About the Guest:
Robert Frick is Navy Federal’s Corporate Economist. In that role, he advises Navy Federal leaders on economic conditions and trends, especially those that affect NavyFederal’s12 million members. He isfrequentlyquoted in the press on issues including GDP, the labor market, consumer spending, and housing. Robert also hasan expertisein behavioral economics and worked professionally in that area before joining Navy Federal in 2017. He was also a business and financial journalist for 30 years, having worked 15 yearsin dailynewspaperand 15 years forKiplinger's Personal Financemagazine. He holds a BA in Journalism and an MBA fromthe PennsylvaniaState University and has served on the Penn State College of Communications alumni advisory board as well as the Mount Nittany Conservancy Board.
Episode Transcript:
Leah Dajches: I like to think I'm a smart person, a curious person who likes to know about things, and I genuinely like to learn about things, so much so that I've made a career out of studying things. But then I'm confronted with something that is so, well, boring that the mere thought of reading about it makes me go, "Meh." And for me, that's something is business and economic news. And it just so happens to be the subject of today's episode. So if you're like me and feel your eyelids getting heavy at the mere mention of a story on inflation or interest rate hikes, stay tuned.
Matt Jordon: Or if you're a seasoned economic news consumer like me, and want to know how the supply chain is impacting the cost of bread, we'll also be talking about how you can find reliable quality reporting to feed all your wants and needs. We're going to talk about what makes for quality, and not so quality, economic reporting and how you can tell the difference. We'll also discuss how you can cut through the buzzwords and market speak and get to the bottom of what's actually going on.
Leah Dajches: To help us break this down, we're talking with Bob Frick, Navy Federal's corporate economist. That means he advises Navy federal leaders on economic conditions and trends that impact people who serve. Bob is frequently quoted in the press on issues like GDP, the labor market, consumer spending and housing costs. He was also a business and financial journalist for 30 years. For half that time, he worked for a daily newspaper and the other half he spent writing for Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine. Bob, welcome to News Over Noise.
Bob Frick: Thank you for having me. Anything for the alma mater.
Leah Dajches: So let's jump right into it. The economy always rates really high on people's list of concerns in polling, and money has a deep impact on our lives. So why is finding good economic journalism so important?
Bob Frick: Well, I think people need to understand what's going on around them and they need to plan for the future. One of the problems that all people have is planning and imagining their future selves, steps to take now to make things better. Buying house right now is hard, but it's probably going to be better in a year. Where do you get that information? Buying a car right now is really difficult, but it's probably going to be better in a year, but a lot of people don't understand that. So economic advice, business advice, is really crucial for people just running their households, running their lives well.
Matt Jordon: So Bob, it's interesting that you say that because you're talking about long-term advice and oftentimes because of the way the news cycle works, that's not where their brain is. Reporters are looking at the indexes, what's up, what's down and they're giving you immediate advice. Do you think that that kind of gets in the way of good economic reporting?
Bob Frick: Yes. And it does. As you know, I've done a lot of work in behavioral economics and exactly what you're saying is exactly what makes people make short term bad decisions. If all you hear about is the here and now, you're triggered and you're anchored to the news you hear today. And if all you're hearing is the news today and lately especially, it's been really doom and gloom, there's been a lot of negatives in the economy, but that really is just a snapshot and business journalism works best when it not only talks about the here, it talks about the future, and there's not enough of that.
Matt Jordon: Do you think that that has anything to do with who the audience for business journalism is for economic journalism in general? I mean, are journalists writing for investors or are they writing for average readers?
Bob Frick: One of the problems that's happened over the last 30 years... I got out of daily newspaper business reporting in, dating myself, in 1997 and I was past the peak. There's really a golden age of local business reporting and right after that, staff started to be decimated. And so now we're in a situation where you have a dearth of local news on business, but you have a lot of big national sources, which are very good. I mean, Bloomberg is developed in that time. We had one of the original Bloomberg terminals when I worked in Rochester, New York for journalists. We loved it. I love Bloomberg right now, but Bloomberg's very expensive, even if you just buy their online newsfeed it's like 300 bucks a year I think. So what business journalism there is tends to cater to big companies and the markets and what does focus on things like pocketbook issues, income inequality, labor, it's still there, but there's not that much of it and it's certainly not brought down to your local level, which is where it could do most people the most good.
