2:14

Have you ever heard an announcement from the Federal Reserve and felt like you are way under qualified to understand a word of it? That’s no accident.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Being able to speak like the chair of the Federal Reserve is an art. Equally impressive – being able to understand what the fed chief is saying. Here’s Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen today.

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JANET YELLEN: The committee judged that a modest increase in the federal funds rate target is now appropriate, recognizing that even after this increase, monetary policy remains accommodative.

SHAPIRO: Translation – here’s why we decided to raise interest rates today for the first time in seven years. By the way, we’ll hear more about the implications of that decision elsewhere on the program.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Right. But can we just talk about this language for a second? I mean, we’ve gotten used to hearing this kind of economic jargon, but that doesn’t mean it gets easier to understand. Remember Ben Bernanke?

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BEN BERNANKE: Consequently, the committee must remain exceptionally alert and flexible, prepared to act in a decisive and timely manner and in particular, to counter any adverse dynamics that might threaten economic or financial stability.

SHAPIRO: Woof – or how about Alan Greenspan?

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ALAN GREENSPAN: As yet, the protracted period of monetary accommodation has not fostered an environment in which broad-based inflation pressures appear to be building.

SHAPIRO: You know, Audie, it’s like I know it’s important, but I don’t know why.

CORNISH: And that is by design, says Caroline Baum.

CAROLINE BAUM: The fed uses these catchphrases – you know, gradual, considerable period – they’re very vague terms. Why? They don’t want to be pinned down. The opposite of being clear is you maintain flexibility.

CORNISH: Baum is a freelance writer. She’s covered the economy for three decades and she wrote about the fed’s jargon for MarketWatch.

SHAPIRO: And she says the other thing about the way fed chairs speak is that it is vague – also on purpose.

BAUM: You cannot be transparent about what you’re going to do when you don’t know. And I don’t know why more people don’t get this. I don’t know why the fed doesn’t get it.

CORNISH: And if the fed doesn’t get it, will anyone step in to help clear things up?

BAUM: (Laughter) I’m waiting for my phone to ring.

SHAPIRO: Well, at least we found a translator.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:27

Exploring the maze-like layout of Manuel’s Tavern is like walking through a museum. And, like museums, the bar is up for its first facelift since it opened nearly 60 years ago, meaning it will close down for several months.

“Not much in this room has changed at all since 1956,” says Brian Maloof, the youngest son of the bar’s original owner.

Brian Maloof took over Manuel’s Tavern after his father, Manuel Maloof, a well-known Atlanta Democrat, died in 2004. Now he’s leading it through a challenging time.

In the narrow room where the tavern started, he points to a nude painting on the wall.

“The artist that painted that picture, that’s his wife,” he says. “He would pay off his bar tabs by leaving us paintings.”

Above the bar stools, Maloof points out a dozen or so plaques that belong to regulars who once took those seats as regulars.

He then gestures to a doorway behind the bar, to an urn. The four urns here, all the photos, posters and other mementos put up by staff and customers will have to come down.

“The renovation has been a very scary thing,” Maloof says.

“Essentially all the people that love this place, know this place, I’m rearranging their furniture in their home. I mean, they think of this place as their home,” he says.

Many people have called him, worried their contributions will be lost, or even just moved.

So when Georgia State University lecturer, Ruth Dusseault approached him about preserving it all digitally, he was relieved.

In a back room at the tavern, Dusseault uses a special camera to take high resolution images.

“The idea really started, because I’m also a resident of the neighborhood and every time I’ve come here, I’ve walked around and looked at all the images,” she says.

Her idea turned into a project that involves professors, artists and students, who are digitally archiving hundreds of objects and the stories behind them, explain Dusseault and Emory University’s Michael Page.

“The end result will be an interactive website, where the public can move around inside of Manuel’s,” says Dusseult.

“And as they see pictures on the walls, they can click on it, and then they get a high resolution photograph of the image but they can also click and get user stories or the story about, you know, the John F. Kennedy photo or Jimmy Carter, just some of the rich history that’s on the walls of Manuel’s,” Page says.

Sure, the objects in the archive speak to the bar’s role as a Democratic hangout, but also as a cop bar, a hub for professors and a meeting place for journalists.

