Marketplace - Wine country is heating up

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

As climate change drives hotter, drier summers, vineyard owners have to adapt. They’re turning to grape varietals more suited to warmer weather. Today, we take a trip to an Oregon vineyard and learn about its preparations for the new season. Also in this episode: Check-ins on the copper market and the barge industry. Plus, why investors are pulling out of private credit, and why labor productivity revisions aren’t too shocking. And finally, FedEx is giving same-day delivery another shot.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.

On the program today, a vote for making finance boring again. We'll do some commodities and then wine. From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizzdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, the 24th day of March. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

We're going to begin today not with the war, not with equities, not with oil or supply chains, but with a slice of the financial markets that is beginning to become just a little bit unglued. Ever since the financial crisis is going on 20 years ago now, if you can believe that. Investors have been pouring money into what's known as private credit, nearly $2 trillion worth, money that gets loaned out to businesses that were unlikely, shall we say, to be able to get loans from actual banks. Those investors, though, have been getting jittery, worried by some high-profile the faults and the future prospects of

you know, getting their money back. So a lot of them have started pulling money out of private credit. Bank run is a little bit strong here, but not by much. Marketplace's Henry App gets us going. Private credit has gotten as big as it has because of the financial crisis. Banks had lost a lot of money on loans and Washington had imposed new lending regulations, says Kent Belasco at Marquette University. That caused banks to become, you know, much more real. risk averse. And so therefore, it became a little harder to get credit. Especially for mid-sized companies. At the same time, investors were looking to put their money into funds that got a decent yield, says Amir Sufi, a professor of finance at Chicago Booth.

Private credit gave them that. From about 2010 to about 2024, the returns on private credit were truly impressive. Eight to 10 percent, Sufi says, and the borrowers didn't default much. But the good vibes have changed lately. Private credit firms made a ton of loans around 2021 and 22, Sufi says, when interest rates were low. They're higher now, and a lot of those five-year-old loans are coming due soon. And when debt comes due and the interest rate required to roll over the debt is much higher, than the borrowers are much more likely to default on the payment. Private credit firms have also done a ton of lending to software companies,

and investors are worried that AI is coming for them. But it's hard to know exactly what's going on at private credit firms, says Lenore Palladino at UMass Amherst because they don't have to follow the same rules as traditional banks. They're making a lot of loans, but without even to disclose what is happening with the loans. They don't necessarily have any reserves in case the loans go south in case they're not paid back. And they aren't required to disclose or be supervised by federal regulators. All of this uncertainty in private credit. at a very uncertain time in the economy has investors trying to get their money out. We always have moments where all the sudden, if there's fear, then everyone will try to get out and,

you know, be safe with their assets, be safe with their money. The thing is, a lot of private credit funds can limit how much investors can withdraw at any one time. And right now, a lot of them are throwing up those gates. I'm Henry App for Marketplace. Wall Street on this Tuesday, the war wasn't front and center in markets, nor though was it far from top of mind. We will have the details when we do the numbers. The program today, it seems, is loosely organized around the theme of things to keep an eye on. Henry did private credit for us just a second ago.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics brings us our next item. It's update on worker productivity during the fourth quarter of last year. So Paul Khruman has this quote where he says, productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything. It's really the primary way by which we improve living standards over time. That's Erica McIntyre, now a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Research. And until she was fired by President Trump after he lied and said she'd manipulated the jobs numbers, she was the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Fourth quarter productivity was revised down. Productivity growth, to be clear. It was revised down by a lot from 2.8% to 1.8%. But the trend is still pretty good.

One important thing to think about is that even after these revisions, the U.S. has been on a very good productivity run with a growth of 2%, 3%, and 2.2% over the last three years, which puts us on page. with some of the strongest decades in American post-war history in terms of GDP growth. That was Seth Benzel and assistant professor of business and economics at Chapman University. And this was entirely driven by downward revisions to output, so not completely unexpected. Erica McIntyre for one more time. And hours remained unchanged. And this revision did also push unit labor costs higher. That means that businesses are paying more per unit of output. And that's important because unit labor costs is a potential inflationary measure that the Fed does watch very closely.

Ah, yes, the Fed. The thing that economists and people who try to make policy about the economy really want is productivity growth. Productivity is amazing because you can use it on anything. So? The Fed is in a very difficult spot right now with a softening labor market and both tariffs, and oil price shocks pushing up on inflation. So output being solid is good news for the economy, and that tends to also be an input into the Fed's decision.