Matt Jordon: And I was thinking about that in relation to when I was starting to be kind of aware of economic news. I remember Alan Greenspan would get up and he would do these talks where you really couldn't tell what he was saying.
Bob Frick: Right. Right.
Matt Jordon: He was like a priest doing incantation. And I'm wondering what you think the job of the economics or the business reporter is when something like that happens. Should they be breaking that down or from the behavioral economics side, should they kind of just be letting that stand?
Bob Frick: Oh no, they should be interpreting. I have the advantage of being a journalist for 30 years and now an economist and I understand how people process information. I don't even repeat and then translate, even when I was a journalist, I just translate, and that's what a good journalist does. If you know enough about the subject matter, you can break down a complex situation into something everyone can understand and don't even confuse them by the jargon. Just get right to common useful words. In the jobs report that just came out the morning that we're recording this, I boiled it down to it's a Goldilocks jobs report, and that's something people can understand, whereas some other people who won't be mentioned, were talking about the acceleration of this divided by the baseline of that, and it's like no one can understand that. I think more economists, more journalists should work harder at breaking down economic news so that the average person can understand. Now at the high level, your Wall Street Journals, your New York Times, your Bloombergs, your Reuters, they do a great job of that, but there's a lot of slippage when you get to secondary and tertiary sources.
Leah Dajches: So when it comes to stories that are missing the mark, are there terms or phrases or kind of things in general that should raise a red flag for readers when we're looking for economic news?
Bob Frick: Yes. A lot of times headlines are reported in just the top line of the number. And if that's all you hear from a reporter, you need to dig further if you want to get to this story. I have a million examples, but a recent example was new home sales came out for August and they spiked, they were up like 28%, and it's like that was the headline and that was the story that a lot of outlets released, but that wasn't the story. The story was new home sales are going down and that was a one month blip because there was a break in mortgage rates in June and July. That was the story. The story's, "It's still bad." The story was, "That was an aberration," but a lot of people didn't read that. So whenever I give a commentary, which I do two or three times a week, I will give a headline, I'll give the Goldilocks quote, but I'll also go into depth on it. Now, sometimes the people who pick up my quotes, and I think I was picked up in Barron's and CNN on that, my Goldilocks quote today, sometimes they just use that in a hook. But I see in these cases that they've gone into my analysis, "Why is it good?" And it's good because it's not going to trigger the Fed to raise rates. It's also good because there are enough jobs out there that people who want a job can get a job. That's like a perfect situation. And I'm looking at the stories that are coming in and a lot of people are just glomming onto one side or the other side and not giving a complete picture. So I'm always suspicious in the story I read, if it's just somebody taking the headline number and running with it.
Matt Jordon: What do you think drives these ticks, I guess you could say, journalistic problems? Is it just that they don't know enough about economics, journalists? I mean, is this just a problem of say, putting any old journalist on an economic beat and not having somebody who really can understand and translate stuff well?
Bob Frick: Yeah, that's exactly it. I deal with almost exclusively the upper end business journalists, and I can throw a lot in there, Bankrate, Axios, HousingWire, there're just some great journalists out there and it's always fun to talk to someone who understands the subject matter because they ask better questions and you can get more into depth. But in a lot of the stories I read, and even some of the interviews I do, I end up explaining to the reporter the fundamentals of the economics that they should know already. Housing's a good example of that. People say, "Oh, well the Fed raised the federal funds rate three quarters of a percentage point. We should expect then that mortgage rates are going to rise by that much." No, that's not how it works. There are a lot of factors that go into mortgage rates and if you understand that, you would never ask a question like that. And so I find myself having to explain stuff, especially in the last year with COVID and how COVID was affecting jobs, numbers, layoffs numbers. That took a certain level of insight, which nobody knew before COVID hit and it took a while to really understand the dynamics and the interaction, some people never bothered to figure it out, and so I was always having to explain to them, "Look, when COVID rises, layoffs will increase," and there's certain things correlated and certain things not correlated and once you understand that, it's like you have a map and you can see where you're going. But a lot of people never develop that map. Now, it's not their fault in a lot of cases, because a lot of people are pulled off of one beat and thrown onto another beat. And especially in areas of business and economics, you need a fundamental knowledge. You need a fundamental knowledge. You need a fundamental knowledge in everything, but if all you have is a headline understanding of economics, you're going to be a poor business reporter.
