Boeing bounces back

Also, of course, the rest of the day is business news from American public media. This is Marketplace.

“In Los Angeles, on Kyri Resdolid is Wednesday, today 22 April, it is always heavy along.”

Everybody, we begin today, deep inside corporate America, a company that spans manufacturing, technology, exports, and supply chains, which hasn't already recently been having a pretty tough goal of things. We have talked many a time on this program about Boeing's very long list of problems. There was a strike, fatal crashes, and in-swing groundings, the production backlog. Well, as of today, the company is hoping that's all in the rear view mirror.

Boeing reported profits this morning, well ahead of expectations, revenue up 14% from last

year, and this is the biggie. It's outperforming its biggest competitor Airbus for the first

time since 2019. Marketplace is Kelly Wells gets us going. For years now, Scott Hamilton kept thinking Boeing had finally stopped its downward spiral. "When they stepped on their own foot again, and did something else." He's an aviation industry consultant with Lee Ham Company. He says Boeing's downfall started

“with a merger in the '90s, and its quality has suffered ever since. Hamilton says it'll”

take years to fully fix, but now? Boeing is finally finally, finally, on an upward trajectory." There are two recent developments that have helped shape that trajectory, says Megna Maharishi, airline reporter at the travel site, Scyft. First, she says President Trump has been a big Boeing salesman.

"A lot of the blockbuster orders that we've seen in the news that have come out, those are things that have been maybe announced at summits, and events where Trump was at."

And second, it's been two years since that fateful panel broke off a Boeing plane mid-flight.

"They've also been just like able to ramp up production of the 737 Macs after the FAA had put um, you know, limits on the production of that aircraft, which is their best selling aircraft. So now 737 Macs production has ramped back up, and the FAA says certifications for two new Boeing models are on track to happen later this year. But just as Boeing overcomes those problems, it's facing a new set of headwinds from the war in the Middle

East, Ryan Ewing, founder of the industry site airline geeks, says those aren't showing up in the first quarter numbers. "The airlines usually feel at first, and then manufacturers will feel at second." The airlines are feeling the spiking fuel prices, and canceled flights as ticket prices soar.

“"I think you're going to start seeing airlines pull back a little bit on what they're”

willing to, you know, go out and/or, I think the other part of that is, you know, you might see your lines deferred deliveries for airplanes." The war started two-thirds of the way through Boeing's first quarter, so it's effects likely won't show up until next quarter. I'm Kaylee Wells from Marketplace.

"Market Action Day" kind of a mixed bag, TBH equities, hit yet more record highs, oil traders though. Not at all saying when about the state of affairs, we will have the details when we do the numbers. "Chipping is arguably the global economic story right now, what with the state of our moves still being closed and all, but set aside the headlines for a second, about oil

and fertilizer and aluminum, and what not being trapped in the Persian Gulf, and think bigger.

About what's happening in the rest of global shipping, critical as eight is to global supply

chains. Weston Labar is our go-to on matters of maritime supply, he's a cheap strategy officer at waterfront logistics, that's a short-distance transport and yard storage company down at the Port of Los Angeles. Mr. Labar, welcome back to the program."

Great to talk to you, Kaylee. So last time we had John and Ish of last year, 2025 had proved to be a little bit tricky for you. I wonder how the first four months of 2026 were treating you. Yeah, full disclosure, 2026 has been a little rough to start for most people in this industry,

but I don't think that comes as shocking news to anybody. We talked about how erratic last year was with the high highs, with surges related to tariffs in the low lows, with the volume walls that follow it. We knew traditionally the first part of the year is slow because of lunar new year, and the impacts that that has this year, lunar new year in February.

We saw 136 blank sailings for the US West Coast, and what that really means is they don't

Think of it this way.

“If you're taking a flight and they've got four flights from Los Angeles to New York, and”

they only have enough people to fill two flights, they cancel two of those flights, and they re-jigger the structure of who's sitting where to fit all of those passengers on two flights instead of four. So imagine 136 sailings that were supposed to happen with containers that did not happen. For a lay person, what do we read into that?

Well first and foremost, that obviously means there's less cargo coming through our ports,

and that means there's less jobs and opportunities for the workers in this surrounding area. And then on top of it, we had other impacts, like the closing of the straight of our moves due to the Iran conflict. So ships that would normally go through the straight of her moves, so maybe the US East Coast or Gulf Coast were being redirected to Transshipment ports in Asia to get that cargo

to the US West Coast, and with the blank sailings, there were no ships to bring that cargo to the US West Coast, and so that compounds the issue on top of it. The knowledge meant that you're mostly a short distance company, obviously, as you were just talking about, long-distance shipping is kind of an issue now, and ships, of course, use fuel, fuel is expensive, talking to me about that part of your industry right now,

and the rising cost of petroleum products. Yeah, well, on the shipping side of things, a lot of them have locked in bunker fuel contracts, which are coming up for many of them for re-negotiations, so I don't think you've seen 100% of the impact of fuel on the maritime shipping industry, so that the actual container ships.