Your obligatory reminder here that this is productivity growth for Q4 last year. The interesting update is going to be what we're going to see for this quarter, you know, given the war and all. One of the economic through lines of the war in the Middle East has been commodities and the spiking prices thereof. We have covered, in turn, the rising costs of oil and fertilizer and helium. But there is an exception that proves the rule always, and copper is ours today. Copper's been sliding since the start of the year, hitting a low for the year over the weekend. Daniel Ackerman checked in on the market for the world's electrical conductor of choice.

Atomic number 29 has a nickname in financial. financial circles. Copper is traditionally known as Dr. Copper. Natalie Scott Gray, senior metals analyst at Stonex, says that's because the metal is used in so many economic activities from transport to construction to electricity. It's a good barometer, basically, for macroeconomic health. High copper prices tend to reflect optimism about future economic growth. And heading into this year, Dr. Copper's prognosis was pretty good, says Morgan Bazillion, a professor of public policy. at the Colorado School of Mines. The copper market has done

terrifically, right? It's gone up and up and up, and it reached almost record highs as recently as late January of 2026. But prices have fallen in the past few weeks, thanks in large part to the war in Iran, says Chris Berry, president of House Mountain Partners. Investors are worried about demand destruction due to an energy shock.

The longer the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, the greater the likelihood of a recession and slower economic activity. Plus, Barry says new concerns over inflation mean the Federal Reserve and other central banks are less likely to cut interest rates this year. And of course, higher interest rates lead to slower growth, which is another reason why I think you see a lid

on the price of copper currently. Even though the market has been down, it's unlikely to collapse anytime soon, says Albert McKenzie, a copper analyst with benchmark mineral intelligence. He says in the long term, If you look at most companies' forecasts, including our own, you see that demand growth is growing significantly. He says that's because global population is increasing and becoming wealthier.

And the world is more electrified than it's ever been. And with the war roiling the oil market, that trend is likely to continue. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. A lot of the conversation around shipping of late, by which I mean really the past 25 days, has been focused outside our borders, which does make some degree of sense. But maritime transport matters domestically, too. So we have called Austin Golding. He's the president and CEO of Golding Barslines in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Austin, good to talk to you again? Great to talk to you, Kyle. The first question first, as you know by now, how's business? Well, business has been steady over the last year. Lately around this spike in oil price. We've seen a lot of demand for barging here, really come on in the last couple weeks, but over the last year, it's been pretty steady. Yeah, same more about the last couple of weeks and demand for, you know, the bulk transport that you guys do. You know, whether the price of

oil is going up or down, volatility brings barges into the equation. We can show up in a lot of different places and carry product to a lot of very strategic places that there might not be pipeline or rail access, definitely not enough capacity on the highways to serve. So barges come in to try to play as big a role as they can. Does it affect, does the price volatility, the fact that you know, oil is up and gases up and all of that. Does that affect how much money you're making? No, it doesn't. I don't get to trade on the value of the product in the bar,

just the value of my time and how bad they need me. Gotcha, fair enough. I wanted to ask you about this waiver of the Jones Act that the president signed the other day. Jones Act, of course, says transportation between two U.S. ports has to be by American crude and American-made vessels. Since you're the guy in shipping that I know, what do you make of that? Well, I'm highly, highly skeptical that the Jones Act waiver is going to have much of an impact at the pump or for the American consumer. If the Jones Act didn't exist, first people that would get hit would be the shipbuilders in America,

because all these vessels would be built internationally or a lot of them would. And then the mariner would be the next person that took a hit after their job was replaced for a cheaper option and offshore somewhere else. I think this is a situation where the impact of the waiver has been highly overstated. This waiver is 60 days. It's more structured, I think, than past waivers have been. What do you think it's going to mean sort of in the longer-ish term, the longer this war goes on? You know, I think there's a lot of discussion that needs to be had around our supply chain in this country. I agree completely that shipbuilding is way behind here. But there's other ways to help initiate more shipbuilding than just waiving the Jones Act. I think you'd see investment really start to coalesce around shipbuilding if there was more guaranteed for long-term investment. You know, the hidden devil in these details is we don't really have enough mariners now.

