This is America's Trucking Network with Kevin Gordon.
Welcome themar Thanks for tuning in on this Wednesday morning. Well later on this afternoon, we're gonna find out what Lion Jerry Powell and the Federal Reserve are going to do as far as interest rates are concerned. Lion Jerry Powell and the gang to see what they're going to do. We've got some interesting information that proves my point. And I know I talk about interest rates a lot. I know that I harp on Lion Jerry Powell. I do that for a reason. In my opinion, I look out
over the landscape. I look out everybody talking about all of a sudden, the Democrats, the liberals, and the spoon Federi gurgitators in the mainstream media are suddenly concerned about affordability.
This is the same crowd that lied to us for a year and a half at the beginning of the Biden administration in twenty twenty one, when when inflation was down at one point four percent when Biden took office, one point four percent hit a high of nine point one percent a year and a half later in June.
Of twenty twenty two.
So only it took him a year and a half to go from one point four percent inflation up to nine point one. And we were told all during that time, this is just a this is transitory. This is this temporary. It's only going to last, you know, for a little while. Well, we saw gas prices go up a dollar twenty five between the beginning of the Biden administration until February of
twenty twenty two. Then at February twenty two, once Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices shot up to another dollar twenty five, so two dolls fifty cents increase in a gallon of gasoline, to the point in June of that year. In twenty twenty two, gas prices hit a high of across the board national average of five dollars and two cents.
And where was the talk about affordability?
I saw reports talking about, well, you're saying that gas prices are high because of the Russian invasion and because we're supporting Ukraine, and that's putting a crimp on the oil flow and everything. How long do you expect people to pay that higher amount? And the representative for the White House said, as long as it takes, because.
We are in this to win it.
We are all behind Ukraine, all right, So where was the push for the piece, where was the push for NATO? Where was the push to end this conflict? All during the Biden administration, just like the invasion on the southern border, they just turned a blind eye to it. And now all of a sudden they're lecturing us on affordability.
Yet we had all.
These supply chain issues, We had uh situations where uh, you know, we had certain things certainly that we're out of that were beyond control, bird flew and so on. But the response to that and how quickly the Biden
administration turned their attention to that was very slow. And yet they're lecturing us now on well with interest rates going up because the Federal Reserve raised interest rates up from basically nothing up to what five and a half almost six percent as far as that overnight rate was concerned. And so that started the spiral spiraling of increased cost on your credit cards, increased costs in your car loans,
truck loans, expansion mortgages, and so on. Mortgages back when Trump left office were right, we're under three three percent, down around two point eight seven, two point sixty seven something in that range and then shot up to almost seven percent during the Biden administration, who was concerned about the affordability. Then now all of a sudden, I start hearing about in January, Well, egg prices are still high. Well, birds are still dying, chickens are still being killed. You
want to have diseased eggs? Do you want to get sick there when you have less When you have less chickens, you're gonna have less eggs. Oh, what about beef prices? Well, with the green news steel and the constant braidmen of the cattlemen saying that, oh, there's too much land being occupied by raising cattle and we got to cut that out. We can't allow and cutting off water flows because you know, just too many grazing pastures and so on.
We're eating too much beef.
And we're not you know, we're not being conscious of the environment, and so we wind up with drought situations where then instead of being able to feed grass fed beef out of the range, they had to start feeding them and cattle feed up because again laws is applying demand, because of Biden administration environmental policy and so on, So those prices went up. People started cutting their herds, and we wind up with herds that are down in the range where they were.
Back in the nineteen fifties.
Our population has doubled, but the amount of cattle available is down around where it was in the nineteen fifties. So we've got double the population with that much with no additional cattle in fifty years in terms of the total herd. And so laws is supply and demand affect that. And yet now we're being lectured on affordability.
You have a situation.
Where you bring twenty million illegal aliens into the United States, which are then given free housing, free food, et cetera. And when you put them in certain houses, those houses are there. We're not building a super number of houses and stuff availability around the country. Imagine twenty million people into the country, and so what twenty million people, Let's just say on average maybe three people per household, So you're talking about seven million new homes that have to
be created. Have seven million homes been created during the four years of the Biden administration?
Hell no.
So what happens They are then taken and put into existing homes, which means that then people that want to move homes or move into a new location or something like that.
The supply isn't there.
So when the supply is low, then the housing prices go up. We have a median house median home price now above four hundred thousand dollars for just a regular house. And now they're talking to us about affordability.