However, we've obviously seen it here on the land side with diesel spiking over $8 a gallon

“here in Southern California, and really what that means is you have to re-evaluate how”

you're charging your customers, or maybe you need to author a surcharge temporarily until those fuel prices get back to normal, in which case you're putting your book of business with some customers at risk. Yeah, and nobody's loving those fuel charges, I'll tell you what, let me ask you to step back for a minute, and let's talk, well, not broad sweep, but short-term sweep of history.

Since 2020, the logistics industry has had a pandemic, it's had tariffs, and now it's had a war that we still haven't figured out exactly what's going to happen. I don't know. Was that been for you, I guess? Well, what sad is that our industry for so long was built on these predictable cycles,

early in the year slow, middle of the year through essentially the holiday, super busy. Labor has been created around that capacity has been created around that from like a real estate perspective and equipment perspective and a labor perspective, and you can't predict that anymore. But you have so many of these uncontrollable events that impact your day-to-day business

that there really isn't a new norm, there's just no normal.

“I was going to ask you to crystal ball the rest of the year, but who knows, right?”

That's what you just said. Well, I do think that most importers are anticipating another tariff shoot-a-drop sometime this summer after July, so many of them are saying if it's ready, ship it now. So we should see a very healthy Q2 if consumer spending stays high.

We should still see a strong second half of the year from a volume perspective, but if we

have a year that was up and down like last year, and we have the lower rates even still from last year corresponding with it, you're going to see a lot more bankruptcies. You're going to see a lot more companies either downsize or close their door, and that's going to be a sad situation. Yeah, that's freight rates, not interest rates just to be clear.

That's the bar at Waterfront Logistics, he's a Chief Strategy Officer. Mr. Lobart, thanks for your time, so I do appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Reasonable people can disagree about the utility of prediction markets, calcium and polymarket are the two biggies.

You can argue about the ethics and the legality of some of the big bets that have been made on those sites of late. What you can't really debate though is that they are growing in popularity and that they are looking for ways to get even bigger. The information reported yesterday that calcium is prepared to launch something called

perpetual futures markets, purps in the vernacular prediction markets that basically never

and tied to the price of a particular asset, not to be outdone. Polymarket is getting into purps as well as marketplaces making McCarty Kareno reports.

outside US markets.

“Traditional futures contracts have an end date, a buyer and a farmer make a deal today on”

the price for the next wheat crop, then it gets delivered at harvest. Though modern futures are often tied to an asset that's a bit less tangible like a stock price, they still have an expiration date. For petual futures, don't, says Darryl Duffy, a professor of finance at Stanford.

They never mature, there's no final date, you just keep paying based on price movements.

A few times a day, traders on either side have to settle up based on the current value of the asset. Duffy says they're currently used mainly as a way to bet on the ups and downs of crypto currencies. "It's speculators love it because they don't have to mature their contracts.

They just keep going." But purps raise a lot of regulation questions that haven't been answered yet, says Ben Schiffrin at the non-profit better markets. "They've a lot of leverage, which means investors can lose even more than they put in." In crypto exchanges, traders can leverage a position for up to 50 times what they put in

and keep rolling it over and over with just a small amount of collateral.

“"And I think it's unlikely that we can invest just in these, compared to if you just”

seem to be marketed or going to understand the risks." Last year, the global trading volume of perpetual futures on crypto exchanges was estimated at more than $80 trillion, but these trades haven't really been authorized in U.S. markets. This year, the Federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission signaled its opening the door

to purps. "The most significant benefit of unshoring perpetual futures is that it is regulated." "Gamble Harvey is a professor of finance at Duke." "This makes trading on these markets much more secure." "More secure than offshore markets, but there's still not a lot of clarity about how

the CFTC will regulate perpetual futures," just like there's not a lot of clarity about how they regulate prediction markets in general, I'm making McCarty Carino from Marketplace. Coming up, I've learned that a lot of Americans are addicted to storage. You, perhaps? First though, let's do the numbers.