So if we mass-produce a lot of ships in short order for a demand that really might not be there and a mariner that might not be there, we can cause another problem. So I'm all for increasing shipbuilding. I'm all for bolstering our ability to do that. I just really question if the Jones Act is the right first step towards that goal. A related but slightly different question. This is now geopolitics reaching down in, like at the very highest level, like at the levels of war, right? Reaching down into a guy running a family business in Vicksburg, Mississippi. How often does that happen to you?

Well, you know, being at the core of the energy supply chain for a lot of these major oil companies, geopolitics is one of our probably our top five factors when it comes to evaluating our long-term business. We react to the oil markets into demand, just like you and I seem to always talk whenever we have a flood or a drought, you know. We're at the center of a very large supply chain, and we're at the very top of the supply chain. After we touch it, it moves into smaller modes, smaller vessels, smaller communities. So geopolitics, when it comes towards small percentage changes in supply or large changes in our supply chain, it impacts us just because of where we are in that stratification of supply. Yeah, the longer this goes on, I imagine, the bigger impact it has on you, right? Oh, absolutely.

And I think uncertainty is not great for us. I like to have certainty, consistency, spikes, valleys. They're much harder to manage through than a consistent, rateable business. Yeah, you're not the first person to tell me that. Austin, Golding, at Golding Barselines down in Vicksburg. Austin, thanks a lot. Hey, thank you, Kyle. Coming up.

They'll essentially scorch from the sunburn, and they'll turn into a raisin. Well, that's not good. But first, sure, why not? Let's do the numbers. Now industrial is off 84 points today, just under 2 tenths of 1%, 46,124 for the blue chips. The NASDAQ sank 184 points, 8 tenths percent, 21,761. The SB 500, down 24 points. Thanks for asking.

four-tenths percent, 65 and 56. Dan Ackman was talking about copper. How about some copper miners and processors? BHP group, which operates several mines in South America, shined up eight-tenths percent. BHP also owns an Arizona mine with Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto up one and a tenth percent today. Freeport MacMaran, which produces gold in addition to copper, increased two and eight-tenths of one percent. We could have done gold today, too, and commodities that have fallen in price down quite a chunk. Packaged meats and pork producer Smithfield report Smithfield, rather, reported earnings today that beat expectations. Fourth quarter net income increased to 83 cents a share. Analysts had expected 68 cents a share.

The company's CEO cited pork's prominent standing in Latin and Asian cuisines popular with consumers. Also, Smithfield brought home the bacon to the tune of four and a quarter percent. Bond prices down. Yield on the 10-year T-notes. It rose 4.38%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. We, the American consuming public, have some expectations, among which increasingly is being

able to get whatever we want on our doorsteps as soon as we want. Amazon and Walmart and Target are on board offering ever-speedier delivery. And now FedEx is trying to get a slice of that action. FedEx, same-day local is its new offering, companies to consumers only so far. That's B to C in the lingo. Marketplace's Carla Javier unpacks our expectations for getting things sooner and sooner and how that whole thing works, too. FedEx used to offer same-day delivery services, says Bruce Chan, a senior equity analyst at Stiefel. The company made a strategic decision to pivot away from broader-based same-day option for its customers that it primarily used its own capacity to service and address.

Steeful has an unrelated investment baking relationship with FedEx. Chan says FedEx largely exited the same-day market back in 2023, except for select items like temperature-controlled pharmaceuticals. Now the company is offering local same-day service again, this time by partnering with another company, One Rail. Chan says this allows FedEx to reduce risks. They are not using their own trucks and employees. Nowadays, customers might decide to go with another company

if they find out delivery might take a few days. says Prakash Mir Chandani at the University of Pittsburgh. Because of what Amazon has been doing, what Walmart and Target have been offering, that those expectations have gone up. Those are retailers Arun Sundaram at CFRA Research follows. He says to deliver for their customers, so to speak, they outsource their last mile services to third parties too. They're able to increase delivery speeds to more cities.

They're able to reduce costs. To pay for it all, Sundaram says those retailers, offering fast delivery can lean on subscription fees and advertising revenue. As for the new FedEx service, spokesperson Jason Brenner says customers will see it as an option when checking out an order with a participating retailer. You can get it delivered in three to five days. You can get it delivered priority. Or you can get it delivered via FedEx today between 4 and 6 p.m. As for how much it'll cost, Brenner says, we're not in the business of telling our customers, the retailers, what to charge their customers for shipping, but we will have a very competitive rate card.

