Marketplace - Jet fuel prices soar as war continues

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

As war in the Middle East pushes oil prices up, the price of jet fuel rises too. And that means air travel could get more expensive. The catch? Airlines are responding unevenly. In this episode, airlines balance pinched consumers with climbing fuel costs. Plus: Small business owner uncertainty is at its highest level in decades, investors scrutinize Oracle’s AI spending, and a Minneapolis cafe owner switches to a pay-what-you-can model amid ongoing ICE operations in the area.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

The widening ripple effects of the hit to the oil markets due to the war in the Middle East. Plus, a check-in on small businesses. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams in for Kai Risdahl. It's Tuesday, March 10th. Good to have you along. There are all sorts of estimates floating around, but experts and government officials are saying the war with Iran is costing the U.S. government up to $2 billion a day. In the private sector, the impact on oil markets and other commodities is already showing up in higher prices across several industries, including travel. Now, if you have any big summer trips planned, FYI, airfares are climbing as we speak.

The problem is simple. As the price of oil goes up because of the war in the Middle East, so does the price of jet fuel. Now, the way airlines are responding, not quite so simple. Marketplaces, Kaylee Wells explains. Last time we saw a spike in jet fuel prices like this was at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Fuel went up and airfare went up, but people paid up anyway. Because during the time, there was just such a crazy level of demand for travel. It was during that revenge travel period. Megnamaharihi is an airline reporter at Travel Industry News Outlet Skift.

She says back then, we were coming out of the pandemic, craving to go somewhere with a bunch of saved up money burning holes in our pockets. Today, demand for travel is still elevated, but not that elevated. So I think those increases are going to probably feel a little bit more painful. More painful, partly because higher oil prices mean less disposable income for consumers, says independent airline industry analyst Robert Mann. Notably leisure customers have to decide, well, you know, am I going to pay to light the house and heat the house and fill the fuel tank on the cars, or am I going to go buy airline tickets to see Mickey Mouse? The price hikes will likely target travelers who can afford them, says David Slotnick, contributing aviation editor for the travel site, The Points Guy.

If they see a $10, 20, $30 increase in their tickets, and they're already spending $1,200 on a round-trip flight to, say, Japan, that's not something they're necessarily going to notice or be affected by. Which also means airlines that fly to Japan or elsewhere overseas are better positioned to weather this storm. But for the domestic and budget airlines? Their customers are less likely to just absorb that without minding. And that might mean that those airlines need to absorb more of that cost themselves. Airline analysts are reluctant to offer booking advice right now with all the uncertainty surrounding the war. But Slotnik says he wishes he'd booked his family summer trip to Europe weeks ago. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

Wall Street today, everyone's still watching the oil markets. And while, the administration's social media posts, we'll have the details when we do the number. A bigger budget line for travel is yet another hit for businesses this year, already dealing with uncertainty around tariffs and weakening consumer confidence. That's probably why business confidence, small business confidence in particular, is also in a bit of the doldrums right now. The National Federation of Independent Business, or NFIB, for short, is out today with its February Small Business Optimism Index,

which is down for a second straight month, although the numbers have rebounded from the sharp dive the index took last April after President Trump's Liberation Day tariffs were announced. Marketplaces Mitchell Hartman has more. NFIB's optimism index for February is just about average for the past 52 years that has been compiled. But one component of sentiment is running much higher than it has for decades, business uncertainty. Holly Wade, with NFIB's Research Center, says small business owners have plenty to be worried about. Inflation is still a pain point for many small business owners. The labor market, a large share are looking to hire, can't find applicants. Let's break that down.