"Thowendell" shows up 319 to date 2/3 to 1/449,468, but as deck picked up 322 points, that's one and the third percent, 24,582, the S&P 500 found 59 points in the couch cushions and 9/10%, 71,23 there, Boeing U.S. above 5.5% down the day, the company's main competitor, Jobs Airbus, dipped 2 and a third percent, the Brazilian company, and Breyer, for maybe his and Breyer.

I don't know. Anyway, known for its smaller regional jets, dropped 2 and 2/10 of 1% G-Evernova turned

in a robust revenue report for the last quarter, up 16% to almost $10 billion that's better

than expectations. What is G-Evernova, you ask? It's a spin-off. The O-G-G-E it makes gas turbines and other equipment needed for electrical grid modernization, much in high demand with the build out of AI, right, G-Evernova, up 13 and 7/10% on the

day, bonds down, yield on the 10/0, rose 4.30%, you're listening to marketplace.

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This is Marketplace, I'm Kai Rizdon. With no offense intended toward car sales professionals used or new, it's not like a trip

Yet there are states that require new car and trucks to be sold through independent dealers

“franchises in so many words of car makers.”

Enter though Tesla and a 13 year legal fight over its move to sell direct to consumers everywhere. Other auto startups, including Rivian and Lucid, are following suit earlier this year, they won the right to go DTC in Washington state they're looking for more Marketplace's Henry App has today's economic history actually is pretty interesting story.

This all started over a century ago when cars were a new thing and there were hundreds of car manufacturers in the U.S. and many different ways to buy them. Daniel Crane is a law professor at the University of Michigan. You could order one from the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog.

You could buy one from a gas station or traveling salesperson.

You could buy them from company on stores or you could buy them from local independent dealerships.

“But by the 1920s, the U.S. auto industry consolidated into the big three General Motors”

Ford and Chrysler. They were all based in Detroit but sold to the entire country. The problem with that American consumers weren't ready to buy a very expensive product from a distant company they didn't know. They needed a person that they trusted in their local community to sell the car to them.

So car manufacturers contracted with local dealers to sell their vehicles and car makers focused on making cars.

But that gave the big three a lot of power over the dealers since Katherine Judge, a

law professor at Columbia. And they could force smaller franchises to buy things they didn't want to buy and to accept terms that were really unfavorable to them. The dealers fought back, starting in the 1930s, they pushed states to pass laws to level

“the playing field with the car companies.”

Those included bands on car manufacturers selling direct to customers. The idea was to prevent car companies from undercutting local dealers. So for decades, consumers didn't have any other option, Judge says. If you wanted to buy car, you needed to go to a dealer and the dealer was your primary source of information about the different options that were available.

But then came the internet where customers could get their own information and then came this startup called Tesla with its CEO Elon Musk, again, Daniel Crane at the University of Michigan. He makes a business decision that Tesla will have to go direct, open its own stores, sell online, and have its own service centers as well, no independent dealers involved at all.

The dealerships hated this and fought with Tesla in court and in state legislatures, Tesla and other EV startups came out on top in many cases and won exemptions that allow them to sell direct. Crane calls this period the Tesla wars, he wrote a book about it, a decade in he says the legal landscape looks pretty different.

Their states are very closed and states are quite open and a whole variety of possibilities in between those things. In some states, Tesla, Rivian, and other startups can sell direct, but traditional carmakers still can't, which brings us to the latest chapter in this battle, over a brand called Scout Motors owned by Volkswagen.

It plans to sell its SUVs and trucks directly to consumers starting in 2027. Cody Faker is scout's vice president of commercial operations. We got overwhelming feedback that the consumer was tired of the existing model, felt abused in the existing model, and they were begging us for direct sales. Dealership groups have filed multiple lawsuits arguing that Volkswagen dealers should get

to sell the Scout brand. The National Automobile Dealers Association did not provide a comment by our deadline, but in the past, it is said it would challenge "all attempts to sell direct." Scout argues that its direct sales model will lower consumer prices. And Rathefska, at the carbine site, Car Edge, who worked in dealerships for four decades,

says dealerships can help cut prices too. When you have multiple dealers of the same brand in a market area, there will be competition and the customer can utilize that competition to hopefully get a better price. When you're buying direct from the manufacturer, that doesn't exist. In the best case scenario, he says dealers can add a level of service and connection to your

local community that a manufacturer can't. I'm Henry App, a market place.

facility right now?

I ask, because more Americans are using self-storage than ever before, and as a result,

in the way that these things go, the industry is building a whole lot more of it. Fred Bernstein wrote about the self-storage boom and his personal experiences with it in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Mr. Bernstein, welcome to the program, it's good to have you on. Thank you so much.