Matt Jordon: One of the things that we're really interested in on this show is understanding... Well, I guess I could put it in economic terms. There's a business trend in news reporting, if one wants to call it that after in 2015, we see the rise of this thing called hyperpartisan news, and in their economic reporting, they tend to put things always in partisan frames. So you'll see things like that inflation is caused by Joe Biden or the Democrats War on fossil fuel or radical spending agendas and stuff like that. So I mean, the takeaway I'm getting from you is if you hear something like that, you're probably hearing noise, that it's not going to help you understand things.
Bob Frick: Yeah. But it happens on both sides of the aisle. So when great numbers come out, let's just say for example, the Biden administration takes credit. Well, the Biden administration has nothing to do with inflation, and their Inflation Reduction Act had virtually no impact on inflation. And on the other side, they'll blame Biden for everything that goes wrong. And during the Trump administration, it was just the reverse. So one thing you can take to the bank is that who's ever in charge politically has very little influence over the economy. We're still a market based economy and we're also a global economy, which means a lot of the inflation, for example we have now isn't domestic and we have no control over it. Gas prices, we really don't have any control over. Food prices, which even a generation ago was very domestic, now is international. Grain prices have gone through the roof because of the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues. So there are some cases in which a government can radically change an economy such as the $5 trillion that were injected into the economy to help us get out of the COVID recession. I get that, but that's an exception. That rarely happens. And so I automatically ignore anything with a partisan spin. And if you're a good consumer of business journalism, you should too.
Matt Jordon: Yeah, it seems like that would be a good red flag for our audience. If somebody's saying it's simple and it's related to politics, it's probably not.
Bob Frick: Well, saying the Biden recession or the Trump recovery or the whatever, that's just noise.
Leah Dajches: If you’re just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordon: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: We're talking with Bob Frick, Navy Federal's Corporate Economist and a former business and financial journalist about the good, the bad, and the ugly of economic reporting. So if someone is trying to educate themselves on economic news, and so you mentioned pointing people to nonpartisan outlets. I mean, is there a place or an outlet that you recommend our listeners or we go to?
Bob Frick: Yeah, there are several. And I did even more research. I spoke to some business journalists I know just to make sure that I wasn't missing any sources. The big problem is sources for local business news have really dried up. You may be in an area in which you have a weekly business journal, which is good. There aren't nearly enough of them, and some of them aren't very good. Some of them just cater to promotions and just very fluff kinds of business stores. Some of them are good, some of them are award winning. But on a national level, they're a lot of good sources. I mentioned Reuters is one. I still think the Reuters feed is free, I think they're going to put a paywall on it at some point. Reuters is really good business reporting. I'm always proud to be named in a Reuters story. In my mind, and these are the favorite of my many children, Bloomberg is my favorite source. Now, Bloomberg was originally set up for traders, and you get a sophisticated Bloomberg terminal that's like $2,000 a month or something, but you don't need to have the full blown Bloomberg experience. If you just subscribe to the Bloomberg newsfeed, that's a great set of journalists and they do great analysis and the reporting is really on target. There are things I disagree with, but it's not because I think they're biased. I think we just have an honest disagreement. Of course, the Wall Street Journal, its editorial page leans far right, but its reporting is very by the book. And I draw a lot from those people. The New York Times, its business section isn't that great and occasionally it leans kind of left, but I think their basic reporting is really terrific. And the qualities that I love in good business journalism is that it not only talks on a sophisticated subject using simple words and phrases, but it does analysis. It goes into the why, it goes into the how, and it also quotes people who are directly affected by the issues they're dealing with. It could be a small business owner, it could be a corporate owner. It could be someone at a supermarket, it could be someone at a gas pump, could be someone struggling to pay their bills with high inflation. That to me shows a depth of reporting and understanding, which if you're a good journalist, that's what you should be doing. A lot of journalists don't do that, either because they don't have the time or maybe the training.
