Marketplace - U.S. oil inventories fall to a 22-year low

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Oil inventories have fallen drastically since President Trump launched the war against Iran. But it’s not because we’re suddenly using more fuel. Instead, the U.S. is exporting much more oil than usual — to places that can’t get enough with the Strait of Hormuz blocked. All this will have knock-on effects for oil prices in the U.S. for months to come. Plus: Investors want to yank more money from private credit firms, your social media algorithim is likely full of “stealth ads,” and we visit the elk antler market in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.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.

Oil, private credit, and elk antlers. Seriously. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Thursday, today, the fourth day of June. Good as always, to have you along, everybody. Here's a little choose-your-own adventure as we get started. Today, according to AAA, regular gas right now, this is a national average,

is $4.24 a gallon. That is, depending on which adventure you choose, either down more than 18 cents from a week ago and or nearly a buck 10 more than we were paying a year ago. We all know why, I imagine, but the ramifications aren't always clear. The United States is exporting more of the oil that is produced here to make up for some of that missing Persian Gulf supply,

because it's a global market, right? but that in turn has helped convince the Trump administration to draw down the strategic petroleum reserve to try to keep prices down. Thing is, the Energy Information Administration said this week, U.S. petroleum inventories are now as low as they have been since 2004. Marketplaces Kelly Wells gets us going with what that might mean. The U.S. is exporting more oil, but not because it's producing more oil. We're just kind of pulling that out of our inventory and we're shipping it overseas. Abi Rajendron with the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute says exports from the U.S. have tempered the global supply shortage and actually kept prices relatively stable.

But the U.S. can't continue to be backstop just through inventories for too much longer. At this rate, analysts expect U.S. inventories to reach record lows because last time they got this low in the mid-2000s, The U.S. wasn't even close to exporting the millions of daily oil barrels it does now. It's really easy to say, well, we can just stop that. Well, we really can't. Patrick DeHan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, says if we did stop exporting, oil companies would pretty much stop drilling. You can't have a world in which the U.S. is the world's largest oil producer, and we keep all of our own oil. It just wouldn't work like that. There's not enough financial incentive for oil companies to invest billions of dollars for, for a very limited return.

Even if the Strait of War moves were to open today, the U.S. would likely keep drawing down its stockpiles for months. Greg Pretty, senior fellow with the Center for the National Interest, says, for one thing, oil tankers are slow, and a lot of them are in the wrong place. They're not sitting there waiting in the Arabian Sea to go in and pick a cargo up. A lot of them are parked near the destinations, or tankers that would have been going to the Gulf just picked up a cargo in Texas. And if the war keeps going until the end of the year?

It's conventional wisdom even that the U.S. would be in recession. Pretty says it's likely that U.S. drivers will pay $5 per gallon by July, and if the war continues, it could be six by the end of the summer. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. Today's installment of what could possibly go wrong in this economy is brought to us by the private credit market. Blackstone's private credit fund is capping what private credit investors can withdraw at 5%. They'd been asking for 10. And other private equity firms doing the same partners group in Cliffwater, Marketplace's Supreme Benashore, has more on what's eating those investors and a very quick refresher on what private credit is in the first place.

After the great financial crisis of the late aughts, interest rates were really low for a long time. And so investors were like, well, this sucks. How are we going to make money? So they started snooping around for good places to put their wealth. There is generally big inflow of money into alternative space. Victoria Ivashina is a professor at Harvard Business School. A lot of investors realized, let's just do what banks do. Let's lend money to businesses, but like new kinds of businesses, like software that banks are afraid of.

Traditional debt markets were not providing those forms of financing. People who are not banks doing bank-like things, lending specifically, is called private credit. And it took off. It was exponential growth since after the financial crisis. Private credit became even more popular when interest rates started to rise after COVID. Big companies did not like that, and they didn't like how inflexible traditional banks were about loans. So they started turning to private credit. It reflects a broader trend of decline of traditional banking.

Thomas Piskorski is a professor at Columbia Business School. Private credit got even bigger when cloud computing and AI and data centers all joined the party. And investors went absolutely nuts for all of that. price of private credit more than tripled over the last few years. So why are we now hearing about investors wanting to take their money out? Well, basically, with time, the warts on some of these investments are beginning to show, says Yvashina. Well, as this asset class kind of expanded, we didn't see many defaults.

When you start something, the problems are not imminent, right? And sure enough, as time went on, there were defaults. And one of private credit's favorite darling software services got a bit of. big scare that AI might undermine it. That's where some of the pressures were concentrated. So some investors got queasy. They wanted to take their chips home early. And some private credit firms have let them do it up to a point.

