Kai Risdahl

The petroleum price shock we are currently enjoying is going to last for a while, months, easy.

And while straight up oil and gas are the primary players, of course, so much more passes through the strait that is critical for the way this and the global economy work.

Just one word.

Plastics.

Here's Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval.

The plastic pellets are coming in.

They're feeding into the screw and barrel.

And you're going to see this is the screw advancing forward.

That's squirting the plastic into the mold.

And so now it is complete.

The mold is filled.

What it's doing is circulating about 55 degree water to chill the part.

Then it's ready to come out.

The robot will come in and will pick the parts out of there.

When you think of a commodity plastic, say what your Frisbee's made out of or whatever, this is polyethylene.

If the price was, say, 75 cents, you know, we're seeing 10 to 20 cents per pound increases on some of those.

The largest input cost to the manufacturing process is the material.

And so when your material goes up 10 or 15 percent, it puts a real squeeze on you really quick.

If there's an increase in raw material cost and we've got to pass that on, they also have to prepare and have to have time to be able to work with their customers.

As Catherine Ann Edwards and I were talking about just a couple of minutes ago, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the February PCE this morning.