Energyflation? More like everything-flation

Well, that wasn't what we wanted to hear now, was it? From American Public Media, this is Market Class. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Wednesday today, 14 October. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. You know, today was one of those days where government economic data comes out and you, the average American consumer, goes, yeah, I knew that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics told us this morning that consumer prices rose 3.7% in September from one year ago. It was a 0.6% increase month over month. That's August to September. And I know maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. I also know you think the next thing I'm going to say is that, energy prices are the main culprit, which, yes, OK, they are. But they're not the only culprit. Marketplace's Sabri Beneshour starts to solve. If energy prices are a dumpster fire in the economy, you want to know if it's going to spread. And to do that, you've got to look at how dry and tindery the area around the dumpster is. Like, what's inflation doing over in services? Services inflation is just not dampening down at all. Omer Sharif is founder of Inflation Insights. There are areas of mild concern around the dumpster. Recreation services were relatively strong today. Hotel rates have moved up sharply the last several months. Airfares are still rising as airlines try to recover jet fuel costs. On the other hand, some other prices have come down. Beef, pork, milk. You can actually look at all the goods and services the government measures and calculate how many of them are seeing inflation below 2%, which people tend not to see. And how many things have inflation above 2%, which people do notice. And right now it's about a 50-50 split. Eric Winograd is chief economist at Alliance Bernstein. The dumpster fire is not spreading too much. The truth is that the second round effects or the knock-on effects from oil and into other prices have been a lot more limited than I think most people would have expected. Markets are still betting the Federal Reserve is going to hose down the economy with an interest rate hike in December. We're just to be safe. Now, whatever is going on with inflation around the dumpster, the actual dumpster is still on fire. I mean, you can't really just exclude energy. People can't just not pay for gas, not pay their heating bills. Alan Detmeister is an economist at UBS Investment Bank. More than half the inflation we are seeing today comes from higher gas and diesel prices alone. And that inflation has been higher than wage growth for six months in a row after the UBS investment bank was shut down. Iran war began. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace. Hey, you remember back in the depths of the pandemic, all the supply chain mishegas that was going on, the months it would take for something you had ordered to show up, the inflation that followed, all those stories about how much more it was costing to send a shipping container from Shanghai to L.A.? Here's the 2026 version. The supply chain in question is crude oil, the inflation, I mean, Sabri was just talking about that, and instead of container ships, it's crude oil tankers, which are running very nearly 80 million dollars a pop to send one of them, one of them full of oil from the U.S. Gulf Coast to China. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has our story. Around the world, out on the open sea, there are only 900 or so VLCCs. VLCC stands for Very Large Crude Carrier. They carry two million barrels. Nick Watt is with Argus Media. He says those carriers used to charge three to six dollars per barrel before the war. And now it has absolutely skyrocketed, and freight rates for VLCCs carrying U.S. crude to Asia, about 38 dollars per barrel. That price reflects the increased demand for a limited number of tankers because of all the extra lifting it takes to move oil around the world these days. Dan Pickering is with Pickering Energy Partners. They're using vessels. Sometimes they're not. They're using vessels that are not. They're using vessels that are sometimes smaller vessels to get oil through the strait, which is most risky. And then they're transferring it onto other vessels out in the Persian Gulf where the Iranians can't strike them. You need more vessels, and there's more risk. So refiners are paying more for shipments of crude oil, especially in Asia, says Rick Joswick with S&P Global Energy. Refinery margins in Asia are getting a little thin. Thin and negative in some cases, at a time when diesel and gasoline are in short supply. The world is looking to run more crude someplace else to make the products and backfill that loss. The only spare capacity is out in Asia. And if those margins in Asia are negative, they're not going to run it. Which puts more upward pressure on fuel prices for all of us. