Just in time for Oscar weekend, NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Kim Masters, editor-at-large of The Hollywood Reporter, about the culture in Hollywood post-Harvey Weinstein.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

It’s hard to imagine, but it’s been less than a year since Harvey Weinstein, the former powerhouse Hollywood producer, was arrested in New York City on rape charges. With that arrest, he became both criminal defendant and cultural symbol – catalyst for the #MeToo movement and the symbol of a culture of harassment and abuse in Hollywood and beyond.

But on this Oscar weekend, we wanted to check in to see what, if anything, has changed in Hollywood since the beginning of Me Too, so we’ve called Kim Masters. She’s an editor-at-large at the Hollywood Reporter who broke a different story about misconduct by the former head of Amazon Studios, Roy Price. Mr. Price resigned a week after her story was published. Kim Masters, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us.

KIM MASTERS: Oh, thank you for having me.

MARTIN: So as somebody who’s covered Hollywood for a long time, have any tangible things changed since the Me Too movement?

MASTERS: You know, I wrestle with this because there is a lot of lip service paid and, you know, there is going to be, you know, agencies like ICM say we’re going to have more women, and it’s going to be 50/50 by 2020. And we all heard about the idea of an inclusion rider, or efforts to achieve greater parity – not just for women. But then we see things that are quite disheartening if you’re looking for signs of progress.

And, you know, another story I broke involved John Lasseter, who was the head of Disney Animation and Pixar Animation. And he had allegations of inappropriate conduct, and Disney ultimately moved him out. And he was rehired by – not a public company, a private company – Skydance, which is run by David Ellison. He’s the billionaire son of multibillionaire Larry Ellison.

So he can do more or less what he wants, and it feels like, with various people, there’s just an attempt to try to sort of slip back in and test the waters and see if it works. We saw it with Louis C.K. We saw it with Leslie Moonves. There’s a feeling that – are we going back to status quo ante, or are we actually seeing a change?

MARTIN: You know, people have thought that having more women in leadership roles would be one answer to this pattern.

MASTERS: That’s the hope, yeah.

MARTIN: And so are there more women in leadership roles, and is it the answer to this problem given what you just told us?

MASTERS: It is so slow, honestly. It is so slow. But we see a lot of men, white men – and every year, the statistics don’t change. And I’m not sure we’ll see after, you know, they have a chance to assess the year of Time’s Up or two years out or how long. I just feel that the culture is so entrenched. I think that progress is going to be extremely slow.

I mean, we did see Roy Price was out as the head of Amazon Studios, and Jenn Salke now runs it. She is a woman. It is a new day. Amazon very deliberately decided to give that job to a woman, so that’s one. You know, and again, when Disney replaced John Lasseter, they did put some women in more power, which had been a really big problem at Disney and Pixar Animation under John Lasseter. So, you know, there’s an attempt to say OK, well, let’s at least fix the optics. And in some cases, it’s more than that, but I’m just saying it’s really slow.

MARTIN: OK, no, you’ve given us a lot to think about, and you’ve already sort of told us a little bit about this, but is there any sort of checklist that anybody can point to in terms of looking for accountability? For example, I mean, there’s a Time’s Up organization that was founded by Hollywood women like Shonda Rhimes and Reese Witherspoon, so is there any entity that’s keeping track of progress here, or is there any way that the public can be – can hold these people accountable if they want to think about this as part of thinking about what culture they want to consume?

MASTERS: You know, I would love to end on a note of hope, but the head of Time’s Up that they hired, Lisa Borders, just left because her son has been accused of misconduct, and she is absorbed in helping to figure out what he’s going to do with this allegation. So Time’s Up has struggled a lot to figure out leadership. You know, they wanted to be very non-hierarchical, but in the end of the day, somebody needs to be in charge.

So I think we’re still, unfortunately, a ways away from having any kind of group. I mean, the unions could be helpful, but then again, they don’t necessarily address this. I mean, I think we’re – Hollywood is decentralized. Each movie is its own world – each TV show, so it’s not like we have the department of making sure that people don’t do bad things.

MARTIN: That’s Kim Masters, editor-at-large for the Hollywood Reporter. She was kind of to join us from Houston, Texas, via Skype. Kim Masters, thanks so much for talking to us.

MASTERS: Thank you for having me.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Workers in Sweden have the right to take six-months unpaid leave if they want to start their own business. It’s one of the reasons why Sweden is a leading country for startups.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

If you dream about opening your own business, you might want to consider a move to Sweden. Their employers must grant a leave of absence up to six months to an employee who wants to start a company. If that company fails, the employee goes back to their old job. The safety net is one reason Sweden has become a leading startup hub. Maggie (ph) Savage reports from Stockholm.

MADDY SAVAGE, BYLINE: The Swedish capital is living up to its reputation as one of the snowiest cities in Europe right now. And many entrepreneurs are jetting off to work remotely wherever they can find sunshine.

JESSICA PETTERSON: My name is Jessica Petterson. I usually live in Stockholm. Right now, I’m here in Sri Lanka, working remote for a month.

