Oil companies pump it up

midterm election results they don't come with a guidebook on what's going to happen with the economy from american public media this is marketplace in new york i'm kristin schwab in for kai rizdahl it's thursday november 5th and it's good to be here with you maybe you saw that oil prices fell below the 90 a barrel mark yesterday and maybe you wondered what happened well nothing really short term oil is a speculative market and an election is cause for speculation prices have already rebounded today volatility or not u.s oil and gas companies have been raking in profits a bunch of them are reporting earnings this week including conoco phillips today the american oil giant brought in four billion dollars in earnings in the third quarter thanks to high prices marketplaces elizabeth troval has more on how u.s producers are faring geopolitical conflict continues to boost profits for the oil and gas industry andy o'connor is with morningstar dbrs u.s oil companies are banking pretty huge third quarter profits and benefiting from the heightened pricing caused by the ongoing disruption of middle east crude oil supplies the big multinational oil companies with their own refineries are also sitting pretty steven cunningham is with argus media finding it's been a standout performer and that's really been driven by skyrocketing refining margins of course given the global disruptions we're seeing with the war in the middle east and attacks on russian refineries high oil prices have also spurred some production growth u.s crude production hit a record 14 million barrels a day last week according to the u.s energy information administration that's like a significant milestone even though uh you know the talk over the last few months has been off the shale plateauing out and uh it's a lot of the basins are mature but one oil basin is still going strong in west texas the permian basin has been driving that growth in u.s production car ingham is with the texas alliance of energy producers it's clear that the price increases of 2026 have incentivized companies in the permian to try to bring bring more production to the marketplace to take advantage of those higher prices by adding rigs and doing other things that they can to grow production still many companies are cautious since it's easy to see how crude oil prices per barrel could spike higher or drop lower depending on what happens geopolitically garrett golding is with the dallas fed we're in the early stages of that for a lot of these companies on plotting out what 2027 will look like on capital expenditures and it's pretty easy to get to a hundred dollar world and it's pretty easy to get to a 60 world through some of those scenarios that they're going to look at looking ahead most major companies aren't writing blank checks for a bunch of new oil rigs i'm elizabeth troval for marketplace on wall street today voters soured on ai data centers so traders soured on ai at least for today we'll have the details when we do the numbers in corporate news hilton rang the opening bell at the nasdaq today here in new york the owners of hotel brands ranging from the waldorf astoria to the homewood suites is not the only company switching stock exchange teams later this month automaker gm will also be joining the nasdaq other companies have made the reverse swap from the nasdaq to the new york stock exchange why would a company want to jump from one to another here's marketplace's stephanie hughes gm has been listed on the new york stock exchange for over 100 years and jim kaine director of financial communications for the company says it's gone well you know the quality of execution on both the new york stock exchange and the nasdaq is is very similar and very high quality but by listing on the nasdaq later this month gm could become eligible to join the nasdaq 100 index which would bring with it a bunch of new investors it's that opportunity to be part of one of the most actively followed indices in the world that helps us expand our ownership base joining the nasdaq which is home to many major tech companies is also a chance for gm to talk up its tech bona fides kane points out the company makes cars but a big part of that these days is making technology we've been going through this transformation where we've been making significant investments in ai for our vehicles and electrification and autonomous driving technology the nasdaq's techie brand is something other companies want to be a part of too in hilton's announcement about listing on the exchange it talked up its new ai powered trip planning technology walmart when it switched last year talked about how both walmart and nasdaq redefined quote their respective industries through innovation sometimes they're trying to rebrand and emphasize that they are a different company than they used to be james angel is a finance professor at georgetown who's advised nasdaq in the past alternatively he says some companies might want to move to the new york stock exchange because there's a certain prestige that comes with it or the swap from one exchange to another can be relationship driven you get a new cfo who just likes one exchange more than the other this kind of competition between stock exchanges is unusual says jay ritter who directs the ipo initiative at the university of florida almost all countries you've got a main market where all of the big companies are listed and then some countries also have a junior market and the idea he says is that as companies get more successful they move to the main market but ritter says here in the u.s there's a true competition between exchanges i'm stephanie hughes for marketplace you you you research publications are an important part of academia these journals allow scholars to share their work they can help them get funding for a project and journalists like me sometimes scour these papers to find experts who have studied specific topics but like every other field academic research is being infiltrated by the university of florida and the university of florida is a place where you can learn more about the research and the research that's being done by a.i. and everyone involved is trying to figure out how to deal with it as they go and a wexler is an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the university of pennsylvania professor wexler thanks for being here thank you so you teach medical ethics and you're an editor at a bioethics journal tell me about how you've seen submissions change yeah so i think i've noticed a change just in the last few years so what we're seeing is a lot more a.i. assisted submissions so it used to be fairly easy to tell when uh there was weak scholarship you know the writing uh you know the writing was pretty poor the citations weren't