Kai Risdahl

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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 Market Class.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizal.

It is Thursday today, the last day of April.

Good as 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 future's 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.

We've seen delivery for physical Brent crude going, you know, like one hundred and forty four dollars.

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