But the vast majority of private credit firms do not allow that. And the vast majority of investors, especially the institutional mega investors, don't want out anyway just yet. In New York, I'm Sabrina Beneshore for Marketplace. Wall Street today. hey, here's a twist. Tech stocks suffered. The Dow had a great day. We will have the details when we do the numbers. Antlers, I learned, you know, today can weigh as much as 40 pounds. They fall off the animals naturally every spring. Also, I learned that as a result of people picking them up when they are shed, there's an elk antler industry.

Here's Marketplace's Caitlin Tan. The Town Square in Jackson Hole, Wyoming is buzzing. Today, it's the world's largest annual auction for elk antlers. Local kids parade antlers out that are twice their size. Sold it for $800 right up there. This is the flashy public-facing event of the weekend. A lot of tourists buying a piece of the west for their living room mantle. But off on the side streets, there's an informal parking lot economy of sorts.

Lots of carhart jackets and camo ball caps. and antlers clinking. Mike Bosworth is dragging heeping piles of antlers from his old truck bed. I found most of these, yeah. Wait, and I was just reading your sweatshirt, antler addicts? I'm an addict. Every spring, Bosworth scours mountain foothills and forests of his home in Oregon looking for antlers. I'm just an outdoor guy and start finding them, and it's like an Easter egg hunt for an adult.

Like a 12 miles a day type of hunt. But this year he's hiking farther for antlers. Oh yeah, they're all in different places. Yeah, they're scattered. A little context on elk migration. They go wherever there's the least snow. They need grass to eat. And normally when they shed their antlers,

they're still in low-lying, easy-to-hike places. But with such little snow in the West this year, a lot of the elk and their antlers were deep in the mountains. had to walk so much farther. So Bosworth is cashing in to make his hobby worth it this year. Do you feel sad in selling them? Yeah. Yeah, I can remember where I found lots of them.

Yeah. Buying them is Roy Rasmussen, who drove down from Montana. He's sorting through the grades, or quality of the antler. Be grade, pea grade. See, great, B grade. After loading them into Rasmussen's giant horse trailer, it's time to figure out the price. The nicest grade of antler is about $14.151 a pound.

251 plus... 351.4 plus 156. It's about a $10,000 check for Bosworth. Thank you, Bob. I'll have to buy you something to drink later. Rasmussen is a middleman of sorts. He'll buy even more antlers and resell them over the next year for a little more money.

How much antler are you selling in here? It varies. different. Every year's different. Like, are we talking tens of thousands of pounds? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Back of the napkin math, $300,000 on the low end. Rasmussen got in the business about 40 years ago. It was all getting exported overseas for medicinal purposes. In countries like China and Mongolia, antlers are pulverized into a powder for tea and extracts, supposedly to help with arthritis and low energy. Antlers are also highly sought after in high-end mountain home decor. like chandeliers and table legs.

But one of the bigger markets? Dog Chews. My name is Stefan Nicholas, and I'm the chief antler officer of Ridge Runner Antler. It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing to my former corporate days. Nicholas spent decades managing luxury hotels.

Now he cuts up antlers into dog chews at his home in Colorado, fully replacing his prior income. One of the canine customers' favorites. It's almost like a Charleston chew of antler because the bone is really, really thin. There's lots of marilyn. They just love that part.

Those will cost you about 25 bucks. Nicholas doesn't think the mild winter, making it hard to find antlers, will trickle down to his prices. But the high cost of living right now, like gas and groceries? You're going to have to cut something out. So maybe you want to get one antler instead of three. Maybe you don't give him anything. And that could mean he'd have to raise his prices for the elk antler dog juice.

in Jackson, Wyoming. I'm Caitlin Tan for Marketplace. It's not like social media is immune to advertising. It is everywhere, as you know, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all the rest. There's the obvious stuff, sponsored ads and the like. But there is a whole world of advertising

that is trying real hard to be invisible. And there is some evidence that it's fueling just about every trend you can think of. Lane Brown is a features writer for New York Magazine. He had the story the other day in a piece titled The Feed is. fake. Lane Brown, welcome to the program. It's good to have you on. Great to be here.

So let's start with the title of this piece. And look, nobody, I hope nobody believes that whichever social feed they are on is actually completely genuine and real. But the feed is fake is, I mean, it's a little distressing. Give us this skinny here. Sure. So basically, marketers have more or less figured out how to make things go viral and invade your social media feeds and ways that you probably don't even realize. And so when you're scrolling through Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, chances are pretty much almost, most of the things you're seeing are actually these days, stealth paid advertisements undisclosed. You have no idea there are ads, but they are. As I said, that's a little distressing. How does it work? What are the mechanics?

