Kai Risdahl

And while the job of being a central banker is never easy, the past couple of three months in particular have been especially trying further explanation.

One assumes not required other than to say that rate cutting environment they'd all been planning on.

Say goodbye to that.

Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has our story.

The easy way to set up this next piece is to mention that crude oil today sits right in the mid-$90 a barrel or so, up a percent or so for each of the commonly quoted benchmarks.

But that doesn't really do justice to the subject at hand, which is the lasting legacy of oil production, in this case, in the great state of West Virginia.

Starting back in the mid-1800s, speculators drilled more than 100,000 wells there.

Most of them, as it happens, stopped actually producing oil decades ago.

And by law, that means the companies that own those wells have to plug them.

Let's just say that law has been honored in the breach.

And today, West Virginia has one inspector for every 6,700 wells.

And to boot, most of the 100,000 or so wells that do need to be plugged...

haven't even been recorded.

From the mountains of West Virginia, Marketplace's Kaylee Wells explains.

But also oil and water can leak out of them onto a farmer's land.

This final note on the way out today in which our packages may be showing up 4% later.

Saw this tidbit in the Wall Street Journal.

Data from Inrix, that's a transportation analytics company, that shows commercial truck drivers were driving on average 4% slower in late April than they were at the beginning of the year.

That is surveying 60 million commercial truck trips across 10 major metro areas.

Why, I hear you ask?