First, costs are up for materials that many need to buy, in part because of last year's tariffs. And the war with Iran is a big new unknown. We have seen in the past the price of barrel of oil increases. They are saddled with higher costs, gasoline, fuel, oil. They do pull back. The labor markets also throwing curveballs. Health insurance costs have escalated over the last year. Small business premiums are up 11% for 2026,

nearly double the increase for businesses overall. Meanwhile, there is increasing evidence that small businesses have expanded their hiring. Aaron Tarasas, said payroll processor Gusto, which is a marketplace underwriter, says in February, small businesses added nearly 106,000 net new jobs, double the 12-month average. A sign, he says, that uncertainty paralysis may be diminishing. In some ways, small businesses were first to be rattled by all of the economic uncertainty last spring, but they've also been a lot quicker to adjust and are now heading into 2026 with a bit more confidence than their larger counterparts. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. Now let's check in directly with a small business that's been

operating in some really challenging circumstances. During the heightened ice operations in Minneapolis over the last few months, small businesses have hosted fundraisers, grocery runs, food drives, and even helped community members pay rent. The Cafe Modern Times, which recently rebranded to post-modern times, transitioned to a pay-what-you-can model in hopes of offering relief to their neighbors. It was temporary at first, but now it's the permanent business model. Dylan Alverson, who has owned Post-Modern Times for the past 15 years,

joins us today. Dylan, welcome. Hi, thank you. Lots of other businesses in your area temporarily shifted how they operated due to the ice crackdowns. But what made you decide to permanently move to this pay what you can scale at your restaurant? Well, the first initial impulse and impetus for change was the witnessing firsthand repeated violence inflicted on our neighbors by the federal government. Feeling of helplessness and overwhelming urge to do something. So how does this model work?

What's it like being a customer in the cafe and placing an order? As far as being a customer, a lot of it hasn't changed. People walk in. We have dine-in service. We have a counter ordering in a side room. And the only thing is missing is the exchange of money. The night before we opened this way, we just basically re-edited all of our menus and our POS system and just took any. price points off of it. But it works just like any other restaurant. You walk up, order food,

and you can decide on whether or not you donate or not, but it's not a requirement and it's not something that we're put anyone on the spot to do. Do you offer people like a suggested amount for an individual item or a total to help them kind of think about how they might offer a contribution if they're able? Yes, if people ask. But it's not like listed or anything. Correct. The thing about giving is that we are trying to do it in a way that doesn't isolate or separate people with differences in income, which is the basis of our country. How's it going so far? Are you like breaking even every day? Well, it's a different way of accounting, as you can imagine. And it's daily doesn't really matter what we're looking at is like a larger input and output.

And so one thing that happened as soon as we made this change is that we received a pretty large public amount of support. Someone flew from Texas to give us $2,000 the first week we were open and he came back. last week. So typically February in Minnesota and restaurants, there's, I can't remember a single February that I've run a restaurant in this town where we haven't had a loss for the month. And this was our first February where we didn't lose money. What has it been like for you trying to run a business in Minneapolis over the last few months during this crackdown? I mean, the same as most business leaders that I talk to, which has been near impossible. Especially for restaurants, this plague from our federal government is probably going to wipe out a quarter or half of our restaurants in the city if things don't change. This decision somehow saved us from worrying about that. And I think that we are in one of the biggest crises for restaurants that we've seen in our lifetime.

So how have the last few months changed you as a business owner? I guess it's giving me more hope, honestly. And it's weird to say, and there's privilege in that. And I made a completely risky and abstract decision for my business. but in that absurdity, it has validated a lot of the things that I've felt about for a long time and given me something to look forward to and try for beyond supporting myself and my family, which is doing good, feeding people in the community, feeding people in the city, and trying to strive for a better future.

Dylan Alverson is the owner of the post-modern times in Minneapolis. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Oracle reported better than expected quarterly earnings today, thanks to the strength of its AI cloud offerings, but it's a tough market for the companies spending big bucks to build out AI infrastructure. Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon all saw shares slide last month

despite relatively strong earnings. Investors are concerned about the scale of their data center spending. And when it comes to AI spending risk, Oracle is often held up as the poster child. The company's stock has dropped by more than 50% since a high last September, and Bloomberg reports it may be preparing to cut thousands of jobs. Marketplaces Megan McCarty Carino has more. There was a time not that long ago when it seemed like investors couldn't get enough of massive AI investments. But that feels so 2025 now, says analyst Jacob Bourne at e-marketer.