Unbelievable. And I hope lyon Jerry Powell.
Or somebody close to him is listening to this program and tells him about this, because here's one of the statistics that they're not talking about. And nobody's talking giving much information and getting much discussion on home sellers are giving up at unusually high rate. According to realtor dot com, latefall tends to be the time when most homes come
off the market so far unsuccessful. As so far unsuccessful sellers would rather not sit through the slowest winter months, so they don't want people tracing through the houses in the winter, and that's a not very popular time for people to go looking for homes. In October, however, d listings, which are reported with one month lag, were up forty five point five percent year to date and rose nearly thirty eight percent from October of twenty twenty four. According
to a new report from realtor dot Com. The report calls it an unusually high rate. It is now the highest delisting year since Realtor dot Com started tracking these numbers back in twenty twenty two. Dlistings started with the rise in June and have remained elevated for.
A five straight month.
About six percent of active listings are coming off the mark Mart each month month, which is typically only seen in the debt of winter. People aren't moving the home, people aren't available that people can't afford the homes. People can't afford the interest rate that's being charged on that. And we've talked about that on this program several times. I've gone through the numbers. I said, here's what the interest rate, or here's what the payment would be if
you had a three percent loan. Here's what it would be if you had a five percent loan. Here's what it would be if you had a six seven, six and a half percent loan. And the difference is almost from the three percent to the six percent is nearly seven hundred dollars a month for the same home. So imagine the home that you live in now, the mortgage that you have on that jumping seven hundred dollars per month? What would that do to your What would that do
to your budget? So the fact that people are looking at that saying, well, I would have to pay seven hundred dollars more than what at three percent loan I can't afford to move into that house. And then when you take into consideration that if you look at the interest rate based on the cost of the size of the house, you can only afford a certain amount. They look at your income, They look at how much money and disposable income you have, and how much helm you
can afford. Then factor in the rate the interest rate on that, and then that dictates the size of the house you can you can afford. So at whatever income level you are. The example I had, was it one hundred and ten thousand dollars? At one hundred and ten thousand dollars based on a three percent interest rate, you can afford a house that's about what was it five hundred or four hundred and fifty some thousand, Whereas at the six percent interest rate, you can afford a house
one hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars less than that. So, just a mere fact of three percent change in interest rates changes the amount of house that you can buy by almost one hundred and seventy thousand dollars. And this is the thing that we look at in terms of the real estate landscape, in terms of what where people can afford and what they can afford. We'll talk about a little bit more about this coming up. I'm Kevin Gordon, America's Truck at Network seven hundred WLW.
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I'm Kevin Gordon, America struck In Network seven hundred WLW. Getting back to this story, home sellers are giving up at an unusually high rate. According to realtor dot Com, they're talking about the highest dlisting year since they began starting tracking this. I guess they started tracking the dlisting back in twenty twenty two when interest rates started creeping up and they wanted to take a look at that. I don't know why they have been tracking this all along,
but maybe it wasn't a problem before. Of course, if you've got three percent interest rate and booming economy, then houses on the market and the affordability is going to be there. It's only during the Biden administration when that all went to hell. In addition to most potential buyers are heading to what realtor dot Com calls refuge markets.
It's almost like you should call it refugee markets. These are areas where home prices are much more affordable and didn't see the run up in prices during the first years of the pandemic.
They say pandemic I call it. Now.
What is also driving this up is that when people were cut out of work or you know, eliminated, jobs were eliminated. Of course, a lot of people hung on based on either unemployment and subsidies from the federal government. But then the people that still had a job and could work from home, they were taking that money. They were saving money because they weren't commuting, they weren't having
that expense. They were improving their homes, they were making offices, they were building on they were going out and possibly not possibly, but they were going out and buying other homes, a larger home so that they'd accommodate both people working from home to have their own offices so that they
could actually work from home productively. Then after and then people's thoughts started thinking in terms of, well, if I'm working from home and it doesn't look like I'm going back to the office anytime soon, why do I want to stay in Detroit, Michigan, or you know, a cold weather area. I could move to Florida, I can move to Texas, I can move to Arizona. I could move someplace that's more pleasant or an area that's kind of more of a resort area, I can work from anywhere,
and so they moved to these hot spot areas. And of course, when you have more people moving in and you still have the limited amount of homes, build that many more homes during that period of time, so you had more people, higher demand, less supplied, those prices went up. Now we're seeing those prices kind of coming back down because again in those boom cities, some of the companies have said, hey, we want you back to work, we want you back in the office.