SAVAGE: She has a permanent job at a children’s charity in Sweden but has long-craved the chance to work more flexibly. So last year, she started a business offering virtual assistance to nonprofit organizations, which she can manage from anywhere in the world. Her employer agreed to hold her job open while she got started.

PETTERSON: I’m actually not sure if I would have dared to try to start this business if it wasn’t for this opportunity to take this leave. It’s quite a risk to start all over, no income whatsoever at the beginning.

SAVAGE: Her story isn’t unusual in Sweden, where anyone with a permanent position has a legal right to take unpaid leave for six months to launch a company, providing it doesn’t compete with their usual employer.

(SOUNDBITE OF WIND RUSHING)

SAVAGE: To find out more, I braved the snow and made a visit to Samuel Engblom at the Swedish Confederation for Professional Employees, which represents white-collar workers. Hi there.

SAMUEL ENGBLOM: Hello, and welcome to our offices. The idea is to promote mobility in the labor market. We want people to change jobs, and we also want people to start companies. I mean, you can promote entrepreneurship by making it more profitable, but you can also promote entrepreneurship by making it less insecure.

SAVAGE: Global observers argue that one of the benefits of Sweden’s unpaid leave system is that it recognizes it’s more than just financial risk that puts off entrepreneurs. Career risk is also a key factor in whether or not people take the plunge in launching a business.

TING XU: Regardless what you do after you fail as entrepreneur, when you go back to the labor market, you might have a hard time finding a job as good as the old one.

SAVAGE: That’s Ting Xu, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia whose work focuses on entrepreneurial finance.

XU: Many countries – they spend a lot of money – subsidize financing to entrepreneurs. However, reduce in risk can be just as important as providing finance. But what we cannot quantify is what’s the cost of providing these leaves, right? I think that’s the harder part.

SAVAGE: And many critics argue it would be just too expensive having to bring in temporary workers and losing staff they value who go off to start their own businesses. Even so, there are signs that Swedish employers are starting to export the concept.

MAX FRIBERG: My name is Max Friberg, today running a business software company called Inex One.

SAVAGE: He took unpaid leave from a consulting firm to start his company, which is based at this buzzing coworking space in the Swedish capital. Now, he’s considering offering staff in the U.S. the same opportunity when the firm opens its next office in New York.

FRIBERG: We see that as the competitive advantage – being able to offer some of these European-style benefits. And we’ve seen some companies, and most recently Spotify from Sweden, now doing that very successfully with flexible parental leave and holidays.

SAVAGE: It’s too early to tell if unpaid leave policies will end up playing a big role in the global race for tech talent. But at a time when much of the world is shifting towards temporary contracts and the gig economy, the Swedish approach certainly stands out. For NPR News, I’m Maddy Savage in Stockholm.

Copyright © 2019 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 Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Economic pessimists seized on new data indicating an increase in car loan delinquencies as evidence of a looming recession, but a downturn is likely simply because of the economy’s cyclical nature.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

The economy is rocking right along. Unemployment is low at 4 percent, and we learned this week of a record number of job openings. But this week, we also got some data on car loans. The number of Americans seriously delinquent on them reached a new high. So let’s turn to NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben for what that all means.

Hey, Danielle.

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey, Lulu.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Let’s do the numbers.

KURTZLEBEN: All right. So the data that we’re talking about is from the New York Federal Reserve. And that data showed that a record 7 million people are seriously delinquent on their car loans. And by seriously delinquent I mean 90 days or more.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.

KURTZLEBEN: Yes. That’s the highest level in the 19 years that the New York Fed has even been tracking that.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why is that?

KURTZLEBEN: Well, we have a few hints in the data. We don’t know for sure. But delinquencies among people under 30, among young adults, have really climbed. As to what’s behind that, it could be student debt. That has climbed in a huge way in recent years.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Indeed.

KURTZLEBEN: Aside from that, we’re seeing really high delinquencies among people with low credit scores. There is some indication that people are getting subprime auto loans, and they’re falling delinquent on those. But the bottom line, as the New York Fed pointed out in its report on this, is that this may mean that, even while you have those really good headline numbers of unemployment, that the strong economy isn’t benefiting everybody equally.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: The economy, though, is strong. So if there’s one bad indicator in the middle of that, how much weight should we give it?

KURTZLEBEN: You’re absolutely right, like you said at the top here, that the job market is looking really, really great. And amid all that, yeah. This is just one yellow flag. But that said, this is one yellow flag among several that have been popping up lately. For example, this week, we saw that retail sales fell in December by the largest amount since 2009. Aside from that, jobless claims, people coming forward and saying, hey, I need unemployment insurance – that also went up this week. So, no, this doesn’t mean recession is coming this week, this month, even this year. But it does seem to show that amid this seemingly pretty strong economy, there are some soft spots. And that is worrying.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And you looked into what tools the government has to fight the next recession. What kind of tools do policymakers actually have?

