Oil Prices Soar Past $100 & Workers Are Flocking to ‘AI Man Camps’

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0:37Toby Scammell:Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the energy crisis just got real. Oil prices shot through$100 a barrel.

0:47Neal Freyman:Then the economy is shedding jobs left and right. It's Thursday, March 9th. Let's grind.

0:58Toby Scammell:Good morning and welcome back to a week that's going to feel like spring is finally here. Thanks to daylight saving time. Sure, we lost an hour of sleep, but sunset tonight in New York is nearly 7 p.m. But I want to start on the opposite coast. The Los Angeles Marathon was held yesterday and an announcement before the race was ruffling some feathers. due to expected high temperatures. Organizers said that runners could stop at mile 18 and still collect a finisher's medal. There is no shame in making a smart decision for your body, the marathon's website read, but that didn't stop many people from shaming the decision.

1:31Toby Scammell:Toby, as a marathoner yourself, is this snowflake culture gone wild or a reasonable health measure?

1:36Neal Freyman:Thank you for sliding in a marathoner there. I appreciate that. Obviously, I was very against this when I first heard it, but I was poking through the marathon training subreddit and got some additional context beyond the weather that made me more sympathetic. One, LA is unique in that there are 3 ,000 middle school and high schoolers that run through a program called Students Run LA. And as some pointed out, kids are very metal motivated. So this might've been done to take some of the pressure off of them. And then two, LA has a very weird course. The 18 mile mark isn't arbitrary. You actually pass the finish line at mile 18 and then have to double back, which would just be horrible for my mental state at that point.

2:16Neal Freyman:So logistically, 18 miles makes sense if you wanted to provide an off-ramp. Understanding all of that, I definitely wouldn't have accepted a medal, though, because it would haunt me to look at it knowing I didn't actually complete the race. We do just have to touch on the winner of the race, though, because it was electric. American Nathan Martin beat Kenya's Michael Kamau by 0.01 seconds, which was the closest finish in LA Marathon history. I'm sure the 18-mile finish line was just as close as well.

2:45Toby Scammell:And now a word from our sponsor, TaxAct. Toby, you're a small business owner.

2:49Neal Freyman:I am not. Oh, wait, you're totally right. I am. I forgot about my pickleball shoe company for a second.

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3:22Toby Scammell:Just head to taxact.com slash business dash returns to get started. That's taxact.com slash business dash returns. The most severe global energy crisis since the 1970s has arrived. Oil prices spiked to more than$100 a barrel this morning, their highest level since 2022 as the war in Iran halts shipments from the Gulf, presenting an imminent threat to the global economy. Crude prices skyrocketed 15 % overnight, extending their historic rise last week when they jumped 35 % for their biggest weekly gain on records dating back to 1983. Investors are responding to troubling developments over the weekend.

3:58Toby Scammell:Major producers Kuwait, the UAE, and Iraq said they are cutting oil production because their storage tanks are full and they can't ship any fuel through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical rot away, which is now effectively sealed off. Qatar's energy minister warned that oil prices could spike to $150 if the status quo continued, adding that the conflict in the Middle East could, quote, bring down the economies of the world. It's already hitting the U.S. economy, where gas prices have soared in response to the oil supply shock. The last seven days brought one of the top 10 largest weekly increases ever in U.S.

4:29Toby Scammell:gas prices, rising 41 cents a gallon. Before the war started, the national average was$2.80 a gallon. Now it's over$3.40 and well on its way to climbing above$4. President Trump has downplayed the price surge, writing that a gain in, quote, short-term oil prices was a small price to pay for taking out Iran's nuclear capabilities and suggested they'll come back down soon. Wall Street has a less optimistic view. The Dow just posted its worst week in almost a year, while the S &P 500 is now negative for 2026 after tumbling on Friday. Things don't look any better this morning. As of 6 a.m. Eastern, stock futures are way down.

5:04Toby Scammell:Toby, lots of alarm bells going off. An energy crisis can quickly metastasize into an economic crisis.