And now you're you know, five hundred.
Well thousands of miles away from your original home or your home office, you know, the company's office, and people had to make the determination do I quit my job or do I move back to that particular area. So that's some of the gyrations that are going on. And again, when you have high interest rates and you're forced to move, you're forced to buy, then those prices are going to go up. So they're talking about these things. Pre pandemic.
Danielle Hale, chief economist at realtor dot Com, said rising delisting and the growing of refuge markets captured the push and pull defining today's housing market. Hall does forecast at gradual improvement next year with potentially lower mortgage rates. Big surprise there, who's been talking about that on this program. More consistent supply, creating an increasingly balanced market between buyer
and seller. Some of the cities that saw the most price growth over the past five years are now seeing large share of frustrated sellers. We had that story a couple of weeks ago where it talked about how the home prices in some of these hot cities back during the pandemic where people moved because they were working from home and they made the determination while hell, I can
work from anywhere, those prices went up tremendously. In fact, they were saying in that particular story, if memory serves me, correct that from the time of the pandemic up to this point they had increased in value about sixty seven percent. Now, actually the terminology was from the last time the home was sold to the time now that home has come up.
In sixty seven percent.
Now, that may have include people that bought these homes prior to the plandemic, but during the plandemic, when prices were going up in these hot markets by ten fifteen percent on a periodic basis, that would account for some of that increase, But they had the story a few weeks ago that talked about in those markets prices could come down about seven percent. Well, if you're up sixty seven percent and your price value comes down seven percent, you're still sixty percent ahead.
So you're not doing too bad.
It's not like during the housing crisis back in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, where your house and the amount of home you had took a forty percent haircut, where the value of your property almost overnight went down forty percent because of that housing crisis. So again, you're not having that kind of panic. You're not having that kind of a situation. You're having basically a market correction.
So anyway, as she points out, some of the cities that saw the most priced growth over the past five years are now seeing the largest share of frustrated sellers. Miami, Denver, Houston saw the highest ratio of homes delisted compared to the new to With newly listed the medium price list price in November nationally was zero point four percent, four tens to one percent lower than in November of twenty twenty four.
According to realtor dot com.
It is still however, thirty six percent higher than November of twenty nineteen. Pre pandemic new listings were up just one point seven percent year over year. So again Del and Jerry Powell get those interest rates down so that people can afford, you know, affordability in terms of homes. Price gains are much stronger in refuge markets like Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they're up five point five percent year over year.
Saint Louis where they're up five percent. Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh round out the top performing refuge markets according to the report. The report, prices in these markets are still twenty to thirty percent lower than the national media average. Another troubling trend this vault canceled contracts. Roughly fifteen percent
of home mortgage agreements were canceled in October. People get in there, they make the offer, they take a look at it, they say, okay, yeah, I think I can afford that.
And the bank has given them the approval.
But at some point in time they take a look at that and say, do I really want to take on that debt? Do I really want to take and commit myself to that. Do I think my job is strong enough? Do I think the industry that I'm working in is strong enough based on what I'm hearing from the spoon fed regurgitators of the mainstream media, so they hit the panic button. One person, I read an article where they were talking about that this person was actually
talked out. Had a very strong job, stable job, upward mobility and so on, but a friend talked her out of buying the home because why do you want to be tied down to a mortgage, Which really doesn't make much sense to me, But that's some of the stuff going on. Regionally, San Antonio saw the most canceled deal with more than that was one of the hot markets where people moved to more than one in five twenty
one percent pending home sales falling through in October. It was followed by Fort Lauderdale at twenty percent, fort Worth at nineteen percent, and so on down to Jacksonville, Florida at nineteen point two percent. Now, so when you look at these situations, and we look at these mortgage rates and the fact that people are backing out of contracts, the fact that people they are trying to sell her home and it's on the market and it's sitting there
for a long period of time. They want to delist that because you know, they just want hopefully that the situation will improve. Now I've dug into this a little bit further, and I thought, you know, I got to thinking about, all right, I've been hearing things about how interest rates have been in other countries and how they are compared to the United States. Now I went through
and I found this particular comparison United States. We have right now an average of where is that United States is at on average six point three three percent for a thirty year fixed mortgage. All right, go to one
of the lowest in the world. Switzerland one point nine seven percent, the Euro Area all of Europe basically two point four to two percent, the Netherlands two point six eight percent, Italy two point seventy nine, Croatia three percent, Spain three point one point five one three, rather, France at three point four to three, Ireland at three and a half percent. Maybe that's why Rosie O'Donnell moved over there.