Sitting in a booth, eating lunch is Andy Klubock. In a rapidly-changing city, he says, the tavern’s images are a view into the past.

“I’ve been coming here since ’77,” he says. “I could probably tell you how each picture is there. It’s a great sense of history here in Atlanta.”

Manuel’s Tavern will still be different after the renovation. But now, at least, Brian Maloof says he can make sure all the objects go back to their original place.

3:57

It’s been a year since Detroit emerged from the nation’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy. The city has made strides in improving services, is enjoying a construction boom and, unencumbered by the billions of dollars of debt erased through bankruptcy, just gave the underpaid police force a raise before their contract is up.

“I want to get the bankruptcy behind us. We have to move this forward. It’s no longer the Motor City like it used to be. It’s no longer Motown. But we can write a new history,” said Mark Young, head of one of the city’s police unions, at a recent news conference about the police force raise.

Nevertheless, Detroit is walking a financial tightrope.

Detroit emerged from bankruptcy with a razor-thin financial cushion, where even being a few million dollars off in its billion-dollar general fund budget could trigger another fiscal collapse. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says even with the state having final say, the city is still making substantial progress.

“We have almost 90 percent of the lights in this city replaced. We have a full contingent of buses and the ambulances are arriving within eight or nine minutes, which is the national standard.”

But some financial analysts say Detroit’s bankruptcy has made the national bond markets leery of loaning money to any municipality.

Stephen Spencer represented Detroit’s major bondholders. He testified at a recent U.S. Senate hearing that the bankruptcy court allowed Detroit to pay far more of what it owed to city retirees than to bondholders.

“Detroit wasn’t a bankruptcy. It was a stick up,” Spencer said.

Yet even those who Spencer claims received preferential treatment say they don’t feel favored at all.

Fear Of Two Cities

Some city retirees lost a portion of their monthly pension payments, all the savings the city had invested for them and their health care benefits. Now retirees like Sheila Baker say they’re paying five times more for health insurance while the city’s downtown is booming with new construction.

“All of a sudden you got money in your pocket? They knew what they were doing,” she says. “You know, it’s all just a racket — literally — and they waited till we were older to do this to us? It is just unbelievable to me.”

New development is erupting downtown. There’s a new hockey arena complex and a new light rail line.

Trying to walk through a maze of construction at a downtown park, Detroiter Paul Garrison calls the efforts a godsend.

“Bankruptcy, in my perspective and opinion, was 10 years overdue. But fortunately it did finally take place,” he says, “and so the money the city is bringing in will not have to all go to debt.”

But only a few blocks away, at Detroit’s major transit center, bus rider James Jordan says he’s yet to see the new development touch the city’s outer-lying neighborhoods.

“OK, they’re opening a Nike shop. But you never hear about a new housing development or a new grocery store being built in the heart of the neighborhood.”

For their part, business leaders say Detroit cannot survive by becoming, in essence, two cities: one of haves and one of have nots.

Detroit-based businessman and auto racing legend Roger Penske is helping redevelop the city’s downtown. He says Detroit’s success depends on making it a city people want to live in.

“I’m gonna be sure it’s not two cities,” Penske says.

City officials are tearing down tens of thousands of blighted buildings and offering cut-rate prices to those who will move in and fix up salvageable homes. But Detroit still needs more jobs and a better school system.

If efforts to make those improvements fail, Detroit’s fragile financial forecast could again falter.

1:57

Two of America’s oldest and most important industrial companies are tying the knot. DuPont and Dow Chemical plan to merge in a $130 billion deal that would create an agricultural and chemicals powerhouse. If the deal is approved, the new company would be split into three separate businesses — agriculture, materials and specialty products.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Two giants of American industry say they are merging in a deal worth $130 billion. NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports that Dow Chemical and DuPont have both been under intense pressure from shareholders to do something about sagging profits.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: The new company will be called Dow DuPont. Within the next couple of years, it will be broken up into three separate companies for agriculture, material science and specialty products. Officials are hoping the new companies will be leaner and more focused. Emilie Feldman is an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School.