5:10Neal Freyman:Yeah, oil is now about 50 percent more expensive than it was before the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28th. It was whiplash over the last few 24 hours, honestly, when the oil markets opened on Sunday night, oil prices rocketed past$120 a barrel. And everyone's like, holy moly, we went to bed, we woke up this morning, and they actually started falling once again. That's because we got a piece of news early this morning that helped mellow things out. The Financial Times reported that the group of seven nations was planning a call on Monday to discuss the release of oil from their strategic reserves, which would help exacerbate some of the supply crunch that we are in right now.

5:52Neal Freyman:And if you look even further down the line, September oil futures are still trading around$70 a barrel, which shows that traders are still optimistic that things get resolved.

6:02Toby Scammell:I just want to put this in historical context. There isn't any. This is the largest oil shock we've seen in history. 20 % of global output has been taken off the market. It's 20 million barrels a day. That was flowing through the straight-up Hormuz in normal times. It's just not flowing anymore. 20 million barrels a day just dwarfs any other historical comparison. The second biggest oil shock was the Iranian revolution in 1978. That took off 5.5 million barrels per day. Some of these quotes from analysts who cover the energy sector are pretty mind-boggling. Mizuho's head of FICC strategy, Jordan Rochester, said, This may be a war, but it's also perhaps the biggest energy supply logistics crisis we've ever seen in modern history.

6:45Toby Scammell:And then JPMorgan Chase analyst Natasha Koneva said, in the whole written history of the straight, it has never been closed ever to me. It was not just the worst case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario. So you have some energy analysts saying we're going up to$150 a barrel. Some saying we see this being resolved, not in the short term, but in the median term. Still, oil prices remain elevated at over$100 a barrel this morning.

7:10Neal Freyman:The world is more resilient this time around, even dating back to the 1970s, because the crude market is just more flexible. There's less long-term contracts. Traders can push cargo to places that they need, add up greater flexibility than in time's path. China also has a big stockpile of oil these days, enough to cover 200 days of imports. The U.S. obviously has turned from a net importer to a net exporter when it comes to oil. Saudi Arabia has different ways to get oil out of the country, not just through the Strait of Hormuz. They have a pipeline that reaches its Western codes. Obviously, all of these measures are half measures.

7:50Neal Freyman:It's not the same as opening the strait itself. And it does show that which parts of the world are very exposed to a supply shock like this, which is Asia. Myanmar has launched a rationing system for cars. Thailand has suspended some of its fuel exports. And then the Philippines are actually having people turn off computers at lunch and set their air conditioning no lower than 75 degrees Fahrenheit in order to ration their energy.

8:14Toby Scammell:Huge global ramifications. Now, I said earlier that an energy crisis can quickly become a broader economic crisis. How can that happen? Well, I want you to look at one thing, diesel. So diesel prices are skyrocketing far more than crude prices. They just recorded their largest single price increase ever recorded, which was 22 cents last Friday. And the reason that diesel can impact everything in the economy is that everything that you buy essentially gets to the store or gets to your house on diesel trucks, trucks that run on diesel. So if diesel is skyrocketing, which it is, then that's essentially a tax on everything you can buy, even agriculture.

8:53Toby Scammell:Agriculture, diesel runs the agriculture industry because farmers use diesel to power tractors and combines. So essentially inflation can go way up as diesel prices go up because it just infiltrates everything in the economy, every consumer product and every industrial product.

9:07Neal Freyman:And then just to throw another wrench into the supply chain, jet fuel is also going up. You know, what do planes run on? Planes move stuff around the world. Jet fuel prices have risen 58 percent since the start of the war. So that's going to mess with things getting to your home, but also your summer vacation plans. Airlines are struggling right now, as are the cruise industry, but maybe not as impactful on the entire global economy as the other two industries that we mentioned. What is the big picture here? Like, what are we looking at in terms of this war with Iran? It is not ending any time as soon.

9:41Neal Freyman:Iran selected Mohatba Khamenei as the country's next supreme leader. That is the successor to his father, Ali Khamenei, although he has seen as potentially even more hardline than his father. So the Israel and the U.S. have said that they would not accept him as a new leader. So again, no immediate end in sight. Moving on, February's jobs report dropped on Friday, and it was enough to make a Pisces cry. The economy unexpectedly lost 92 ,000 jobs, one of the largest declines since the pandemic, while the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. It was a whiplash-inducing report, not only because it surprised economists who forecasted a 55 ,000 jobs gain, but also because it's a sharp reversal from January when the economy added 126 ,000 jobs.

