Minnesota business news with Patrick Rehkamp
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Monday marks the first day of Minneapolis’ Black Business week. The event will run for six days and feature a number of opportunities to support local Black-owned businesses. Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal reporter Patrick Rehkamp joined host Cathy Wurzer to talk about that story and the rest of the top business news of the week.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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Audio transcript
CATHY: Hey, today marks the first day of Minneapolis's Black Business Week. The event will run for six days and feature a number of opportunities to support local Black-owned businesses. Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal Reporter Patrick Rehkamp is back to talk about that story and the rest of the top business news of the week. Hey, Patrick.
PATRICK REHKAMP: How are you? Hey, Cathy. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
CATHY: Good. Well, thanks for coming back. Tell me more about Black Business Week.
PATRICK REHKAMP: Yeah, so the city of Minneapolis is supporting this, and it's a host of different events across the city. It runs from today through July 31. It's six days. And it's anything and everything Black business.
It's a lot of events around roundtables, networking events, clinics, and best practices. They're primarily taking place in parts of South Minneapolis and North Minneapolis. The best bet is to just check out the city's website or go to ours to see all the different events because there's quite a few of them.
And I mean, what's the focus here? It's been the second time that they've done this. They did it back in 2019, but then COVID-19 pandemic forced a two-year hiatus.
And what do we know? We know that consumers have been more inclined to seek out Black businesses to buy from, but they faced a lot of issues during the pandemic, whether it's protests, pandemic-related issues. They've been impacted pretty hard.
We also know that the number of Black businesses in Minnesota have grown over the past decade. But Black owners face a lot of barriers that their counterparts might not when it comes to growing their business for the limit to access, to procurement, and contracting. So this event is really out there to showcase a lot of these different Black businesses, raise exposure, and just overall support of the economic health of the Black community.
CATHY: OK. The Black unemployment rate, as you know, remains stubbornly high in Minnesota despite the state's unemployment rate shrinking last week to yet another record low. Tell me a little bit more about that.
PATRICK REHKAMP: Yes. So last week, the jobs report came out, and Minnesota's unemployment rate dropped to 1.8% in June. That is another record low since they started tracking data back in 1976.
Some good news and bad news-- overall job growth, pretty flat. We only gained 100 jobs in the month of June, not a ton. And we've recovered about 81% of the jobs lost since February of 2020 right before the pandemic.
However, the state has data models that predict that gap will be entirely closed by the end of the year. Wages are going up. Hourly wages on average grew about 5.2% over the year. That's good, but when you compare it to 9% inflation, that's not great. And if we break it down by race, there's still quite a few discrepancies.
The unemployment rate for Black community rose 7.4%. It fell to 3.1% for Hispanic Minnesotans, and it was 2.4% for white workers overall. We know that more people are entering the job market, though. The unemployed are becoming employed, which is what's causing this record drop overall.
CATHY: So tell me a little bit more about what's happening in the housing market. I'm curious.
PATRICK REHKAMP: So it's a little nuanced here. Existing home inventory in the Twin Cities is growing, and the number of sales are down compared to a year ago. But the median sale price for homes continues to increase.
We saw median home price in June of $380,000. That's a 9% jump from the same month in 2021 and nearly a quarter higher than June 2020. What we're seeing out there is rising interest rates or causing things to slip down.
We saw the Twin Cities had a little over 8,000 homes for sale at the end of the month, and that's 10% more than last June. But overall, sales figures are slowing. People are going to spend more for houses. The interest rates go up. It's still pretty messy out there. If you have the money, though, there's a little bit more inventory.
CATHY: Say before you go, UnitedHealth is going to drop out-of-pocket costs for multiple prescription medications like insulin, albuterol. How did they come to that decision?
PATRICK REHKAMP: Yeah, so let me give you a little bit of a backstory here. I don't know how much your listeners are going to know. But UnitedHealth Group is a health insurer based out of Minnetonka, and it is the largest publicly traded company in the state of Minnesota by leaps and bounds. Annual revenues could be $300 billion this year. That dwarfs any of the other local giants like Target, Best Buy, 3M much, much bigger.
They had their quarterly earnings. They earned about $800 million in the quarter, not bad. And what we saw was they had net revenues of more than $5 million.
And they said, OK, for our members that are fully insured, we're going to drop out-of-pocket costs for a lot of drugs-- epinephrine, albuterol. Insulin was the big one, though, that they announced.
They know this is a contentious issue. And they said fine. We'll pick up the tab for it as long as you're a fully insured member. The cost of insulin has drawn the ire of Republicans and Democrats across the country.