EMILIE FELDMAN: Right now you have these big, sprawling companies that are doing lots of different things not very well, and so they’re going to slim themselves down and each do things well that they can focus on.

ZARROLI: Dow and DuPont are both venerable names in American industry. Dow introduced Saran Wrap and Ziploc Bags. DuPont invented Teflon for cookware and Kevlar for bulletproof vests. But the companies have been hard-hit by the slowdown in global growth and the drop in commodity prices. Both have fallen under intense pressure from shareholder activists who wanted to see them broken up and reorganized. DuPont CEO Edward Breen, who will keep the same title in the new company, says the deal announced today will be much better for shareholders.

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EDWARD BREEN: I mean, we looked at every possibility, analyzed every one financially. There’s nothing that financially compares to the value creation for a DuPont shareholder.

ZARROLI: Breen spoke on CNBC. Like all big mergers, this one will have to be approved by regulators who will decide whether it hurts competition. Company officials say they’re not expecting a lot of problems. While Dow and DuPont are the two biggest U.S. chemical companies, they are in a global market and face plenty of foreign competition. They also don’t tend to compete in many of their biggest product lines. Still, federal regulators have been more skeptical of big mergers lately, and this one is likely to face a lot of scrutiny. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

2:09

It sounds like a dance move — the reverse spin. But it’s actually a financial engineering maneuver Yahoo is using to make the company more attractive to investors.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The tech giant Yahoo is forming a new company, a company made up of Yahoo. The move, announced this morning, is mainly meant to help Yahoo avoid paying taxes, but the company says it will also spruce up Yahoo’s image. NPR’s Aarti Shahani explains.

AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Yahoo has a 15 percent stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Yahoo wants to get rid of that stake to give cash to hungry investors and because, arguably, the Alibaba shares are overshadowing the rest of the business, making investors undervalue what Yahoo itself brings to the table – stuff like its search engine, mail, Yahoo! News, Tumblr.

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MARISSA MAYER: A separation of our Alibaba stake will further enhance our ability to attract and incentivize talent to grow both revenue and user engagement.

SHAHANI: CEO Marissa Mayer on a conference call with analysts this morning.

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MAYER: We believe that focusing specifically on a reverse spin will help realize these benefits.

SHAHANI: A reverse spin – sounds like a dance move, but this will take another kind of feat – a feat in financial engineering. At first, Yahoo was trying to spin off Alibaba. Problem is, the Internal Revenue Service would not agree in advance to let them do it tax free. So Yahoo’s board decided they’ll spin off Yahoo – take all its assets, except for those Alibaba shares, and make a new publicly traded company. Another option would have been to just give the shares, worth about $32 billion, to shareholders. But, CEO Mayer explains, then Yahoo and shareholders would both get dinged with a tax bill.

MAYER: So it’d actually result in double taxation.

SHAHANI: Last week, rumors surfaced that Yahoo was in such dire straits, it was going to start selling off the core business, the products we know. Yahoo Chairman Maynard Webb sort of dispelled that.

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MAYNARD WEBB: We have made no determination to sell the company or any part of it.

SHAHANI: The reverse spinoff strategy is experimental – not guaranteed to work. It’ll require third-party consent from Yahoo business partners and regulators. Aarti Shahani, NPR News, Silicon Valley.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

4:29

In America, our food options are remarkably unaffected by the changing seasons. We just keep eating salad greens and tomatoes without regard to the onset of winter.

In most of the country, there’s little chance that the greens we eat in the late fall and winter are locally grown.

But if there were greenhouses nearby, they could be. And in a small but growing number of places, local greenhouses are there.

Take Lower Makefield Township, Penn., right across the Delaware River from Trenton, N.J.

It’s a gray, chilly, fall day when I visit. But when I step inside the greenhouse, I feel the warmth of sunlight that’s been trapped by its glass walls and ceilings.

In front of me, there’s a sea of green: more than an acre of baby salad greens.

“It looks like a field of lettuce. It’s actually a field of boards, with lettuce growing on them,” says Paul Lightfoot, founder and CEO of the company BrightFarms, which owns the greenhouse.

The plants and the boards are all floating on ponds of water. The green plants grow out of slits in the boards, while roots extend down below, into the water.

