Triple-digit trouble
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The cost of a barrel of crude surpassed $100 over the weekend, as war in the Middle East continues to block oil shipments. In simpler, car-commuter terms, gas prices have risen to $4-ish per gallon. But even if the conflict ended tomorrow, they would be slow to fall. Also in this episode: Small business owners remain cautious to hire, community banks struggle to win deposits, and some sectors could see job cuts if the war in Iran continues.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This Marketplace podcast is supported by Fayree Drinker, one of the largest law firms in Minnesota, |
| 0:06.4 | with nearly 300 Minneapolis attorneys helping clients solve complex legal issues and meeting their goals in the Twin Cities and Beyond, |
| 0:15.2 | Faygriddrinker.com. |
| 0:19.0 | Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to be able to tell you that the markets may not be a total idiot after all. |
| 0:27.1 | From American public media, this is Marketplace. |
| 0:36.6 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. |
| 0:43.2 | It is Monday. |
| 0:44.4 | Today, this one is the 30th of March. |
| 0:46.7 | Good as it always is, to have you along, everybody. |
| 0:49.6 | To be fair, these are trying times indeed for traders and the algorithms they live by. In the space of |
| 0:55.9 | literally two back-to-back sentences this morning, President Trump said negotiations with Iran |
| 1:01.6 | are showing great progress. That's a quote. But, and if there is no deal soon, complete |
| 1:08.3 | obliteration, his words will follow. So with that as backdrop, and we are, by the way, |
| 1:13.8 | going to get into the bond market just a little bit later on. But with that as backdrop, the overall |
| 1:18.6 | theme of the program today is the economy yet to come. Because as we have been reporting, |
| 1:25.0 | there does seem to be a very short-term focus on the war's economic ramifications at the expense of some longer-term thinking. |
| 1:32.7 | Oil is where we are going to begin. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, up better than 5 percent today, almost $105 a barrel. |
| 1:41.7 | Marketplaces Kristen Schwab gets us going with the oil market yet to come. |
| 1:45.9 | It took a month for oil to go from $60-something a barrel to $100. |
| 1:51.0 | Hugh Daigle, a professor of petroleum engineering at UT Austin, says, believe it or not, |
| 1:56.0 | that's actually the market showing restraint. |
| 1:58.8 | Now that we see that this may be a prolonged conflict, I would |
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