A cartel, if you can keep it
from coronavirus to oil to Kansas
Hello from Planet Money. On today’s show, my colleague Jacob and I follow oil’s plunge from the viral outbreak in China, to a secret meeting in Vienna, to one guy who runs a little mom-and-pop oil business in Kansas. We talk about how most businesses would LOVE to be in a cartel — you just carve up the market and let the profits roll in. A joy! But the events of the past week indicate that maybe a cartel is more difficult to maintain than it would seem.
Also, last week our colleagues did an episode on the difficult supply/demand dynamics in the emergency-vaccine market. It involves some very delightful, hard-working, SECRET LOCATION government chickens, which my imagination failed to predict.
OK but if you are looking for things that are less on topic, here are some other recent episodes I worked on: on raw milk, which sits awkwardly on the line between personal choice and government regulation; on Michael Milken’s pardon; and, for our Valentine’s episode, I got to send a Valentine to the the best guide for living I’ve encountered in finance, the barbell strategy 💖.
If you are ISO further content for your social isolation (i feel u), I can happily recommend all episodes of our fantastic sister podcast The Indicator, and also all of Planet Money. Other recent favorites include: reparations in NZ! Land rights in Barbuda! Optimizing restaurant tables for maximum customer spend! And: is the govt holding some of your money that you don’t even know about? Otherwise I am the same as you, reading all the reports and watching the charts and refreshing my Stress TV, twitter.
I hope you are staying safe and washing your hands compulsively!
<3,
MC