“Here's the thing I don't understand about this.”

American houses are getting bigger, bigger, bigger, and bigger, and yet we're renting as you point out in this piece far more self-storage based than we ever have. That's right, I mean, not only house is getting bigger, but household sizes getting smaller. So actually, we have much more room per person in our homes, but we buy a lot of stuff, people buy a lot of things that don't really need that they can't bear to part with.

You've got to theory on why this happens, right? Explain that to me. Why it happens, well, just people buy more things than they need, and they're emotionally attached to them. And once you spent a lot of money storing things, you really hate to admit that you're wasted

that money so you keep doing it. And the storage places are designed to make it hard for you to get out.

Their business really depends on people bringing stuff in and never taking it out.

This will surely earn me some hate mail from the self-storage industry, but they are not the most attractive buildings in these places, in towns and cities, so kind of, your towns and cities have kind of decided they don't want them around, or at least in residential areas, yeah. That's right, they don't want them on commercial strips evil, but they've to have street life. And these places are avoiding a life for the most part.

And more and more of them are controlled remotely by large corporations. They often don't even have people on duty. So they're not good for eating commercial areas active, and they're not beautiful at all. And the residential areas, they really need to be in industrial parks. But if you do all those don't want to put them there, they want to put them on central locations.

“Yeah, and of course, people who have self-storage spaces don't want to have to drive out to some industrial space, right?”

I suppose, you ever bothered me, I have space for 30 years, but I guess people will walk around central locations just like everything else. Well, we've come now to that point in this interview where I ask you to relate your personal experience with this, because you know where of you speak. Yeah, I bought a house more than 30 years ago.

The house did really work out. It was a weekend house, and there was some problems with it. And after a year or so I put it on the market. And when I sold it, I wanted to put everything in stores. I thought I might get another weekend house.

And I never bought another weekend house, but I kept the stuff.

And I never really had a good way of getting it out. It was an entire house full of furniture, and appliances, and there was no dumpster on premises.

“I think one of the things the owners of these facilities do is not provide any way of disposing”

your place. It's just seem like an impossible problem having all the stuff that they're not knowing what to do with it. You put this in print, so I'm not outing you at all. But over 30 years, you write that you spent $100,000 on this place. Something like that. I never added it up exactly, but I don't feel too bad. I used to joke with some people's races, alcohol, some gambling. This was my vice or really my addiction in a way,

which is storage. I've learned that a lot of Americans are addicted to storage. I've gotten reader mail from people who have six or eight or ten storage spaces, sometimes in different states, frequently hiding them from their spouses. They're embarrassed, but they can't stop. How did it come to pass that you want of getting rid of this thing? My husband insisted that we'd not take a vacation until he got rid of the stuff. This was costing a lot of money.

He put his foot down, and we spent three days there with our sons, and we went through it all. It was very eye-opening to be reminded of chapters from my earlier life that I had forgotten about completely. All that was in the storage space, not just furniture, but really evidence of so many things I've forgotten about in my personal life and in my professional life. It was absolutely fascinating going through the boxes. Not to add insult to injury, but you

did have to pay a guy to help a card in all the way. Oh, yeah, I had to pay a guy at $1,000 to a hard way of things we just need, because it was no the way to get it out of there. There were many items, and probably were worthless, so I went to have them and months later I saw him selling them on eBay for quite a lot of money. But that really added insult to injury really did. Fred Bernstein wrote in the journal the other day about self-store spaces. The spurred scene

thanks for your time, so I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Skye.

agentic artificial intelligence, AI that can mostly autonomously do things. I missed this in the

“news fire hose that we are living in, but apparently Google's CEO Sundar Bachai said yesterday,”

fully 75% of the company's new computer code is being written by agentic AI. A year and a half ago, it was 25%. Telling you what, the future is coming out as faster than we are ready for.

“Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Fokie, Montana, Johnson,”

Drew Jostette, Gary O'Keef, and Charlton Thorpe, Alex Simpson, is the manager of Media Production, and I'm Kai Rizdall, we will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.

“You may have learned recently just how far a barrel of oil has to travel before it makes it into your”

gas tank. And a lot has to happen to that oil before it even becomes gas that you can actually

use. So this week on Million Vizillion, Brian and I adventure on a road trip with stop,

in Texas and Dubai to learn all about oil and why the price of gas goes up and down. And we even meet Derek, an oil drill who knows a lot about the global economy. O'Keef is a group of oil producing countries that work together to decide how much oil they're going to drill and release for sale. They can drive the price down by releasing a lot of oil.

Listen to Million Vizillion on your favorite podcast app.