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. The obligatory reminder here, as you think about what you are paying at the pump for gas and what truckers are paying for diesel, is that crude oil trades globally, and there is, quite literally, only so much to go around. On Wall Street today, traders for sure did not love them, that inflation data. We will have the details when we do the numbers. We've been planning our stories from Mumbai this week for months. Countless emails and Zooms and phone calls with all kinds of people, which is where our series, The Age of Work, begins today. You have started recording on your end, yes? Yes, I have. All right. We are recording on our end. So the first thing I would like you to do, just to give us a little bit of time, is to let us know if you have any questions. If you have any I get that right, is tell me exactly who you are and how we should properly identify you. Okay. I'm Pushpika Freitas, and I'm the president of Marketplace Handwork of India. I'm also the founder of Marketplace. We reached Pushpika in Chicago, where she lives now. She is originally from Mumbai. And just to get this out of the way, yes, the business we are going to be talking about today is also called Marketplace. Marketplace Handwork of India is its full name. Like Pushpika said, we're just going to call it Marketplace India to minimize the confusion for you all as best we can. Pushpika studied social work in Mumbai, then moved to the United States. Tell me more about what you saw. You'd been in Chicago for a number of years. You'd gotten an advanced degree, and then you went back. Tell me what you saw. Well, actually, I first started leprosy. Rehabilitation program, because that's the job I got. And one of the things that I remember very clearly before I kind of started Marketplace was meeting a young girl, but maybe 12, during the day and saying, hey, why aren't you in school? And she said, well, my mother had to go to work, and I have to look after my younger siblings. That's when I realized how little opportunity women have and how much freedom they have to look after their children. And I think that's to even earn an income. The women's labor force participation rate in India, the percentage of people working or actively looking, is 32%. For men in India, it's close to 80%. Tell me about the conversation you had with your sister when you decided to start this company. Well, one of the first things we realized was that we didn't know what we were doing. We were able to acknowledge that, okay, we want to empower women, but we didn't know what we were doing. So both of us knew how to sew. And so we started with sewing, doing patchwork. We didn't have funding. We didn't have, you know, so we would get scraps of fabric from tailors. They taught women who wanted to earn money of their own how to sew, an embroider, and eventually how to make clothing. But one of the things Pushpika learned pretty quick, was that the clothing these women were making was too pricey for the Indian market. I came to Chicago to visit family and friends. I had a sister here. And I just filled my suitcase full of stuff and had a house party. And people just loved the garments. And so I thought, okay, well, maybe the market is here. And that's how Marketplace actually was born here. Every year, the women in India produce two collections that they export for sale. And they're called the Marketplace. And they're called to the United States. That's the traditional side of the business. There's also a non-profit side that trains women how to work. One key part of that is that these women don't get paid in cash. Their wages go straight to a bank account that they open in their own names, not their husband's. So Marketplace is about economic development for the women, but it is more than that. Earning an income does give them a voice, but the women have taken it to a completely different level, which you'll see when you go to India. And we definitely did. Here's the thing with this, and I'll say it. This is one of those where audio doesn't do it justice. Just the everything of this. It's kind of overwhelming. Neela Richardson and I spent two hours in the neighborhood where Pushpika founded Marketplace India. It's called Santa Cruz East. And obviously we can't walk you through everything that we saw, but we're going to try real hard to convey the feeling. We did our best trying to find the Marketplace India office. We failed miserably because, among other things, there aren't really street signs. All right, we're following you. Welcome. We wound up in a bright white room full of a dozen or so women, some at desks, most, though, sitting on the floor around a low table, closely inspecting individual pieces of clothing and folding them up oh so neatly. Oh, wow. Look at this. We have a shipment going this Friday. I was just going to say, they're busy packaging it up. Why don't we start with who you are and where we are. Okay. So, I am Soumya, Soumya Gautam. I am the CEO of Marketplace India. We're in the Maratha colony, which is basically an entire slum area. We are here. And we're in the Marketplace India office. We're in the middle of quality check. And packaging right now. Soumya is 28 years old. She worked her way up in this company over the past five years. And while Pushpika does big picture from Chicago, Soumya manages the day-to-day here in Mumbai. Sorry, I was just looking at this label. When you wear a Marketplace garment, you join an innovative program for social change, economic empowerment, and changing lives for women, artisans, and their families. And then, amazingly, you've got the Facebook logo and the Instagram logo. So, you guys are all over it. We're trying. The shirt I was looking at was super colorful with some beautiful hand-done embroidery. These tops cost around $100, made right here by these women that Marketplace India trains. We have women, around 180 women that are working with us. 180 women. 