Leah Dajches: So in our local paper, the Centre Daily Times, there was recently a story on stocks bouncing, and I'll share kind of a medium sized passage here, so bear with me. “Inflation prospects as well as planned central bank rate hikes remain the market central concern. However, underscored by a faster than expected September reading for consumer prices in Europe, which rose to a record high of 10% and jobs data from the US Yesterday showing weekly unemployment claims fell to the lowest levels in five months.” So yeah, I could barely get through that without going cross eyed. And so I'm wondering how is the average person or the person like me who honestly I avoid economic news, how are we supposed to stay invested in this kind of information?
Bob Frick: Who wrote that?
Matt Jordon: It was The Street.
Bob Frick: The Street. Okay. Well I have to be careful because I'm quoted by The Street fairly often and the people who quote me in The Street would never write a story like that. That does not belong in a small town general interest newspaper. The Street is designed for traders. It's not designed for average people. What they should be using is the Associated Press or the Reuters Story on that, which is broken down in a way that is useful for people. But just in that story alone, there are two pieces of information which are completely irrelevant to the economic scene in general and to Americans in particular. So a story like that does no service to the people of Center County.
Matt Jordon: What is the function of this stuff that is really for traders, like you said, being given to non-traders, right? Does this keep the kind of economic field impenetrable for the average person? And does that then drive them to financial experts, right? If the news is too crazy, you can't understand it, you better talk to your analyst who knows.
Bob Frick: Well, that's a very complicated dynamic. And again, as a personal finance person for 15 years, I have strong opinions about this. The average person shouldn't worry about the stock market. The stock market is a black hole, which sucks in a lot of people and they lose a lot of money. I know a lot of friends, young friends who got into crypto who have lost their shirts in the last year. Personal finance is very simple, but sources make it complicated in order to scare you to them to get their information. If you have a 401K plan at work, you're golden. Put as much in that as possible, put it in your target date fund, which is a broad selection of index funds basically, and there are your stocks right there. If you want to get into stock trading, 99% of you are going to end up hurting yourselves even though you think you know what you're doing. Think about it this way. If the people giving you advice were so smart, they would be billionaires right now and the last thing they would want to do is be making a living giving you advice. So the advice you get from most sources, I'm not saying that having a financial planner or even a broker is bad because a lot of times they can save you from doing dumb things, but they have to be ethical and not all of them are. How do you know if the one you have is ethical? It's almost impossible to know unless you have some knowledge of the business. So what I tell people is when it comes to personal finance, just do the basics. Put your money in your 401k, have a good savings plan. Get advice from a financial planner, but don't let them sell you any products. Pay for the advice. So, that's personal finance. There is way too much reporting on the markets and it gets people sucked in. And if you look at CNBC, which I had been quoted on, everyday and you try and invest and trade, that's a whole different thing. And you don't want to dip your toe into financial reporting because that's for traders and professionals and for hobbyists, and you don't want to be a hobbyist. I've got 15 years of experience in this. I know that's a strong opinion, but I stand by it. Now if you want to know about business and economics and the labor market because you're worried about your personal situation, there are a lot of great sources for that that are national sources and I've listed a few here. The thing you want to avoid is anything with a whiff of marketing. A friend of mine who I used to work with came to me for advice because I still give personal finance advice to friends and I considered her a friend. And she had some issues and I said, "Look, this is very simple. Don't do this, don't do this, do this, do this." She got a flyer in the mail to have a dinner at a local nice restaurant. She went and she got sold on a financial broker planner who put her in all these horrible investments, which she can't get out of without paying a big penalty. Annuities, which she didn't need. And so she came back to me and she said, "Hey, I went with this planner and I'd like to show you what she did for me." And I said, "Well, this is horrible. Get out of it. Why didn't you do what I told you?" Well, because I just gave straight advice and this person sold her. And everyone has to be resist being sold. If you're being sold, you're letting someone else take the lead in your financial future. If you really want a broker or a planner, then you have to be the one who goes out and looks for one. You have to look at a few, you have to evaluate them, you have to go with one, which you basically just pay fees and get their advice. That's the best possible scenario. A lot of people can't do that and a lot of people don't know enough about investing. So it's a very tough situation. But if you can only resist being sold, you're going to be much better off.
Matt Jordon: You're obviously a very levelheaded advisor. And it strikes me what you're talking about is kind of avoiding things which appeal to your emotions. But at the same time, I'm always struck at how much emotion there is in economic reporting. For example, we talk about the market as if it's a person and it's usually an angry or royaled or upset or tumultuous person. Right? So do you think that this type of reporting on the market plays into the hands of the marketers?
