the target company like Tiffany or Fitbit Fitbit is about 0 point one percent the size of Google so it's really great upset and still stock deals are making a comeback especially when deals are big United Technologies $86000000000.00 merger with Raytheon this summer was an all stock deal Steven Davidoff Solomon at u.c. Berkeley says many companies like receiving stock as a payment because it can give them some say over the new combined company but Target shareholders don't want to take the cash and go away they want to keep stock in the combined entity plus many stock prices are at record highs and that gives companies a lot of purchasing power now and the o.c. Of the Sonnie teaches about mergers and acquisitions at the University of North Carolina he says stock deals can be a sign that some companies think their stocks are too high and want to take advantage of that quickly before the tide turns into. Some extent it is a possible side of caution Shivdasani says stock deals also help big companies of void having to borrow huge sums of cash that could impact their credit ratings and make them more vulnerable if an economic downturn arrives in New York I'm just in how the marketplace. There are some out there for whom what I'm about to say will resonate and there are some out there for whom it will resonate in 20 or 30 years because even with so Security and Medicare and retirement accounts of one sort or another the road to 65 can be a bit bumpy you're than expected that's the setup for today's installment of our series My economy My name is Michelle Simons and my husband and I live in Durham North Carolina I'm 58 years old and my husband is 59. I started working at the Olive Oil shop about 4 and a half years ago and before that I mean I taught cake decorating classes for a while and I I wanted to go and do something to you know bring in a little income I knew I wasn't to be able to make semiprofessional salary again but because of my increasing knee problems I couldn't continue working at the olive oil and vinegar shop. My husband was recently laid off he was still eligible to work if he could find another job which he finally was able to do and that was wonderful but you know it's the same company and there's nothing to say that they can't just turn around to do the exact same thing 6 months a year from now we no longer are living under the illusion that there's any prominence with this. When we thought that he wasn't going to be employed and that there might be a big gap. We went down and had a long drawn out heart to heart with the financial planner and you know we're too young to collect Social Security we can't take advantage of Medicare. So we immediately started trim in the budget really hard we cut out the entertainment right away we canceled the cable t.v. That kind of thing. We paid off the house which is great but we still have student loan debt from one of our children's education Fortunately we've only got maybe a year left on paying for one car the other cars paid for and one of the other things that we're doing is we have a walk out basement or we're converting a storage room to a efficiency apartment and hoping to rent it at least perhaps during the school year because there's 2 universities and Durham and we're hoping maybe we could find a grad student or something that would like a place to live. In Durham North Carolina where you have got to have your help to do this series can share the story of your economy with us which of you can do it at Marketplace. Coming up we got some images that had people in them we got cats where he had computer generated cats people and what your friendly neighborhood algorithm thinks they ought to look like but 1st let's do the numbers. 182 today 6 tenth's percent 27674 The Nasdaq up 23 points to 10 percent 8334 the s. And p. 500 Klein 8 points to 10 percent 3 $1085.00 I usually do this at the end but here you go build on the 10 year dinner jump the 1.91 percent on reports that the trade deal may be a happening no no there's more on that trade bellwethers Rose heavy equipment maker Caterpillar gain one percent for bellwethers we did that a couple of weeks ago Boeing up 1.4 percent the days I'm a conductor from Hong Kong advanced 6.3 percent Rob Warren said demand for its polo shirts and jackets in Europe and China was strong reported stronger than expected earnings shares those up more than 14 percent the listing marketplace marketplace is supported by hacker one helping organisations reduce risk of a cyber security incident by partnering with trusted hackers to find and fix software vulnerabilities before criminals can exploit them more at hacker One dot com And by c 3 dot a a I this software suite for digital transformation using artificial intelligence and Io t. To solve previously unsolvable business problems learn more at c 3 top and I and by Baird more than investment professionals for 100 years Baird has partnered with individuals businesses institutions and communities working together toward their financial goals more information is available at Baird 100 times com. This is. A 91.3. We get support from Sacramento Bee keeping and honey with honey gifts. For those who. Even for the do it yourself. 21st. On Nov 14th. Interview with. The incendiaries. Org slash. This is. Marketplace. To require that you suspend your disbelief the disbelief that's about to hit you when you realize it's a story about Black Friday yes that Black Friday more than 3 weeks away still. Nevertheless retailers like Best Buy Target and Walmart are launching early Black Friday deals so we got buggering today how those companies decide which products to make their hot deals for the day after Thanksgiving Marketplace's mail cigar is on 1st thing you need to know the question we're asking retailers don't really want to know the answer Joel Bines is a managing director at Alex partners hall that merchandising is a highly strategic activity so what's promoted and at what price and so forth are highly guarded secrets what we do know is that retailers go for $2.00 things they've got the classics the items you'd expect to see every year the ones people wait until Black Friday to buy you know it's cameras it's Barbie playhouses it's the Pops laptops cell phones and then they've got the trendy products whatever they think is going to be hot this year based on their own data and on what you all are talking about on social media you'll see this in the toy category target's Black Friday deals include the $22.00 inch stuffed critter they call the squish Malou jumbo unicorn for $25.00 and for 18 you can get the. Shark doo doo doo doo doo dancing doll which will provide endless fun intil you check it out a window even if you don't have kids you have probably heard the song and gotten it stuck in your head Casey Runnion is managing editor at the website Brad deals retailers want to have those things on their list they want to have that I popping saying that like oh I've seen that before these products are not necessarily supposed to make money Jane Boyd Thomas teaches marketing at Winthrop University she says retailers are willing to take a loss on this stuff because that gets people into the store and on to the website . And build hugely discounted television for example but while there they are they're going to buy from a wide and well ideally some items with a higher profit margin. For marketplace. If you've been paying attention to the business and technology news lately 1st of all. Thanks for being