So there are a few different methods that marketers are using, but one is this thing called clipping, which is where basically anybody with something to promote, whether it's a movie trailer or a song, they will clip it into a whole bunch of little tiny social media-friendly fragments and upload it at great volume to TikTok or Instagram or Twitter using a bunch of dummy accounts that look like the accounts of normal people, but they're not. The algorithms of the social media platforms interpret this as a surge of organic interest, and so they push these clips to the wider user base. So it's basically, it's a way to make things go viral. Right. There's a great quote from a guy in here that you spoke to, and he says,

there's so much spam and pretend hype on the internet that nothing cuts through without artificial help anymore, not even huge artists with real audiences. Are we talking like Taylor and Beyonce, need help doing this too? I didn't find clipping campaigns. I didn't find evidence that they're using it, but Justin Bieber is using it. And so he recently performed at Coachella, and clips from his Coachella performance went viral. And that was basically he had some artificial help there. Am I being naive? I mean, give it to me straight. Yeah, it's pretty much.

You can say yes, it's okay. Yeah, more or less. I mean, I don't want to accuse Taylor Swift and Beyonce. I know they have fantastic lawyers. Fair enough. But no, really is big artists with lots of real fans still sort of have to do this. The problem is everybody has now figured this out. And so even if you have lots of real fans, you have to sort of fight fire with fire with this.

If I wanted to do this, if I wanted to really go viral and get, you know, whatever it is I do on the socials to really catch on. How much would it cost me? I mean, it can't be that expensive, right? No, it's amazing. It's $5,000 is sort of the budget for a lot of these campaigns. And what they'll do is basically pay normal people to post from their own accounts. And they'll give them, I think, a dollar per thousand views.

And so for $5,000, you can actually get a pretty big hit online. So it really isn't that expensive. So you may want to look into this. I may well. I'm sure my bosses would have something to say about that. Yeah. A dollar per thousand views, right? Compare that to, I don't know, like TV or something else.

Well, yeah, so like if you were to buy a normal ad on TikTok, it might cost you $10 per thousand views. Oh, wow. Yeah, if you wanted to buy a TV ad, it might be $30 per thousand views. And it may be basically one of the cheapest forms of advertising that's ever existed, and it's also one of the most effective, at least for the moment. So it's cheap and it's effective.

one imagines that that is a very hard combination to give up. So we're kind of stuck now for at least the time being until the next big thing comes along. We're stuck in this paradigm. We are, unless people finally get out of these feeds. Yeah, I wrote this article. The article itself seemed to go viral. You know, I didn't use clipping myself, but the article did pretty well. And so I, although I did talk to a lot of clippers who do this, and I am a little suspicious that they may have given me an artificial boost.

If so, I thank them. But one of the guys in my story does say, it's like pretty soon this has gotten so bad, people are going to stop trusting what they see in their social media feeds. And at that point, it may no longer work. But I don't think we're quite there yet because people are still buying a lot of this stuff. Not trusting what you see in your social feeds, by the way, is probably a good way to live.

I'm just saying. Great way to live, yeah. Lane Brown. He's at New York Magazine. Lane, thanks a lot. Thank you. Coming up. If venues that continue to ignore the groom,

do so at their peril. Grooms, a business opportunity. Who knew? First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's up 786 points. That is 1 in 610% today, 5,073. The NASDAQ up a relatively mere 66 points, 1 quarter of 1%, 26,920. S&P 500 expanded 39 points, a half percent, 75 and 93.

Blackstone, told you about that up top. soared seven and a half percent today. Partners Group traded on Swiss exchanges increased three and seven-tenths of one percent. Blue Owl formed in late 2020 ascended five and two-tenths of one percent. Today, by the way, National Cheese Day, according to the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. produces a whopping 29 percent of the global cheese supply. Second only to the European Union. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Small businesses, Kelly Wells told us yesterday, are proving to be a bright spot. in an otherwise dreary labor market.

That's what the hard data says, more of which, by the way, we're going to get tomorrow morning with the May jobs report. While we wait, though, we thought we'd check in with one of our regulars to get some anecdotal data. Joy Schmidt is the owner of Moxie,

salon, and spa, and Yulee, Florida. So we recently hired a new stylist back in February. She came from New Jersey. She's such a sweetheart. She's got so much talent. And then we recently hired our new assistant two weeks ago. So in the last couple months, we've hired two. Unfortunately,

we did lose one, but that's okay. I'm always looking to hire new stylists because we're constantly getting new clients. I kind of ran some reports from January until now. We did 1,802 clients during that time. A lot of our clients are booking while I'm sleeping. It's wonderful. I wake up in the morning and I see three, four new bookings and it's just awesome. We've actually built another spa room in our salon. That is our first expansion that we've done. So now both of our aestheticians have their own space to work. They're not having to share one room.

We have definitely seen an increase in the supplies that we use in cost. It's the little things like foils that we use for highlights. I mean, I used to pay $12, $14 a box. They're up to $18. to $25 a box now. In order for us to cover the rising costs of everything that's coming in, we have to up the game with our price list a little bit. So that is something that we're actually working on and putting together now. And I would say probably by end of July, beginning of August, our prices will be raised a little bit, probably about $10 per service.