10:31Neal Freyman:Now, there are signs that this was potentially an aberration. February had horrible weather, which factors into hiring choices for industries like hospitality and construction. There was also a physician strike that dented the only reliable employment engine in the labor market, the healthcare industry. But the losses were pretty broad-based with payrolls sinking in the government, manufacturing, and tech sectors too. Given that, it's looking more like January was the aberration, since the report also showed December was revised down from a gain of$48 ,000 to a loss of$17 ,000. Neil, a lot to unpack here, but one can't help but think about the Fed here, which is now dealing with accelerating price growth due to the war with Iran pushing up energy costs and what looks to be a very weak jobs market.

11:15Toby Scammell:Yeah, companies aren't hiring. There's too much uncertainty. They haven't been hiring for almost a year now. The U.S. has lost jobs since May 2025. The only industry that's gained any jobs and is keeping the job market somewhat afloat is health care, the 4.4 % unemployment rate while still pretty low is one of the highest rates since 2021. Young workers and workers of color are struggling the most in this job market. Blue collar workers getting absolutely smashed. Construction lost 11 ,000 jobs. Manufacturing lost 12 ,000 jobs. Leisure and hospitality that employs about one in 10 American workers lost 27 ,000 jobs.

11:52Toby Scammell:You go down the line, it was a, it was just a horrible report all around the board.

11:55Neal Freyman:Yeah. Omar Sharif, the president of but Inflation Insights LLC, which is a great name for a firm, said this is about a labor market that is so soft, it cannot withstand a strike of 31 ,000 physicians in healthcare because no one else is hiring. We have talked a lot about how technically we were getting jobs gains, but if you look deeper, only one industry was propping it up. And now that a single strike happened, it kind of tanked the entire labor market. It also maybe shows that companies are following through on some of the layoffs that they were planning a few years ago. or not even years ago, a few months ago, a lot of people have been saying artificial intelligence is going to eat into white-collar workforces.

12:33Neal Freyman:Maybe this is them falling through on those AI promises. So you are right, though, that you do not want young people to struggle to find a job because that's kind of the bedrock of the labor market right now. It seems like the labor market had found its footing a little bit with that blowout January report. Turns out it is like Bambi on ice still.

12:53Toby Scammell:And you mentioned the Fed. The job just got a lot harder. It was already hard to begin with in this particular economy. But you have the war in Iran, which leads to higher inflation. That supports rates staying where they are. But then you have a weakening, deteriorating labor market here that bolsters the case for a rate cut. The Fed is meeting later this month and will probably hold rates steady. But they're between a rock and a hard place. Every single maneuver that they can make will probably send something in the wrong direction elsewhere in the economy. We also talk about one job that I don't think anybody wants right now, which is a TSA officer.

13:28Toby Scammell:So I don't know if you saw this over the weekend, but there were insane lines at a couple airports, some of the busiest in the United States. Hobby Airport in Houston, insane lines. They told passengers to arrive as early as five hours before their flight. Security wait times were much longer than three hours. Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta and the New Orleans International Airport also said that passengers should arrive at least three hours early because TSA officers are not getting paid right now. Remember, we are still in a partial government shutdown. They just collected their paychecks. They just got 30 percent of their pay because DHS is not being funded.

14:03Toby Scammell:And then next weekend, they're going to miss their second paycheck. So some are calling out sick, sick, and because they're not getting paid and it's leading to absolute chaos this weekend at airports.

14:12Neal Freyman:I mean, you combine the TSA lines with the fact that jet fuel prices are rising and that gas prices are rising. You can't go by car or plane anywhere. I'm walking. I'm running.

14:23Toby Scammell:You're stopping off at mile 18.

14:25Neal Freyman:Yeah, at least 18 miles. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our winners of the weekend right after this. Neil, I'm ready to make an announcement.

14:34Toby Scammell:Toby, we all know it's okay that you're afraid of horses.

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