We've exited the pure AI excitement phase, and we're definitely full into the AI accountability phase. Markets want to see signs that these big bets on AI will pay off. And perhaps no big tech company has made a riskier bet than Oracle. Oracle just has become sort of the canary in the cold mine. Because the company is financing its data center buildout large. largely with debt. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon may be spending more, but those companies have massive revenues and cash reserves. Oracle is spending more than it makes, says analyst Luke Yang at

Morningstar. They're already pushing themselves to the limit. Oracle has racked up more than $100 billion in debt and has committed even more. The entire plan is going to be highly risky is the AI-related demand is not as strong as we would expect. An Oracle is relying heavily on demand from one big customer, OpenAI. In September, they announced a cloud deal worth $300 billion. It was the halo around your proverbial head that's now the news around your neck. Daniel Newman at Futurum Group says while OpenA.I. is still a frontrunner, it's an unprofitable company with a lot of big dollar obligations itself.

People think some part of what Open AI is committed will not come to fruition. Open AI has reportedly pulled out of a major data center project with Oracle in Texas, though Oracle denied the project was in trouble. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino for Marketplace. Coming up. So she is fully pink from head to toe. And she sounds delightful. But first, let's do the numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 32 points about 1 tenth of 1% to close. close at 47,706. The NASDAQ added one point, basically flat, to finish at 22,697. And the S&P 500 gave up 14 points, 2 tenths of a percent, to end at 6781. Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrongly posted on X last night that the U.S. Navy had escorted an oil tanker through the street of Hormuz. Today, the White House said the Navy is not escorting ships through the waterway. Brent Crew topped dropped to as low as $80 a barrel before closing at $87. Bonds fell, the yield on the 10-year T-note rose to at 4.16 percent, and you're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kimberly Adams. The right-to-repair movement is one of those slow-burning

efforts with some passionate supporters of the idea that if you buy something, you should be able to fix it yourself, or at least have some options to pay someone other than the manufacturer, to fix your smartphones or tractors or refrigerator for you. But what happens to the ability to make a fix when the maker of an item goes bankrupt? Take, for example, the now out-of-business automaker Fisker, which put out the electric vehicle, the Ocean EV, in 2023. Now that the company is bankrupt, who gets to access the software needed to keep the EVs running? Arian Marshall did a lot of digging on this.

She's a staff writer at Wired. Welcome to the show. Hi there. So this is kind of a wild tale of an owner's association that's now turning into a volunteer-run car company. First of all, how did you even come to this story? So Fisker, the car company in question year, was on my radar for several years. It was started by really kind of a legend in the auto industry, this guy named Henrik Fisker, who designed some very influential cars and then went on to found several.

of his own car companies. So when he came out with this new EV, it was definitely something to pay attention to. And then about a year after its first car called the Fisker Ocean went on the market, it declared bankruptcy. It had a lot of internal problems. This car, the ocean, was kind of a mess. They also just had internal financial issues. So it just kind of blew up in the faces of these thousands and thousands of owners who bought what they thought was this pretty slick, cool, electric vehicle and kind of ended up being a nightmare. So where does this all stand now? What are these owners trying to do? At this point, we are about a year and a half into this organization called the Fisker's Owners Association that was founded by several owners who kind of saw the company going out of business and

thought, oh God, this car is really dependent on software. What are we going to do when this company goes bankrupt and there's no one to help us out of this jam. There wasn't really a support network in terms of technicians who could help them. So they banded it together and basically tried to figure out how to fix it themselves. And right now they are really still fighting to own the intellectual property for this car, which would kind of be a new thing, a all-volunteer car club, basically owning the intellectual property for an electric vehicle. If the company's gone bankrupt, why is there so much resistance to letting these owners have the IP? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it really comes down to money. Money and reputation. Fisker doesn't want to just kind of, or whatever's left of Fisker, doesn't want to kind of give out right to the intellectual property, willy-nilly to anyone, because that kind of might sell you what's left of their good name. They have to really trust that the people that they're giving these licenses to will do things safely and in good faith. And it's also just a lot of kind of ticky-tacky legal negotiations that go on here that I don't, I'll be honest, completely understand.