quite right um and it was pretty easy to make a desk reject decision for an article um but what we're seeing now is that a.i. puts a kind of gloss or a kind of sheen on articles so they sound better uh but the underlying argument isn't isn't quite there yeah tell me about how this impacts your time what does it like to sift through all this you know, that can be disheartening to see people submitting articles that have had such a, where AI has had such a heavy hand in the writing. But at its core, it's just, it's very time consuming. Again, writing those rejections and sort of articulating what's not working about the piece or finding where the argument isn't as coherent as it could be. It just takes a lot more time than it used to. So it's more time consuming. It also just feels a little bit depressing and disheartening just seeing how much is being used across the field. What do you think this means for the credibility of published research? I think it's really challenging, really as, you know, again, really existential. I think it's about the credibility of published research. I think it's about the credibility of researchers. I think it's about the credibility of journals themselves, right? I find myself not knowing where to turn, right? When a journal, that used to publish work that I could trust, and when a researcher used to publish work that I could trust, you know, when I see that researcher appearing in a certain journal, it used to be like, I would want to read that piece. And now I find myself pausing and saying, can I trust that piece without reading it very carefully? Can I trust to assign it to my students as a lab meeting reading, for instance, if I don't sort of comb through it carefully first? And I published an article about this topic in The Atlantic recently. And I think what really struck me was the response from other academics from across different fields. So I've heard from climate scientists, I've heard from marine biologists, mathematicians, political scientists. This is happening, you know, really across the board. And I think many people like myself are really struggling with these deep and existential questions, you know, just what do we do? What's the point of scholarship? And if there is still a point of scholarship, which I think there is actually, then what does the output look like? And how do we. Judge the credibility of that output? And I think those are open questions that are just not resolved yet. Do you think there is any room for researchers to use AI ethically in their work? I mean, it's here. So how do we, how do we move ahead? I absolutely think there is room to use AI ethically in research. And I'm not, I'm not someone who's, who's an anti-AI person at all. I completely agree. It's here to stay. And we have to figure out how to live in a world with it. There's no going back. And I think AI can be really useful. You know, one of the ways I see it being useful is in writing, right? So if you have a draft of an article, you've, you've developed your argument, or let's say you've done a survey study or an interview study, you've written up the results. But some of the transition sentences aren't quite hanging together, or the flow is not working. I think AI is really useful in making it flow more smoothly, making it flow better. Another use of AI that people talk about is critiquing articles. So actually, sending it in for peer review, ask an AI to write a peer review of your own article and see maybe what it thinks some of the weaknesses are. And then you can respond to those. So those are some of the ways that I think AI actually can be really helpful. And I think there are actually fantastic uses of AI, but just not when it's used in place of scholarship and in place of human thought and knowledge and opinions. Anna Wexler is a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Wexler, thanks again for coming on the show. Anna Wexler: Thank you for having me. You got to live the life you have, not the life you dreamed of, I guess. I'm not sure it gets more real than that. But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,833 points, three and four tenths percent, to finish at 51,523. The Nasdaq subtracted 1,421 points, five and a half percent, to close at 24,315. And the S&P 500 lost 339 points, four and a third percent, to end at 7,353. It seems like a lot of investors woke up and thought twice about this whole AI thing. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices tumbled 17 and a quarter percent. NVIDIA slid nine and a quarter percent. Intel deleted 10 and one third percent. Memory chipmaker SanDisk plunged 22 and a quarter percent. Checking in on some of the big oil companies Elizabeth Troval was telling us about, ExxonMobil dipped two and one third percent, Chevron dimmed just shy of one and nine tenths percent, ConocoPhillips dialed down one and a tenth percent. Bonds rose, the yield on the 10-year T-note fell to 4.83 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab. I feel like everyone's got their own version of oddly satisfying videos they watch on social media. You know, those ones where someone's pressure washing a sidewalk or cutting soap into a million little cubes or decorating a cookie perfectly with icing. Maddie Gartman has nearly one million followers on TikTok. I visited her a handful of years ago when she was running a cookie-making business out of her home near St. Paul, Minnesota. She's now a full-time content creator under the name Garty Goodies. We called her up to see how it's been going. Maddie, it's good to talk to you again. Yeah, thanks for having me. Your business has changed so much since we first met, I think, five years ago. You went from being a full-time teacher and part-time baker to being a full-time content creator. Give me an update. What does a day in your life look like today? Well, today I'm still teaching cookie decorating classes, and because we are approaching the busy holiday season, I am busier than ever with actual in-person classes. Luckily, people still want to go learn how to do an art form in person. Later this afternoon, I'll be heading down to my little home filming studio and I'll film some cookie decorating content that I can post on social media. And then I'm also educating other cookie decorators, so teaching them how to do what I do. So it's a lot of different facets. Gotcha. And what does that mean for your income streams? What does that pie look like? So the majority of it comes from my cookie classes. Those are key. I think of it like the Minnesota State Fair. I make a lot of my income during one chunk of the year. And then a smaller portion comes from my video content. So I still do sponsored brand deals. So brands will reach out to me and ask me to make a little cookie advertising their