CATHY: Patrick, good report. Thanks so much.
PATRICK REHKAMP: Thanks for having me.
CATHY: Have a good week.
PATRICK REHKAMP: You too.
CATHY: That was Patrick Rehkamp. He's a reporter for Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal. Check them out online.
PATRICK REHKAMP: How are you? Hey, Cathy. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
CATHY: Good. Well, thanks for coming back. Tell me more about Black Business Week.
PATRICK REHKAMP: Yeah, so the city of Minneapolis is supporting this, and it's a host of different events across the city. It runs from today through July 31. It's six days. And it's anything and everything Black business.
It's a lot of events around roundtables, networking events, clinics, and best practices. They're primarily taking place in parts of South Minneapolis and North Minneapolis. The best bet is to just check out the city's website or go to ours to see all the different events because there's quite a few of them.
And I mean, what's the focus here? It's been the second time that they've done this. They did it back in 2019, but then COVID-19 pandemic forced a two-year hiatus.
And what do we know? We know that consumers have been more inclined to seek out Black businesses to buy from, but they faced a lot of issues during the pandemic, whether it's protests, pandemic-related issues. They've been impacted pretty hard.
We also know that the number of Black businesses in Minnesota have grown over the past decade. But Black owners face a lot of barriers that their counterparts might not when it comes to growing their business for the limit to access, to procurement, and contracting. So this event is really out there to showcase a lot of these different Black businesses, raise exposure, and just overall support of the economic health of the Black community.
CATHY: OK. The Black unemployment rate, as you know, remains stubbornly high in Minnesota despite the state's unemployment rate shrinking last week to yet another record low. Tell me a little bit more about that.
PATRICK REHKAMP: Yes. So last week, the jobs report came out, and Minnesota's unemployment rate dropped to 1.8% in June. That is another record low since they started tracking data back in 1976.
Some good news and bad news-- overall job growth, pretty flat. We only gained 100 jobs in the month of June, not a ton. And we've recovered about 81% of the jobs lost since February of 2020 right before the pandemic.
However, the state has data models that predict that gap will be entirely closed by the end of the year. Wages are going up. Hourly wages on average grew about 5.2% over the year. That's good, but when you compare it to 9% inflation, that's not great. And if we break it down by race, there's still quite a few discrepancies.
The unemployment rate for Black community rose 7.4%. It fell to 3.1% for Hispanic Minnesotans, and it was 2.4% for white workers overall. We know that more people are entering the job market, though. The unemployed are becoming employed, which is what's causing this record drop overall.
CATHY: So tell me a little bit more about what's happening in the housing market. I'm curious.
PATRICK REHKAMP: So it's a little nuanced here. Existing home inventory in the Twin Cities is growing, and the number of sales are down compared to a year ago. But the median sale price for homes continues to increase.
We saw median home price in June of $380,000. That's a 9% jump from the same month in 2021 and nearly a quarter higher than June 2020. What we're seeing out there is rising interest rates or causing things to slip down.
We saw the Twin Cities had a little over 8,000 homes for sale at the end of the month, and that's 10% more than last June. But overall, sales figures are slowing. People are going to spend more for houses. The interest rates go up. It's still pretty messy out there. If you have the money, though, there's a little bit more inventory.
CATHY: Say before you go, UnitedHealth is going to drop out-of-pocket costs for multiple prescription medications like insulin, albuterol. How did they come to that decision?
PATRICK REHKAMP: Yeah, so let me give you a little bit of a backstory here. I don't know how much your listeners are going to know. But UnitedHealth Group is a health insurer based out of Minnetonka, and it is the largest publicly traded company in the state of Minnesota by leaps and bounds. Annual revenues could be $300 billion this year. That dwarfs any of the other local giants like Target, Best Buy, 3M much, much bigger.
They had their quarterly earnings. They earned about $800 million in the quarter, not bad. And what we saw was they had net revenues of more than $5 million.
And they said, OK, for our members that are fully insured, we're going to drop out-of-pocket costs for a lot of drugs-- epinephrine, albuterol. Insulin was the big one, though, that they announced.
They know this is a contentious issue. And they said fine. We'll pick up the tab for it as long as you're a fully insured member. The cost of insulin has drawn the ire of Republicans and Democrats across the country.
CATHY: Patrick, good report. Thanks so much.
PATRICK REHKAMP: Thanks for having me.
CATHY: Have a good week.
PATRICK REHKAMP: You too.
CATHY: That was Patrick Rehkamp. He's a reporter for Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal. Check them out online.
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