But it's just kind of a difficult process, and it takes a long time. What was cool in this story is how much of a community has formed around this, because you talk about people like going out of their way and spending all this money to be part of this Fiskers owner association, going to meetups and trying to install new software. I mean, is that the future of right to repair and the way to get these cars up and running again? I'd say personally, I hope it doesn't have to be. The people in my story, a lot of them, they're basically pulling two jobs right now. You know, they're like powerful tech executives and then also running this car company on the side. It shouldn't have to take that much work to actually own the thing that you've bought to use the thing that you've bought. to use the thing that you've bought, in this case, for tens of thousands of dollars. But it may be that

the work this group is doing and groups like it are doing could sort of pay the path towards greater rights for consumers to fix and repair the things they own. Yeah, how many groups are there like this? Like, how common is this idea of owners getting together to try to claw back ownership of the IP of their vehicles? Yeah, that's a great question. I haven't seen any specific car groups like this, but we've seen a lot of fan-organized communities, especially on the internet, around a lot of hobbies. Some of them include game consoles that have kind of gone out of business and fan communities grow up to create new games or to make sure that the consoles are continuing to work. So this is not a totally new movement, but it's definitely kind of has higher stakes here.

There's, of course, the price of a car, which is really expensive and only getting more expensive as listeners who have tried to buy a car lately, no. But also, it's a safety issue as well. You know, cars are on the road all the time. And if something goes wrong, that's a big problem. So the stakes are really high here. Arion Marshall is a staff writer at Wired covering transportation. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Mitchell Hartman was talking earlier about how small businesses are feeling in this economy. And while it is good to look at the data, it's always nice to hear directly from the source. So we checked in with one small business owner we last heard from about a year ago when she was just opening her new store.

Jane Rodriguez owns the New Romantics, a romance-only bookstore in Orlando, Florida. I honestly can't believe it's already been a year. I was worried that we would be something fun and exciting in you for the first six months. and then we would see like this massive drop off. I'm happy to report that that has not been the case. It has been pretty steady. Like honestly, it almost feels like I've been waiting for like the other shoe to drop. And it hasn't.

Which I'm going to knock on wood and keep hoping that it doesn't. We have expanded in a couple of different ways. Like we introduced our very own book truck, which is Poppy, the book truck. So she is fully pink from head to toe. And we had her like specially built. out, which makes, like, setting up for an event so easy because all we have to do is open the door. We were able to pay Poppy off when we purchased her, which is really nice. And right now, it's kind of just a matter of getting her out to as many events as possible.

When it comes to, like, costs specifically, our lease is up this year, and now we have to pay rent, and that's going to be an increased thing. insurance goes up and I want to increase my team's salaries or how much they get paid hourly. So it's so funny because I was like, oh my God, we get this massive revenue boost at the beginning of us being open. But then that kind of starts to trickle down slowly, but your expenses go up. So it kind of becomes like an X where the money is coming in is a lot less than the money that you're spending. The thing that is always on my mind is the sustainability aspect. Because I really do, like, this is, I was meant to do what I'm doing now.

And this is something that I want to do for the next 20 years of my life at minimum. Like 20, 30, like, I want to retire doing this. The fact that I get excited to respond to emails, I think that that was the thing that made me be like, yeah, I want to do this forever. Jane Rodriguez going on year two. We can't do this series without you, so write to us about what's happening in your economy at marketplace.org slash my economy. This final note on the way out today, another economic data point before we let you go. Existing home sales came out this morning up 1.7% from January to February. Pick your adjective here, modest, sluggish, meh, growth sales month over month.

But according to Redfin, a lot of sellers that delistening, their homes in the fall are starting to put them back on the market. Jordan, Manj, Zoniel Maharaj, Janet Wynn, Olga Oxman, and Virginia K. Smith are the digital team. And I'm Kimberly Adams. We'll see you tomorrow. This is APM. Hey, David Brancaccio here. I hope you're well and that your passport is up to date because I am hosting a trip to Italy this fall. And you, you are invited. Stay at a world-class Tuscan Villa and step into the world of the Medici, the formidable family whose influence and power helped give rise to the Renaissance

and the art we still celebrate today, and not to mention the banking system. We're going to visit the world's oldest bank, swim in the thermal spa waters in Monte Cattini, and take in the art of the Uffizi. All of this, and then we'll try to put it all into context with great conversation over even better meals and wine tasting. Please join me and know this. Buying into this trip will provide essential support for public media. Discover more about this fall's Tuscany adventure at Marketplace.org slash travel to reserve your spot today. That's marketplace.org slash travel.