It's a petroleum-based economy, gang.

We just live in it.

Also, what the labor force in Vietnam has to do with the economy here.

From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl.

It is Tuesday.

Today, this one is the 14th of April.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Another story from our series, the age of work, coming up later on in the program. But we are going to start

today with the economic reality of our geopolitics. It comes in the form of the producer price

index prices at the wholesale level, which we learned this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

rose five-tenths of one percent month to month. That is the headline number.

The core rate, which takes out food and energy prices because they bounce around a lot,

that was basically flat. And that's going to make more sense when I tell you that gas prices

were up 14 percent in March. That's wholesale, again, not pump prices. And diesel was up more than 40%, 40%.

4.0%.

Now, me mentioning diesel, should get you thinking about what diesel is used for.

And if you said trucks, we'll go straight to the head of the class.

Marketplace's Justin Ho is on trucks, transportation,

and what the price of diesel is going to cost consumers for

us today. Over the last few weeks, Catherine Reynolds, who handles imports for Palmetto Tile

distributors in South Carolina, has been getting a lot of emails about fuel surcharges from shipping

companies. So whatever, like, the gross bill is, they'll add 15 to 25 percent to that.

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