The plants are fed a precisely balanced diet of nutrients through the water. They get energy from the sun, and that’s supplemented this time of year with overhead lights.

What’s most remarkable is how fast they can grow under such conditions, with optimal temperatures and lighting. These plants go into the pond as pale seedlings, so tiny you can hardly see them. Thirteen days later, they will be baby kale, ready for harvest.

In fact, 10 or 20 times more lettuce will come out of this greenhouse in a year, per acre, than from an outdoor field. That’s partly because the greens grow faster in ideal conditions, and partly because those ideal conditions continue year-round; there’s no winter.

Some countries grow a lot of their vegetables in greenhouses. In the Netherlands or Canada, you can find vegetable greenhouses that cover 100 acres.

But they’re rare in the U.S. And the reason for this is simple.

We have easy access to such fields in the temperate-climate states of California and Arizona. Mexico, with its vast and expanding fields of fresh tomatoes, is right next door, and farms in Central and South America aren’t far away, either. It’s easier and cheaper to ship vegetables across the country than to grow them in local greenhouses.

Lightfoot, though, is betting that the future of vegetables, starting with salad greens and fresh tomatoes, lies indoors.

To show me why, he drives me to a nearby supermarket, McCaffrey’s, in the borough of Yardley, Penn. It’s selling his products.

Lightfoot pulls a package of BrightFarms arugula off the shelf and checks the expiration data. “This has about nine days left,” he says. These greens came from his greenhouse just a few days ago. Printed on the package, in big letters, are the words “Locally Grown.”

Next to them is the competition: organic salad greens that almost certainly came from California or Arizona.

There’s no difference in price. But some of that long-distance arugula and spinach looks a little wilted from that trip across the country.

This is part one of Lightfoot’s sales pitch. “You can see the difference in freshness. So it’s going to taste better. It’s going to last longer in the refrigerator,” he says.

The second part of Lightfoot’s pitch for local greenhouses is environmental.

Those fields in California and Arizona are in deserts, he says. The water they need is increasingly scarce. Most greens, for instance, come from the Salinas Valley in California, and farms there rely primarily on irrigation water from underground aquifers. Up to now, farmers have been able to pump an unlimited amount of water from their wells.

“In the United States, we just realized that we didn’t have endless land and water a few weeks ago, almost,” Lightfoot says.

Modern greenhouses require much less water — as little as 5 percent as much water as open-air field production.

Yet outside experts say that the case for greenhouses isn’t quite so convincing in all respects.

They say that greenhouses do take less water, but require extra heat and light during cold and dark parts of the year. And that usually comes from burning coal or gas. This adds to that global greenhouse effect.

Neil Mattson, a greenhouse expert at Cornell University, has calculated that growing lettuce in greenhouses in New York state can release twice the amount of climate-warming gases as growing lettuce in California — even when you consider the fuel burned to ship it across the country. “It’s not so good, and that’s the status quo,” says Mattson.

But he says those numbers may improve, as better lighting and heating technologies come online. And even though growing vegetables in greenhouses is usually a bit more expensive than open-air production, Mattson does agree that indoor farming’s key advantage — the freshness of its produce — may outweigh cost for many consumers.

That’s why the number of vegetable acres under glass in the U.S. is rising. From 2007 to 2012, the amount of land devoted to greenhouse production of vegetables in the U.S. increased by more than 50 percent. Mattson regularly hears from entrepreneurs who are interested in getting into this business, and are looking for advice.

“I think it really has legs,” Mattson says. “Ultimately it will depend on how robust consumer demand is for fresh, local, food.”

According to Lightfoot, that demand is booming.

“The demand is way higher for this product than our capacity right now,” he says. “There’s no limit right now. We’re raising the capital, and we’re building two other greenhouses that are much bigger than this.”

Those greenhouses are outside Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The one near Chicago will take advantage of waste heat from a nearby ethanol plant, cutting its energy consumption drastically.

Right now, BrightFarms is growing salad greens, basil, and tomatoes. Down the road, Lightfoot says, his greenhouses could diversify into other cucumbers, peppers, and strawberries — anything, he says, in which a local product looks and tastes a lot better than one trucked in from far away.