Vietnam is in its workforce golden age
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What economic factors are influencing the U.S. and Vietnam's relationship?
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 Market Class.
In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. 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 percent, 4-0 percent. 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.
Reynolds says she's been through this before, when energy prices spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine. But Zach Rogers, a professor at Colorado State University, says back then companies were holding on to excess inventory they built up during the pandemic. And that helped them to rely less on transportation.
This year, we've been running inventories very lean. And so even if transportation is very expensive, there will really still have to be some replenishment.
Companies could build up their inventories again to avoid having to constantly replenish items. But Rogers says doing so comes with its own costs, since companies still have to pay tariffs on imported goods.
And so a lot of companies are finding themselves between a rock and a hard place because of these counteracting pressures of tariffs and surging fuel costs.
Many companies are doing what they can to mitigate those fuel costs. Ken Giddent is CEO of Rothmans, a men's clothing store in New York. He says he's also been getting hit with surcharges, even for local shipments.
So, you know, we started investigating alternatives. And last week we rented a truck and drove it out to the warehouse in New Jersey and picked up 22 boxes.
Meanwhile, Catherine Reynolds at Palmetto Tile Distributors says she's trying to consolidate her shipments. For instance, today she's waiting to place an order while she has two other orders on hold.
Just because I want the three to ship together if possible to save everybody money on the back end.
Still, Reynolds says she'll have to pass at least some of the costs on to her customers.
I had a staff meeting this morning and just had to discuss that and tell them, keep your eye peeled for this. We do need to build that into our cost to our client.
Because the business, she says, can't afford to absorb the cost. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace.
What if there was a war and six weeks into it, Wall Street and the person, if you will, of the three major indices said, you know what, let's just call it a wash. Because that's where we find ourselves today. Equity is basically back to where they were before the bombing started. We will have the details when we do the numbers.
The macroeconomic phrase of the day today was delivered by the International Energy Agency, which in a report out this morning said it's worried about a falling global demand for oil. The supply challenges we know about, the Strait of Hormuz being closed and all. But the IEA says demand destruction is becoming a problem, too.
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