It was cheaper mortgage. Germany at three point six percent, All these countries that are below four percent, and the United States is at six point what did I say, six point three to three we are down there near Romania, Moldava, Australia, Promote Peru, Jamaica and thereabouts. So we are let me see, on the list we are thirty six, So of the top of the lowest interest rates in the world, we are at thirty six as opposed to number one. So
the affordability factor comes into play. What I was talking about earlier, the type of house that you can afford, the size house you can afford at three percent loan versus six point three percent is dramatic. And the fact that Lion Jerry Powell keeping these prices high. Hopefully we'll get some a little bit of a rate cut from him. I think it should be a half a percentage point, but more than likely it'll be a quarter percentage point anyway.
Coming up, we've got information from the National Iteration of Independent Business, their survey. I'm Kevin Gordon, America's struck In Network seven hundred w LW.
Here's your trucking forecast for the Try State and the rest of the country and the Try State over nightclouds increasing with rain lightly near day break, the low down to thirty seven rain Wednesday, then a chance of rain and snow showers by late afternoon, hies into the mid forties, mostly Claudi Thursday and colder, a high of thirty three, mostly Claude Friday, with a chance of snow, then a chance of rain and snow in the afternoon a high
of thirty seven. Nationally, several days of heavy rain seen in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies, as snow will fall on higher mountain elevations. A strong clipper system bringing a thread of heavy snow and high winds across the upper Midwestern Great Lakes region, as well as portions of the interior, Northeast and Appalachians.
Seven hundred w l W I Kevin Gordon, is America struck in network. I gotta apologze. I've got a little bit of stuffy nose today. Earlier, well this afternoon, I just to well, we had some plants that were, you know, on the deck and they've pretty much died off as the result of the frost and everything, and I thought, you know, this would be a good time to take those up to the dumpster and get rid of them and all that sort of stuff.
Well, I don't know what was in there.
I know that I've got, you know, allergies as far as pollen in the spring, and then we got hay fever in the winter or in the fall. I don't know what got in my nose today, but something's got going on, and I've been sneezing and hacking and all that sort of stuff. So I apologize for that, but you know what, I'm tough. We'll muddle through here. We had a report I got released from the Small Business
Optimism Index. They call it the Small Business Economic Trends Report sb E t that almost I don't go into that, but a National Federation of Independent Business Optimism Index rose point eight percent or eight points rather in November to ninety nine and remained.
Above it's fifty two year average of ninety eight.
So we're a full percentage point above the average over the last fifty two years. You would think that the mainstream media would applaud that. Hell no, they're trying to bury that. They're not talking about that. I guarantee you that if that was a full percentage point below what the fifty two year average was, we would hear NonStop. That would be leading the news cycle. But the fact
that it's a good number. The spoon fed regurgitators of the mainstream media aren't going to applaud that because, again, in my opinion, they are trying to manufacture recession. They're trying to put the idea in people's head. Again, this
is more gaslighting from them. These are the same people that allowed the current previous administration to tell us that the border was closed, told us lies about COVID, told us that Joe Biden was not suffering from age or dementia or whatever, that he was perfectly fit to be in office, And now all of a sudden, we've got
these reports. We actually had a report the other day from the New York Times that said that, according to certain sources, Joe Biden was warned about the influx of migrant illegals at the border, and yet they chose to do nothing about it. They were warned about certain things all along, people were talking about there's books out now
where they talking to Joe Biden. He didn't seem to be with it, and it wasn't part of the conversation that he the operations at the White House would shut down at ten o'clock in the morning and there would be any other public appearances or any of that sort of stuff.
Now they're talking.
About his decline where all along anybody that challenged that, anybody that brought that up, you just don't know what you are?
You a doctor, Do you know what you're talking about? How do you know what he has?
Well? How do you know whether he's suffering from demanchia or something along those lines. Now, all of a sudden they're medical experts as far as Trump is concerned. He gets a bruising on his hand or something like that, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, you know, he's going to die tomorrow or something along those lines. It just it infuriates me that they told us how great the economy was under Biden when the prices went out of control, and now and we all knew.
That they were out of control.
