We'll do some oil, we'll do some data, and we'll wrap it all up with a nice bowl of beans.

From American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Thursday, today the last day of April. Good always to have you along, everybody. There is some economic data with which we could begin today,

and we will get to it in a minute, I promise.

But we're going to start instead with a number. That number is 126.41. The proper denomination is

U.S. dollars. The commodity associated with it is Brent North Sea crude, which in the wee small hours of this

morning hit the aforementioned $126.41 a barrel.

That's June delivery, which is to say the futures price.

Now, as we sit here at the two-month mark of the most severe energy shock the world has

ever seen, as every day countries are chewing their way through their inventories, and ever less

oil is being produced and delivered, the competition for those barrels gets steeper and

steeper.

And that is showing up in futures market, yes, which I just talked about, but more significantly,

in the physical market for oil, the very high price you will pay to get a barrel delivered to you today.

The thing is, as Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval reports, that spot price isn't what financial

markets tell us it should be. Let's say I'm trying to buy a million barrels of crude oil.

I had a contract from a producer in the Middle East, but that oil is tied up in the

Strait of Hormuz, so I need oil now on the spot market for a lot more money. Joe DeLora is with

Robo Bank. The physical market is skyrocketing. We've seen delivery for physical Brent crude going, you know, like $144.

Well above the on-paper prices being set by Wall Street types.

It's a divergence of what people think versus reality.

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