I no longer work Saturdays. I have enough staff that I do not have to work Saturdays anymore, which is amazing. My husband and I just took a two-week RV road trip. We did over 4,000 miles. One thing about myself is I do love to work. I love to be behind the chair. I love to be there for my staff. But it's so important for me to step away and take that time to just kind of rebalance myself. So I'm thankful that the staff that I have allows me to do that. Joy Schmidt, Moxie, salon, and spa finally getting some time off in Yulee, Florida. You know that old wedding rhyme, right? Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. It is time, perhaps, to add a new line about something for the groom, because a growing number of men want a say in their

big day, which has in turn led to a whole new micro industry of wedding services catering solely to those grooms. Ellen Gamerman wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Ellen, welcome to the program. Good to have you on. Thank you for having me. Well, so, you know, men have been part of the bridal party for a very long time now. And just like lately, the wedding industry is saying, oh, look, there are many here, too. Yeah, I know. It's funny. Like, the rule was always whatever you do, you cannot upstage the bride. But grooms are really challenging that a little bit more lately. And there's so many vendors who just are all too happy to cater to them. So it really is kind of reflecting both sides of the couple a little more than these ceremonies used to.

Sure, sure. They're doing it in a whole lot of ways. There's a thing called a groom's concierge. What is that? That is an assistant to the groom. He is only to, you know, be in charge of the groom. Whatever the groom needs, if the groom, you know, forgot his shoes or needs water or wants to have a prayer circle, you know, even if the groom gets a little irritated with the wedding planner and needs somebody to run interference, that's what the assistant does.

There was a great anecdote in this piece where this groom came in with a, I don't even know how long it was, like a multi-page spreadsheet. I want to say like 52 or 56 pages, whatever. And the venue they went to visit didn't match up. And so he said, no, you're out. Yeah, it's venues that continue to ignore the groom do so at their peril. If you offer the bride this palatial suite and then you tell the groom to get ready in a closet, a lot of men just aren't really standing for that because they want to have. their own glam squad. They might have an outfit change. They have like a whole plan for getting ready with me photos and maybe even their own photographer. So they need their space too. I'm sorry to laugh,

but but a groom glam squad, I, you know, I'm okay, I guess, right? I guess you didn't have one. No, no, I didn't. And if my wife hears this, I'm a dead man. But, but, you know, it's very interesting to me that this is happening because for, for a long time, the answer for men was just, keep your head down and show up, you know? Right, right. And now we have, I mean, it's certainly fueled by social media. Yeah. Because some of these videos are amazing of these grooms, you know, choreographed entrances.

I saw one groom who entered the wedding like Cleopatra with all the groomsmen holding him up on a chair like a throne. There are all kinds of ways that this is just spreading like wildfire. And the women who are married. these grooms, they're obviously attracted to that and this is good with them. That's what they want. Well, some of them, I think, are a little surprised because they thought their groom was going to just show up and say, you know, he liked the color blue and that was going to be the end of his input. But, yeah, I mean, I think one interesting thing about it is that it sets the tone for the marriage.

It's not just a unilateral decision by the bride and her mother, but they're testing out how they're going to resolve differences in conflicts. And it's like a little mini-marriage in planning the wedding. We should point out here that these men, by and large, at least the ones described in your piece, are men of means. And these are high-class problems, shall we say? Yeah, definitely.

it's you're not going to spend $2,000 on your own assistant unless you have $2,000 to burn. So it's true. This is really a privilege. Ellen, Gamerman at the Wall Street Journal. Ellen, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. This final note on the way out today in which I remind you that two of the big artificial intelligence firms,

OpenAI and Anthropic, are looking at near trillion-dollar valuations as they get set to go public. And about which, I'm sure there is nothing at all alarming in a blog. blog post today, Anthropics said maybe a global pause in leading-edge AI research and development would be a good idea because what's called recursive self-improvement is going to be here sooner than we are ready for. What you ask is recursive self-improvement? Well, the blog post title kind of tells you. It says when AI builds itself. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbyn, Ria Holland Horse, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, Michaela Saneer. and Sophia Torenzo. Will Story is the

supervising senior producer, and I'm Kai. Rizdaal, we will. See you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. It's almost time for the World Cup. And as we're cheering on our favorite teams and hopefully watching them win, I know at least some of us are wondering, why do athletes get paid so much money?

This week on Million Bazillion, Bridget and I learn how scouting works, how teams decide what to pay their star athletes, and why those are important factors in making games fun to watch. Leagues or team owners have an interest in making sure that all the teams have somewhat equal talent because it makes it way more fun when you don't know in advance which team will win. We call that uncertainty of outcome and the way that players are paid is one way

that league rules can improve competitive balance. Listen to Million Bazillion on your favorite podcast app.