P.M. Edition for Mar. 11. New policies effectively closing the U.S.’s southern border are pushing some migrants to turn back around. WSJ Latin America bureau chief Juan Forero caught up with some of them on their long journey home. Plus, the U.S. resumes intelligence sharing and military support to Ukraine after Kyiv agrees to a 30-day cease-fire. And consumers’ spending—sometimes on credit cards—has kept the U.S. economy afloat. Telis Demos, Heard on the Street writer and co-host of the Take On the Week podcast, joins to discuss whether Americans may now be overstretched on debt. Alex Ossola hosts.
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Alex Ossola: The US restores military support to Ukraine after Kyiv agrees to a ceasefire. Plus, do Americans have too much debt to keep the economy afloat?
Telis Demos: The risk is that we aren’t really clued in on what’s happening in consumer credit because the numbers are looking better, but under the hood things are getting worse.
Alex Ossola: And a growing number of migrants are being turned away from the US border. We follow them on their long journey back home. It’s Tuesday, March 11th. I’m Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What’s News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. The Trump administration has said it would immediately lift a pause on intelligence sharing and military support to Ukraine as Kyiv agreed to implement a 30-day ceasefire. According to a US-Ukraine joint statement, the ceasefire plan, which is contingent on Russian acceptance, envisions opening negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow on halting the war. The agreement is the result of the first high-level talks between the US and Ukrainian officials since a combative Oval Office encounter in which President Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of being unwilling to negotiate a peace settlement with Moscow. President Trump said in an online post today that the US will increase its planned 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50%. That’s in response to Ottawa’s retaliation to US tariffs. The administration is still expected to move ahead with 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum from all other trading partners tomorrow. Trump’s team has said repeatedly that there would be no exceptions or exemptions. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he’s suspending the province’s 25% surtax on US-bound electricity, hours after President Trump threatened the additional tariffs. Canada’s Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney had called Trump’s move to raise tariffs a direct attack on the country’s households and businesses. Reports that Ontario was ready to roll back a surcharge on electricity delivered to the US helped stocks recover from early-session losses. That began after President Trump said he would ramp up tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada to 50%. Major US indexes still ended the day lower. The Nasdaq fell about 0.2%, the S&P 500 dipped about three-quarters of a percent, and the Dow dropped just over 1%. Speaking of markets, 25 years ago this week, the Nasdaq hit its dot-com era peak after soaring more than 500% in five years. The collapse that followed was quick and brutal. Today, some investors are worried that the same cycle might be playing out In artificial intelligence. WSJ reporter, Rolfe Winkler joined our tech news briefing podcast to talk about why people are comparing today’s market to the dot-com collapse.
Rolfe Winkler: Probably just because there’s a huge amount of investment going into a technology where the return is not yet clear. People are really excited about AI, there’s a lot of really promising opportunities there, and you can see a world 10 years from now, 15 years from now where it changes everything assuming that technology continues to progress. But, right now we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on basically GPUs graphic processing units, Nvidia chips, to fill out these cavernous data centers to power AI models that are cool and advancing, but we’re not really sure how we’re going to use them all just yet. Is there revenue behind all this investment that justifies the investment? Not yet.
Alex Ossola: To hear more from Rolfe, listen to tomorrow’s episode of Tech News Briefing. As you may have heard in our What’s News in Earnings last week, retailers are anticipating the impact of consumer spending pullback. Today department store chain, Kohl’s said it predicts a larger-than-expected sales decline for this fiscal year and Dick’s Sporting Goods’ forecast earnings well below Wall Street’s targets citing economic uncertainty. In the past few years American consumers have been able to spend through economic rough patches, putting purchases on their credit cards and keeping the economy afloat. But now concerns about a recession are rekindling worries that Americans are too overloaded with debt. For more on this, I’m joined by Heard on the Street writer and co-host of WSJ’s Take On the Week podcast, Telis Demos. Telis, consumer lending and credit card companies like Amex, Capital One and Discover Financial were hit particularly hard in the stock market’s recent plunge. So what exactly is investors’ concern here?
Telis Demos: The concern is that what’s going on in the economy with tariffs, with potential slowdowns and growth, President Trump didn’t rule out a recession, those things are not great for consumer borrowers. And so the issue is whether or not consumer lenders will continue to see increasing spending. Part of the way they make money is when you spend money, they make money when you use your card. The other way that they make money is by lending you money and you paying it back. And if you’re not paying it back, that’s not so great for them. So consumer lenders tend to be highly cyclical stocks. The risk is that we aren’t really clued in on what’s happening in consumer credit because the numbers are looking better, but under the hood things are getting worse.
Alex Ossola: I’m curious where employment fits into this because there’s new data out today from the Labor Department that shows that the US had 7.74 million job openings in January, which is higher than in December and slightly above expectations. So what does that mean?