Bob Frick: Yeah, market reporting is fraught with personification. Traders took profits today. Mr. Market is angry by when there's blood in the streets. There's a lot of emotional rhetoric that surrounds market reporting, especially in a day to day basis. And I used to make fun of this routinely even when I was in the newspaper business, but certainly all through my career at Kiplinger's. It's ridiculous. And really you run out of things to say, and I think people buy into this whole personification that the market is anything more than a dispassionate pricing machine. And by speaking about it emotionally, by personifying it, that convinces people that they can understand it. I tell people, get out of the markets, invest for the long term. Don't look at your portfolio more than once a month, maybe once a quarter and you'll be far better off. But unfortunately, a lot of people get sucked in. A lot of it's overconfidence. People think that they can beat the market, which they can't. And a lot of people, it provides a kind of entertainment and satisfies their emotions and so it has kind of a personal payoff, but it's false. You're not going to get anything out of it. So yeah, I'm very negative on markets reporting for the average person. I think it's great for professionals and I think it serves a real function in keeping stock prices honest. But if you are at the low end of that scale and you're not a market professional, you're just going to get hurt. And there's way too much market reporting in my opinion.
Leah Dajches: So I want to circle back to kind of a question we opened the interview with, and that's really kind of the importance of economic news and that's one of the driving themes of the show. Why does news matter? And in full transparency, I understand and appreciate that the economy drastically impacts me, but something in the way economic news is written really turns me off from it. So I guess I'm asking you to sell me on economic news. Why should somebody who's like me and actively avoiding it, why should I stay engaged with this content when it feels often just kind of boring and sometimes painful to read and stick with?
Bob Frick: Well, when it comes to investments in the market, you don't need to engage in it. When it comes to understanding what's going on in the economy, for example, buying a house. Why are cars so expensive? What's the job market likely to be like? Is it healthy? When is inflation going to go down? I mean, I think those are things you're interested in, but you just don't want to do a deep dive in it and you don't have to understand the minutia behind it. If you subscribe, let's say you look at the Reuters feed or you subscribe to the New York Times or more expensive, the Wall Street Journal and just get their digital, there's enough information in there which is written in simple to understand terms by good journalists that that's all you really need. If you want to go deeper, you can read deeper in those publications or you can get Bloomberg, for example, get a digital subscription to Bloomberg. But if you have the time and you want to shop around online, there's plenty of free sources and you can pick that stuff up. You don't need to know, most people don't need to know anything except the highlights. In this political season, I think I've seen so many bad political ads talking about the economics of this candidate or that candidate. And anything that's in a political ad, you can discount as worthless when it comes to politics. You have to do that reporting yourself. And I've spoken on both sides of this issue. I've said for example Biden's right on this but he's taking credit for something he had no responsibility on. I used to say the same things about Trump. When political discourse gets mixed with economics, it's bound to be terribly biased.
Leah Dajches: So, for those of us who are maybe not reading as much economic news as possibly we should or... You know, I'm not really sure. But, is there a cost of people checking out of economic news?
Bob Frick: Oh, absolutely there is. If you're not aware of what's going on in the job market right now and that if you switch jobs, the average job switcher gets a 16% raise, you're... That's some pretty valuable information. If you don't read economic news and realize that home prices are starting to correct and that you may want to wait and buy a house this time next year, you may save yourself tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache. So, people really do need to be tuned in to the economy. But, a lot of people tune out because they think, and a lot of economics is that clip you read, is just ridiculously complex. So, that's why you have to seek sources which are really targeted towards a general interest audience.
Matt Jordon: Well, that's... All this makes me feel a little bit better about the economy, especially knowing that there is much to feel good about it in the economy. So, Bob, I'd like to thank you so much for chatting with us today and helping us unpack all of this.
Bob Frick: Well, it was a great pleasure. Thank you. Anything for Penn State.
Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Bob Frick, Navy Federal's corporate economist. To learn more and to hear an extended version of this interview with additional content, download the podcast at wherever you subscribe to podcasts or at news over noise dot org. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordon: And, I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well informed.
Matt Jordon: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This podcast has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost of Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