And retailers, he says, will use that to decide what to charge for same-day delivery. I'm Carla Javier for Marketplace. California wines get the lion's share of the attention looking at you, Napa and Sonoma counties. But one ignores other states at one's viticultural peril, Washington State, New York, and for us today, Oregon. Wine is worth $8.5 billion to Oregon's economy. data courtesy of the Oregon Wine Board, but grapes are a fickle fruit,

and climate change is doing damage to the historically cool climate in Oregon's key growing areas. Marketplace is Mitchell Hartman took a trip out to wine country to find out how wineries are trying to stay profitable in the face of rising temperatures. I start in one of the Willamette Valley's most favored wine growing regions, the Iola Amity Hills AVA, or American Viticultural Area, about an hour south of Portland. I pull up to Bjornson Vineyard on a cool, rainy morning, and vineyard owner Mark Bjornson insists we start in the tasting room to get a little warmth into our blood. We'll pour you some Pinot Noir.

Pinot Noir is the flagship grape of the Willamette Valley. Now you'll taste why. That's so good. Next, we head out to the vineyard. 107 acres of trellised vines marching across rolling hills that mostly face south and west for the warm summer sun. We grow 14 different varieties of grapes. A lot of those grapes would have been just about unthinkable 20 years ago,

like Cabernet-Franc, a Shennan Blanc, but we're getting them ripe now because things are getting warmer. Things are getting a lot warmer. In the last five years, we've had three years of climate scares. David Pot at Sunbreak Wines, produces pino, chardonnay, sparkling cider, and vermouth with grapes from Bjornson's vines. 2020, we saw the wildfires in the Cascades that brought smoke into the valley. And I personally made some red wine that year.

It didn't turn out very well. Had kind of an ashy aftertaste. Most winemakers had to throw theirs out. Another growing threat, extreme heat events, says Greg Jones, owner of Abicella Winery in southern in Oregon's Umpqua Valley, who started his career as a climatologist. The heat dome in 2021, 118 degrees in my vineyard, 126 up in British Columbia. Under that strain, the grapes? They'll essentially scorch from the sunburn, and they'll turn into a raisin.

At Oregon State University's Climate Change Research Institute, Professor Erica Fleischman has been tracking the growing environmental disruptions. Many of the extremes are not something that the agricultural industry in this region has experienced over the past hundred years or so. So we are getting longer heat waves, hotter heat waves, more frequent heat waves. But there's a big caveat here. Up until now, warmer average temperatures in summer and fall have mostly helped grape growers. In some cases, climate change may benefit the wine industry. Historically, temperature here was a little bit too cool.

And so up to a point, it's been beneficial because it is a little bit more reliably warm. Though that might not continue. Climatologists predict the region will keep getting hotter with more extreme events that can seriously damage the grapes. Mark Bjornson remains optimistic they'll still be a viable wine industry making Pinot Noirs in 20 or 30 years. He says his investment is for the long haul. So, mitigating, regenerative farming. keeping a permanent cover crop, building the carbon in the soil. In southern Oregon, where conditions are already as hot as parts of California and getting hotter,

Greg Jones at Abicella Winery is diversifying. We're growing Triga Nationale, Tenta Cow, Tintamorella. Some of these Portuguese varieties perform exceptional in the hottest years where we are. But there are big challenges to this strategy, too. It's a long-lived crop. You plant a new vine. today, you're wanting at least 50, 60, 70 years from it. The challenge is how variable the climate is today. How do you plan for something like that? Right now, growers are getting ready for a more

immediate threat. It's been a super warm winter. Mountain snowpack is near historic lows. So water shortages and wildfires may be in the cards again this year. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, news from the betting markets, Kalshi and Polly Market by name. As Congress starts murmuring about how and whether to regulate them, the two are trying to get ahead of things. Kalshi says it's going to ban political candidates from trading on their own campaigns, and it is not going to let anyone involved in college or professional sports trade on contracts related to the sports they play or are employed by. Polymarket is going to do basically the same thing. Oh, and in other news, they weren't already doing this?

Jordan Manji, Zaniel Maharaj, Janet Wynne, Oghman, and Virginia K. Smith are the digital team. I'm Kai Rizdal. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. 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 means, 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.