KURTZLEBEN: Long story short, they have fewer tools or maybe weaker tools than they did before the last recession. I mean, let’s look at the Federal Reserve. A very simple way to think about it is the Fed uses interest rates like an accelerator pedal. It lowers those down when it wants to speed up the economy, right? Except right now that accelerator pedal is pretty close to the floor. Interest rates are already pretty low. The Fed has been raising them very, very slowly since the last recession. We kind of have a hangover there.

Then, you go across Washington to Congress. OK. Congress controls the purse strings, except when you look fiscally, we have higher debt than we had before the last recession for a whole bunch of reasons. Now, economists do differ on how bad debt is for the economy. But either way, it appears there’s less room there. And by the way, look at how much Congress is accomplishing these days. It’s hard to imagine them easily coming to an agreement on what to do if we did have a downturn.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Downturns are inevitable because, as we’ve seen in economic history, things go up, things go down.

KURTZLEBEN: Most definitely, yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That is just the nature of the economic system.

KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: President Trump likes to talk about how strong the economy is right now. So if there’s a downturn, does he get the blame?

KURTZLEBEN: No. I mean, presidents can push policies that can boost the economy. They can potentially flub things that could hurt the economy. But in general, presidents can’t steer it. So you can’t give them full credit or full blame for big economic swings. Aside from that, you have a lot of these Democratic presidential candidates pushing really progressive policies aimed at helping Americans who are hurting economically, so promising better wages, better benefits. You even have some candidates talking about guaranteed jobs. And that’s, you know, a very, very big, sweeping change. So I’m interested in – if we do have a downturn, could that affect how voters feel about those policies? Could that push some voters more progressive?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That’s NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben with many good questions. We’ll be watching. Danielle, thanks so much.

KURTZLEBEN: Thanks, Lulu.

Copyright © 2019 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 Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

So far, the U.S. trade war with China hasn’t affected consumers much. But without a deal soon, tariffs on thousands of products will more than double.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

If the United States and China fail to reach an agreement on trade this month, tariffs may soon reach directly into consumers’ pockets. Farmers and manufacturers have been affected for months. This latest round of talks puts more at stake for more people. Grant Gerlock of NET News in Nebraska reports.

GRANT GERLOCK, BYLINE: In September, the Trump administration launched its biggest round of tariffs yet – a 10 percent tax on thousands of Chinese products, including a lot of everyday stuff. At this dollar store, I found a pair of pliers, some wall screws, eyeliner, a bath mat – all on the tariff list. But that doesn’t mean the price on the tag is 10 percent higher.

UCHE JARRETT: I can’t stress to you how much companies care about maintaining that stability.

GERLOCK: That’s Uche Jarrett, who teaches international economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

JARRETT: It drives their profit margins. It drives their estimates for the future. Whenever there is a change, there’s a lot of uncertainty that follows.

GERLOCK: Jarrett says so far, suppliers and retailers are shielding consumers from price hikes. They’d rather ding profits than lose customers. But soon consumers might have to pay up. The administration’s tariffs are aimed at narrowing the trade deficit with China. If there’s no deal by March 1, that 10 percent tariff will jump to 25 percent.

Irv Blumkin is CEO of the home furnishings chain Nebraska Furniture Mart. He says a 25 percent tariff would lead to higher prices at his store for everything from carpet to patio furniture.

IRV BLUMKIN: At 10 percent, you can come to a very minimal change. At 25 percent, it becomes a different deal.

GERLOCK: Blumkin is concerned a higher tariff will scare away his shoppers.

BLUMKIN: You know, they hear the news every day. And they see some of the uncertainties that are going on. And I think that impacts how people think.

GERLOCK: Irv Blumkin says some manufacturers are moving their production to countries like Vietnam, Malaysia or Mexico. While importers are scrambling, you might think that American manufacturers are benefiting from the tariffs. But maybe not. Take Bison, a company in Lincoln, Neb., that makes sports hardware.

I met CEO Nick Cusick at a local YMCA, where some office workers were playing a round of pickup basketball. The rims, the backboards and the wall pads were all made by Bison. Almost all the parts and pieces were manufactured in the U.S., too.

NICK CUSICK: Since we do compete against a fair number of companies who buy offshore, you would think generally speaking that we would benefit from…

GERLOCK: Yeah, aren’t you supposed to be the winners in this thing?

CUSICK: We’re supposed to be the winners.

GERLOCK: But Cusick says there’s a problem. When the U.S. raised taxes on imported steel, the price for American steel skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent. Bison had to raise its prices this year to cover costs.

CUSICK: But the end users – the schools, the consumers on our residential basketball side of our business – they’re the ones that are getting hit. So it’s kind of counterproductive.

GERLOCK: Unless the U.S. reaches a deal with China in the next few weeks, more businesses will be raising prices. And that’s when more consumers will begin to realize that trade wars come with a cost that they’ll be feeling in their wallets.

For NPR News, I’m Grant Gerlock.

SIMON: That story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and rural issues.

Copyright © 2019 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 Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.