or 2nd of all you've almost certainly seen all the artificial intelligence stories right algorithms that are going to take our jobs or revolutionize health care or moderate Internet comments or disrupt just about any industry you can think of artificial intelligence ai is what you know Shane experiments with and writes about on her blog it's called Ai weirdness a new book about Ai and all of its weirdness is called You look like a thing and I love you you know thanks for coming on the program thank you it's great to be here I need you to tell me how you came up with the title of this book because I kind of love that story. Well this is one of these experiments that seem like a good idea in till I started doing it when I was doing was training a computer program to generate new pickup lines like like you'd like like you go to a bar and try to pick somebody up pick up lines Yeah that type of thing Ok And you know it sounded like a good idea in theory until I started reading some of these pick up lines and you know they're cheesy or they're just like kind of slimy they have these terrible puns but the thing is what I discovered when I train this computer to try to imitate those pick up lines is all of that went completely over its head it had no clue what any of that was supposed to be and so the pick up lines it generated ended up being kind of sweet and my very favorite one ended up being the title of the book you look like a thing and I love you I can't allow that and that's where you go in here with that with with the basic premise of this. Book why and how ai is making the world a weirder place talk about that a little bit yes so this is looking at these algorithms that are all over the place you know they're already in our finances are already making decisions on like who gets a job who gets a loan it's giving them kind of real world things that we're familiar with that they might not necessarily be in kind of seeing where they succeed and where they fall flat on their faces because of this general lack of understanding the half Ok so through the miracle of modern technology we've set up a little demo here we are not in the same studio but I have shared my computer screen and you're going to give me a little demo what am I supposed to do now so there's 2 versions of this same algorithm and the 1st version we're going to look at is one that does a pretty impressive job of generating human faces and there is a nice demo of this at the u.r.l. This person does not exist and I honestly type or this person does not exist Yeah Ok oh yeah there we go. And there's a picture it's a little bit so it's a picture of a guy and it's a little it's a little skewed it's almost up but Ok yeah so it's a reasonable person and if you refresh it you'll get another person. So I say this is what I'm looking closer to the mouth is all messed up I think the eyes are totally different Yeah and there's like there's like an you're out there somewhere here is kind of at loading and then the background is kind of you can't really tell what any of the objects are but basically it at a quick glance this is a human face right yeah yeah it's not too bad. Let me let me refresh decimals here you know oh yeah all right this one's a woman this one's much better better Yeah well except for that bit of hair on the side but yeah yeah the teeth is another giveaway so if you look at her teeth in kind is see her Fred 2 t. There are not her biggest 2 teeth as would. That's about it like a really good 4th teeth it is just another whiny Ok yeah but in general like when these results were released people were amazed researchers were amazed and so this is my example of a algorithm that's been given a pretty narrow problem so all it has to do are human faces racing forward at the camera really tight crop so basically chin to the very top of the head you're not getting much other than that but the next algorithm I want to show you this is the same group same resources and the euro is this cat does not exist. Ok. Such a bad typer. Ok This does not exist. Well so it's a cat head but then a blob. It's a little troubling Frankly yeah the body is a furry mass with a kind of lumps that are suggestive of maybe these are kind. Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God All right that's terrible it has attempted to do a human I think the cat. Because this is really hard this is sort of the harder you look at than weird people so it thinks this is part of a cat right because it doesn't know that's so funny because there's like yeah there's a zillion cat pictures on the Internet and you'd think that. I would be able to come up with something better than this yes so it had a lot of trading data as examples and this is a really powerful algorithm right but this time like there's a lot of variation in the Capek chairs on the internet so we're not just dealing with cat faces tightly cropped but we have whole bodies to deal with we've got some images that had people in them we've got can't swear he had. Heart so look as troubling as these cats are and to some degree as amusing as this experiment has been let me throw it to the real world at some point. Recently should I imagine we're going to have fleets of cell driving cars I mean yes we've got to but we'll have many many more and this is really amusing to sit here and look at cats and humans and all that stuff but. Talk to me about what happens when you have trying to I don't know drive down the 95 between Baltimore and Washington d.c. Yes So this is a really good illustration of how much struggles when it's a problem gets just incrementally harder right what is the really tough part what South driving car companies are struggling with right now to try to bring the cars to finally the market is all of the weird stuff that happens like d e moods get loose or there's a. Yeah no I get them as our escape are yeah no I get it right the point being it's the unpredictable stuff that's going to get you yeah exactly right it's this freak accidents that are going to be really really hard to. Eliminate because you know we're talking about a narrow intelligence test trying to deal with they've really broad and unpredictable world some of these commercial applications were hoping to have a idea for us really does require something more like an artificial general intelligence more like this science fiction Ai and we're not going to have that any time soon you know Shane is an author and a scientist your book is called You look like a thing and I love you you know thanks a lot of really appreciate it totally fascinating Thanks a 1000000000 joy talking to you. Or got an excerpt from Janell's book on our website along with another dose of those generated pick up lines and a video should you so choose of those somewhat disturbing cat pictures we were looking at Marketplace dot org is where you go. This final note on the way out today in which a famed symbol of market capitalism might be on the move Wall Street Journal reports today that the city of New York is working on a plan to move that charging bull statue now on Bowling Green in lower Manhattan somewhere closer to the New York Stock Exchange it was originally an unwelcome middle of the night surprise literally that bull was placed by the sculptor in front of the stock exchange 30 years ago in the wee small hours of a December evening the city didn't want it there hold it to a lot in Queens before negotiations put it in its current offer now spot. Marketplace is supported by a. H