business. And then a chunk comes from just getting paid from the social media apps. But that's a much, much smaller chunk. And then I'll have some months where I'll get a ton of views, and I'll make a nice chunk of change. And then I'll have some months where I'm getting, you know, checks for $20. So it just varies so much. And it's hard to know how much you're going to get. What are the patterns you're seeing in, you know, when the money is coming in over social media, when it's not? Are you seeing any consistencies in what works and what doesn't? Unfortunately, with TikTok, there really aren't a lot of patterns because the way that their program is set up, it's a lot of mystery. Your videos won't qualify because people didn't watch it long enough. Or some arbitrary computer decided that it wasn't high quality enough. So there really isn't consistency, which is why it's not a good idea to rely on TikTok being your main employer. You got to find other ways to generate money. Well, what does that all that mean for, you know, the money you make at the end of the day? And, you know, it is still a job after all, the sort of stress that brings. Yeah, I mean, it means that the hustle for actual cookie classes needs to be consistent. You know, I can't, I have to make sure that I'm filling all of those cookie classes, those in-person classes, because that's the money that I know I can rely on. And I have to make sure that my focus is always where I know the money is going to be. And I have to make sure that I'm filling all of those cookie classes, those in-person classes, because that's the only way I know the money is reliable. And the cookie videos and the content, that's sort of like a fun added part of it. But I have to keep those going too, because that's also part of how I advertise the other aspects of my business. So. Yeah, one feeds the other. Yes. I wanted to ask about some brand partnerships. I saw there were some with Kodak, Paramount, Alaska Airlines, Orkin, which struck me as kind of odd. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was and how these partnerships work? Yeah. So usually I think people will find me because I'll have made a decorating video. So when Orkin contacted me, I had made some bug cookies for Valentine's Day, just for fun. And so they really liked them. They were very realistic, very creepy looking bugs. And they just somehow, I came across their feed and they contacted me and wanted me to make some cookies for them. So I think it just happens to be that brands will see what I'm already doing and then realize, oh, that would be great if she could just put our name on it and make a cookie for us. Your business has changed and grown so much. Where do you see Garty Goodies going in the future? You know, I'm just going to, I go day by day. I never could have predicted where I'm at right now. I mean, I know we've talked about it before, but I was a high school English teacher and I started my baking business out of my home because I needed to pay some bills when I was a little bit older. I left my job to stay home with my son. And now to think that I have millions of followers and I get to teach people how to decorate cookies every day. It's just, I would have never, ever predicted this and I never really take it for granted. And until this ends, until this burns out, I'm just going to keep riding, riding the wave. Maddie Gartman, teaching cookie decorating classes and making content at Garty Goodies in South St. Paul, Minnesota. Thanks, Maddie. Thanks so much for having me. People move from place to place in this economy for a whole bunch of reasons. A new job, aging parents, better weather. Sometimes, though, a move is much more unexpected. You don't really choose the move. The move kind of chooses you. Here's the next installment of our series, My Economy, about a family figuring out where they want to live. My name is Michael Devitt. I am a physical therapist, and I am currently living in Grangeville, Idaho. I have lived in Idaho for 32 years. Right? Right downtown in Boise. My wife was originally from here, and so she started family practice residency here, and I found a job, and we thought that people would have to pull us out of here toes first. But our relationship with Idaho started to change when our youngest daughter came out as transgender. That completely changed not the way we saw Idaho, but the way Idaho saw our family. ♪ music playing ♪ The Idaho. The Idaho state legislature passed a law making it illegal for minors to get gender-affirming care. And it has kind of progressed over the years with them creating more and more onerous laws about transgender Idahoans. That made us have to rethink our relationship with the state of Idaho, and me in particular, my work situation, and my private practice clinic. ♪ music playing ♪ We shut that down as part of the process of leaving the state. I wrote a letter to our patients telling them, you know, that in five months, August 31st, we would be closing our doors. And that was hard. That was really hard. I worried for my employees. You know, we had a great thing going. I mean, we had a wonderful practice, and we were going to run through the tape in probably four years. And we would close the office. ♪ music playing ♪ But it was because we were going to be in the office for four years. But it was because we were all retiring, and it would be a happy moment. But, you know, you got to live the life you have, not the life you dreamed of, I guess. The ultimate plan is to end up probably in Walla Walla, Washington. I am doing what is called locum tenens, or traveling PT. But I did not get my Washington license in time to take an assignment in Washington. That was Michael Devitt, for now, living in Grangeville, Idaho. I should mention that voters weighed in on ballot initiatives impacting transgender people in at least seven states this week. That includes Washington, where the Devitt family hopes to live. It looks like it'll be one of four states that voted to restrict transgender athletes in K-12 sports. This final note on the way out today, saw this in Reuters. Imagine you board your flight, ready to settle into your window seat and take in a view of Mount Rainier or the Grand Canyon or the New York City skyline. And there is. There is no window. Delta Airlines is facing a lawsuit over selling windowless window seats at a premium. Airlines have tried to get these lawsuits dismissed, but a U.S. district judge ruled today that this case will move forward. I gotta say, I love a good old class action lawsuit. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Mika Ellison, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio. Will's story is the supervising senior. Producer, I'm Kristen Schwab. We'll see you back here tomorrow. This is APM.