Chapter 1: How is President Trump's war on Iran affecting oil prices?
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It's a commodities kind of day today. We're going to go a little sideways, though, from American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdell. It is Tuesday, today, the very last day of March 2026. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. Commodities is where the opening stanzas of the program today find us.
Not, though, the usual suspect because fine, sure, oil, important, yes, but not the only globally critical item that is in the news. We're going to do a commodities one, two today, aluminum and then coal. Aluminum prices have been rising since the war started. Attacks on smelters, you've probably heard of those. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, you've definitely heard of that.
Also, the rising cost of the energy that those smelters need. Prices are up around 10% since the start of the war. That's according to CRU Group. And that only adds to the 50% tariff that businesses have been paying on imported metals. So Marketplace's Justin Ho called some businesses that rely on aluminum to find out how they're being affected and what they're going to do about it.
Wolf Tooth Components is a bike parts manufacturer based near Minneapolis that makes hundreds of different products, including gears, pedals, and seat posts.
I would say aluminum's in probably 90% of our products.
That's co-owner Brendan Moore. He says ever since the war started, the price of the aluminum he buys has risen about 10%, even though the company mostly uses aluminum that's made in the U.S.
U.S. aluminum rises along with the broader commodity, and so U.S. prices have gone up, too.
Thing is, Moore says there's not a lot he can do about that.
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Chapter 2: What impact does rising aluminum prices have on businesses?
In the couple months before those credits went away, electric car sales spiked. But then... I like to refer to the time after that as like a hangover. Alex Lawrence owns EV Auto, which sells used EVs at dealerships in Utah and Tennessee. For his business, the bad part of that hangover lasted about a month. And then just slow uptick, kind of creeping back, creeping back.
But the EV market as a whole, it's still kind of hungover. Sales slumped from 10% of the car market in the third quarter to under 6% in the fourth quarter, according to Kelly Blue Book. Plus, says Jessica Caldwell at Edmunds. We heard automakers saying that they were going to delay plans or cancel EV programs altogether. So it sort of felt like a bleak market.
It wasn't necessarily stopping, but it didn't feel great in the short term. On top of the tax credit, the Trump administration also weakened fuel economy rules. So a lot of carmakers cut back their EV manufacturing and turned their focus, and money, back toward gas-fueled SUVs and trucks.
And then all of a sudden gas prices spike. It's like, well, are you sure you want to do that?
Because those high prices at the pump could maybe lead more Americans to go electric, says Tim Levin, senior editor of the EV News publication Inside EVs.
I think it depends on how high gas prices go and how long they stay that way, right?
Even if gas prices stay high, EVs face a bunch of other points of friction, Levin says, that have always made them a tougher sell.
People are worried about charging infrastructure. Not everybody has a home charger at home, which is where you're going to get the best savings and the best convenience. People are worried about range. The cost of these EVs is pretty high.
But at least that last point appears to be changing a bit. Chevy and Nissan both released new models under $30,000 this year. Toyota and Subaru are also coming out with new models aimed to be a bit more affordable than previous generations of EVs. And the market for used EVs is growing fast, driven by many electric models coming off three-year leases, Levin says.
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Chapter 3: Why are countries in Asia reopening coal production plants?
Yeah, it's worth pointing out here that CSL, the company that runs one of the centers that you found these people in front of, it's a publicly traded for-profit Australian company, you know? Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's done really well over the years, but it's also a company that's looked to work on its profit margins, essentially. It's lowered donor fees, but it's very much a company that's doing well in this country.
Mr. Briseño and the other folks you talked to, how much are they getting when they sell their plasma?
It varies quite a bit how much people are receiving. Mr. Brisenio was receiving on average $70 each visit, but it really varies based on people's weight, the frequency they donate. Food and Drug Administration rules don't allow an individual to donate plasma more than twice a week. So a lot of people are doing the maximum, and the pay really does vary.
It is just as a way to bring this home. It's a form of a safety net, right?
Oh, absolutely. I talked to researchers and academics who said that it's kind of a shadow safety net in a lot of ways. There's people who are very much looking to supplement their income in this economy. They're driving for Uber, Lyft, but there's also this other area, which is plasma donation, and it's a way for them to really survive in this economy.
Curtis Lee, The New York Times. Curtis, thanks a lot. It's quite a piece.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thursday is the one year mark of President Trump's now struck down tariffs, the ones he just decided on all by himself under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. So we're going to go back to some of the small business owners who have paid the price quite literally for the president's volatile trade policy. And we're going to start with Melissa Fields.
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