Telis Demos: Employment is the lifeblood of consumer credit. Whatever’s going on in the economy, if people are working, they’re pretty good at paying back their debts, and so the risks that people see to employment are what will ultimately really drive if there’s going to be a significant sell off of consumer lenders and consumer credit assets. And so the last jobs report was a little light versus expectations, so there’s not necessarily any screaming red alarms right now. However, you spin forward some of the things happening with are we going to lay off huge numbers of government employees? They are consumers, like anyone else, and so something that impacts them would be meaningful for consumer credit. Here’s what I focused on and maybe the kind of pivot point here, and that is what’s going on with wealthier borrowers? Are they feeling the squeeze of concerns about their job future? They don’t have endless budgets. And so that is the thing to key in on as the real variable here for the sort of the consumer borrower and consumer economy.
Alex Ossola: That was Heard on the Street writer and co-host of WSJ’s Take On the Week podcast, Telis Demos. Thank you, Telis.
Telis Demos: Thanks for having me.
Alex Ossola: And if you want to know what consumers are doing, especially in the face of tariffs, listen to tomorrow’s Your Money Briefing podcast. As our reporters visit grocery stores, Best Buy and liquor stores to see what people are spending on. Coming up, the journey migrants take after they’re turned away at the US border, that’s after the break. Migrants sometimes travel thousands of miles to reach the US. Increasingly, they’re finding it effectively closed. There are new US policies that make it nearly impossible for migrants to apply for asylum upon reaching the US southern border. And for a growing number, that means having to turn around and travel back to where they came from. South America Bureau Chief Juan Ferraro recently traveled to the border between Colombia and Panama to get a better understanding of this story.
Juan Forero: I first started out in Panama and then came back by boat. These are all people, by the way, who are taking the sea route, which is several hundred yards away from the coast and heading back into Colombia and then skipping from one town to another until they get to a bigger town where they can catch a bus to go anywhere else in South America.
Alex Ossola: One person you spoke to was a man named Hector Ferrer. He’s 69 years old and used to be a vendor in Venezuela, but he left because as he describes it, things had gotten pretty grim.
Hector Ferrer: I was like in a hole trapped. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t have hope. No illusions. Nothing. There was no horizon.
Alex Ossola: You met him on his return journey where he was jostling for a seat on a ferry across the waters that separate Colombia from Panama. He was one of a number of people you spoke with who were on their way back home. How were these people feeling?
Juan Forero: There were a lot of people who were just disappointed. They had made this investment in time and money. These are people who hadn’t gotten to Mexico last week. They’d gotten to Mexico months ago. So we’re talking some of them had been in Mexico for six, seven, eight, nine months, and they had been waiting to try to get into the United States and apply for political asylum, which you could do through an app that the Biden administration had created. Donald Trump did away with that app. And so people realized that though they had filled out the application to try to get to the United States and get a hearing to apply for political asylum, they knew they couldn’t do that anymore, and so they opted to just head south.
Alex Ossola: Juan, you’ve reported on this before and I’m just curious, is this reverse migration new?
Juan Forero: It is new. What we used to see in the past was as many as 1500 people, sometimes even more, heading north and eventually to the southwest border. And in this case, what we’re starting to see, and this is pretty new, is people heading back the other way. We’re not talking about huge numbers. We’re talking about 150, 200 people leaving by boat from Panama and getting into Colombia. That’s 150, 200 people a day, sometimes more, sometimes less.
Alex Ossola: Who’s feeling the impact of this reverse flow of migrants?
Juan Forero: The country that’s feeling it the most is Panama. Because Panama is a small country, only has 4.5 million people, and they’ve already had to deal with many hundreds of thousands of people heading north, and now they’re starting to deal with people heading south, and so there’s a whole logistical challenge there. The big beneficiaries are smuggling groups who benefited, of course, from the people heading north. These outfits are there ready to move them and offer them services and all this stuff to get them back home, and they try to charge as much as they can. So a lot of these migrants are running out of money on the way or they’re getting back home without a cent in their pocket.
Alex Ossola: That was WSJ South America Bureau Chief Juan Forero. Juan, thank you.
Juan Forero: Thank you.
Alex Ossola: Funding for the federal government expires this weekend. The House is expected to vote this afternoon on a bill that would avert a government shutdown and extend government funding through the end of September. Vice President JD Vance rallied House Republicans to back the party’s proposal, part of a last minute push to exert pressure on remaining GOP holdouts and pass the measure over democratic opposition. Meanwhile, Congress is working on a budget and cuts to Medicaid are on the table. The program is mainly for low-income Americans, but deep cuts could affect state budgets and healthcare more broadly. What questions do you have? Send a voice memo to WNpod@WSJ.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. We might use it on the show. And that’s What’s News for this Tuesday afternoon. Today’s show is produced by Pierre Bienaimé and Anthony Bansie, with supervising producer Michael Kosmides. I’m Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. We’ll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.