180 artisans that are working with us, divided into about 10 cooperatives, which basically means that every artist is an equal owner of that. Okay. Entity. Absolutely. An employee ownership model. Yes. Is that what I heard you say? Yes. And where do the women come from before they come work for you? So, we go to them. We find these kind of slum areas where there are opportunities where we can find women who want to work but are not able to. The majority of the women that we're working with, they've never earned their own money before. Coming up, a trip through the slum to meet some of these artisans. First, though, let's do the numbers. Yeah, the wah-wahs. Dow Industrials down 48 points, only about a tenth percent there, 51,621. But the NASDAQ down 511 points, 1.8 percent. Finished at 26,692. S&P 500 down 86 points, 1.1%. 77 and 18. We heard from Sabri about U.S. inflation. We're focusing this week, as you know, on the Indian economy. So, some inflation numbers from over there. Headline inflation for September, 5.5 percent. Food inflation across India is at 7.7 percent. Wholesale inflation. Producer prices, which we get tomorrow, by the way, rose sharply to about 11.4 percent because, wait for it, wait for it, energy. Shares of the AI cloud computing company. Core, we've plunged 15 percent on the day. Yields on its bonds surged. Investors have grown fearful of how much AI's borrowing is going down. Can you say bubble? Sure. Sure you could. Netflix shares ticked up at 10 percent. The company is laying off about 1,000 people, 6 percent of its workforce. Bonds up. Yield on the 10-year T-note down 5.19 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Somya led us out of Marketplace India HQ. The way that you were going, yes. By the kitten? Yes. Hi, little kitten. To meet some of the women at one of the cooperatives in the Santa Cruz East slum. And I should say here, I have never really been any place like this. Neela and I and a lot of Americans, I suppose, had a picture in our minds of what the Mumbai slums would look like. Being here, though, is a totally different thing. The slums aren't just in specific areas. They are all over the place. All over the city. And they're actually commercial centers to the thousands of people living in them. Yeah, so what happens in this slum, and all slums here, I imagine, is that, like, an economy sprouts up to support it. So there's, like, a chemist. There's, like, a locksmith-y kind of place. All types of exterior and exterior painting work, the sign says. All of these businesses are about the size of a small garage, completely open in the front. All right, I'll go. I know. I'm standing right here. We took a turn off the main road. It got darker and narrower the farther we went away from the street. You can get lost. It's like a maze back here. Yeah, you could get lost in a heartbeat. They all store, like, water because they have limited water supply during, like, a certain hour of the day. Oh, I see. Pretty deep into the slum, there was a beauty salon. So there's shops here, too. Yes. Small shops for groceries, daily needs. After a 15-minute or so walk that felt, honestly, longer with the heat we got to where we were going. Hello. Sorry to bother you. Please sit down. Please. Please. So tell us where we are. Again, tell us where we are. We are at Wear. They've been producing garments for Marketplace for over 30 years. This is the tailoring. Level. There are two levels more. And we have one for cutting and then one for hand embroidery and packaging. So vertically integrated. Literally and business model-wise. That's right. There's no other way. The room is maybe 10 feet by 12, flanked with tables and a few women working away on sewing machines. We pulled up a couple of metal stools so we could chat without interrupting the work too much. It did look like belts were the item of the day. Pamya translated. Oh, so you're doing a belt too. What is your name, please? Sarah Kamri. And how old are you, Sarah? How old are you? 37. 37. How long have you been here? Nine years. Oh, nine years. Okay. And what were you doing before this? What were you doing before this? No, I came here before the wedding. After marriage, this was the first thing. She likes this job, she said, because it's clean. It's close to her house. She can walk her daughters to and from school. Could you ask her about the community she finds at work? All right, wait. You're smiling, she's smiling, the guy in the background is smiling. What was that? That was clearly a good answer. She said that I came here to Mumbai right after my marriage. So I knew nobody, nobody knew me. That's when I joined. So this place became my home. This place became like a second home to me. Secondly, she said before this, everybody knew me by my husband's name. Like I'm this person's wife. But now when I'm walking around in the community, they're like, this is Sarah from where? So they know me by my own name. That's cool. And that I really like. That's really cool. So this is a big question. So think about it for a minute. What does it mean to you to be a woman in this economy right now? So she's asking, what does it mean to be a woman in today's times? I don't understand. It's hard. I know it's hard. I know it's hard. I would have a hard time answering too. Yeah, I know. I mean, maybe it's not a fair question. I don't know. Without, you know, 15 people and a microphone in her face. But it's a real question, right? Because she's part of this workforce. So she said that I don't have to ask my husband for money. In fact, I make my own. So I can give him if he needs any. And so that feels nice. Thank you for your time. I'm sorry I embarrass you with all these questions. Sorry. Thank you. Can we go upstairs? Yes, let's go. Thank you very much. Stairs, by the way, being a generous term. It's more like stairs and a rickety ladder combined. So steep that there's a rope dangling from the ceiling way up above. So you've got something to hold on to going up and especially coming down. Not easy when you're also holding a bunch of microphones. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my. Hello. I'm sorry, but were you waiting for us? There were around a dozen women. All of them Marketplace India artisans in traditional dress sitting in a big circle on the floor. What does it mean for you all to have this circle and be able to go to these other women, I know you can't understand what I'm saying, and have this sisterhood around you during the work day? You are expecting each one of the various ones, maybe this woman here. Whoever wants to, we would love to hear from anybody, but we're just glad you're here, so whoever would like to. This is not as maybe you can hear our usual interview setting, talking to this many people all at once, so it did take a little time with all the translation and literally the space in the room and the technical audio stuff. But once Samia started translating our questions, a bunch of women jumped in, sometimes talking over each other. There were apparently a lot of inside jokes. She's getting some nods around the circle around here, but what did she say? So she was saying that I. I make my own money, so I'm very proud. I have the right over myself to command my own life, make my own choices, because I'm not dependent on anybody. So that is what it means to me, to be a woman in today's economy and having a job. What is your name, first of all? Deepika Surthi. Thank you. How old are you? I am 52. You speak great English. Why are we doing this in Marathi? You're 52. What did you do? I am an embroidery lady. I am doing embroidery here for 25 years. For 25 years. So you are an embroidery master. Yes? Sounds like it. Why are you here? Deepika spoke for a couple of minutes, but there were some words we kept on hearing. Power and empowerment. She would gesture to herself and flex her bicep. So she said that all of us are from different backgrounds, different cultures, but all of us have the same problems. We all want to make money, earn money, and we all might be bringing different skills to the table. Someone might be better at something else, but that gives us power. It unites us all together, and that feels really good. Question for the room. Yes. What would it mean to India, to the country, if every woman. had their own bank account, their own way of making, earning money, and were independent? What would change? We asked the youngest woman in the room what she thought. She is 32 years old. She's a shy one. I know she's shy. I can tell. She's pulling away. Would she mind? Another Marketplace India employee did the translating this time. She's saying definitely it will be good. Because they don't need to ask money for anything, they can pay the fees for the tuitions and education fees for their kids by their own. They don't need to ask for those money. We're going back to you for the last one. Just because you did so well the first time. Here's my question. What's the most important thing for people in America to know about the work that you do? What's the most important thing that you want to tell the people in America? The whole of America. That's where the customer is, right? America is where the customer is. For the customer, for the first time. So she was saying that I want to tell them that embroidery is not easy. It's like gold jewelry that, you know, the design is so intricate. We have a lot of steps. It's very complicated. And we do, like, a different design on every garment, every season, the design changes. So I want to tell them how much work and effort and skill it requires to do what we do. All of these women we spoke to said this was their first job. They had gotten married, moved to Mumbai, maybe had kids, and then started doing this after training from Marketplace India. They were making detailed, individualized pieces of clothing. So, just like the visual effects workers at DINAG, or the brothers we saw beating fine jewelry on the sidewalk, these women are a part of India's skilled labor force that this country has to keep growing to take full advantage of its demographic golden age. I think we've got some pictures of that room in India. It was something else. You should check them out. Anyway, this final note on the way out today, real quick. The Beige Book came out this morning, the Fed's regular anecdotal look at this economy. Here is my favorite tidbit. The word "diesel" was used 21 times in this report. In the August report, twice. Two times. Twice. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Foche, Montana Johnson, Ken Charlton, Thorpe, Alex Simpson is the manager of media production. I'm Kai Risdell. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APN.