Now they're trying to tell us how bad things are when things are turning around. When you look at energy prices, when you look at what's going on as far as oil and gas prices, we are now down below three dollars a gallon of gasoline, where just a few months ago we were up around three dollars and forty cents a gallon. It just infuriates me. And when people start talking about well, price comparisons compared to what I pointed out on this program time and time again. I do
the grocery shop. I do the majority of the grocery shopping in this house, in my household, because I enjoy it. I'm one of the few men I know that enjoy that and going to the store looking at the prices on a regular basis and seeing how they will put certain things on sale this week. Then they will go back up to the regular price for a couple of weeks and then come back down depending upon when they're buying that.
If you're buying that.
In an up cycle, of course, the price is going to be up if you're not paying attention to what you're paying, if you're not paying attention to how much you're spending, if you're not taking advantage of the digital coupons or any of that sort of stuff. And I've talked about that on this program several times. I talked about this on our sister station when I filled in there right around almost day before Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Eve, and I had a couple of people call in and they say, yeah,
I talk to my family members all the time. They always talk about how they just go into the grocery store and grab what they need to walk out.
I see that all the time.
There's it's interesting when you go depending upon what particular store you go to, it kind of has a vibe to it depending upon what neighborhood it's in. If you go to a more established neighborhood, the pace is a little bit slower. But then there's a store near here. And we've got two stores within about three miles of each other. That one is in a more suburban area and then one is in more of kind of a
hotspot type of thing. So you see people racing through the parking lot and I'm surprised there's not accidents there. I mean, driving thirty five miles an hour down the aisle of a parking lot and a grocery store. It just absolutely infuriates me. But anyway, that's the story for another day. But the way the store is set up, they have an entrance on one hand or one side, and an entrance on the other, and that flow in
the suburban areas you go in. At least in our store, you go in, you go to the right, you start going up and down the aisles that way. But in this other store they've got entrances on both ends, so people will come in one entrance and come in the other entrance. And when you watch people instead of up and down the aisle, it's like they're crossing over. They're
crossing in front of people. People are going instead of one direction down the aisle, there's like, you know, it seems like in a situation, there's like people going in three different directions. And then of course you have the people that are going down the aisle. They look like they're looking for something and they stop dead in their tracks and do a U turn and try to come back out. And the frenetic pace of some of these stores where and I guess it's more of the younger
people stopping by after work or whatever. It's it's nuts and to the point where you go in there and you see these people and they just they're going down the aisle.
I don't know if you remember years ago, there was a show where I.
Can't remember the name of of the TV show, but it was one of these things where they ask questions and you depend upon the number of answers you had. If you won, you had like a minute to go through or five minutes to go through. The store to see if you can whoever went through the store and got the most groceries, they would win that particular contest.
And you'd see these people running up and down the aisle. Just as they're running.
By their grabbing stuff off the shelf and stuffing in their baskets. They run back to the meat as'll throw everything in there and just run up to the checkout. Sometimes it reminds me of that going into these stores where people are just grabbing stuff off off the shelf and not even taking the time to even look at the price, look at the expiration dates or any of that sort of stuff, and they just buy the stuff.
And it's just franatic. But anyway, calming down looking at the grocery prices, knowing what patterns there are, looking at the different ads from the different stores to see what's on sale, and then play in your day or play in your shopping experience. Okay, if I'm going to be in this neighborhood on this particular day on my way home or whatever from work, this store here has the best price on a couple of items, so I'll stop in there, pick up a few items, and come home.
It's just amazing to me how they try to talk about some of these I don't. The grocery prices that we use in the Gordon household are basically about the same as what they have been over the last couple of years, simply because they are the items that they put on sale, and you wait for the sales and
you buy a couple at a time. So any of that so anyway, getting this National Federation of Independent Business Association, the National Federation of Small Business Optimism Index I guess I mentioned rose point eight points to November to ninety nine, which is above the fifty two year average or fifty two year average of ninety eight. An increase in those experiencing sales those expecting real sales to be higher contributed
most to the rise of the optimism index. The uncertainty index rose three percent three points from October to ninety one, an increase of owners reportedly uncertain about capital expenditures, planning, and so on, according to the NFIB Chief Economists built Doug Dunkelberg. Although so optimism increased, small business owners are still frustrated by the lack of qualified workers. Despite this, more firms still planned to continue new jobs in the
near future. So so much for a job market. Slowdown, pick this up coming up. I'm Kevin Gordon, America struck In Network seven hundred Wlwright.
News Radio seven hundred WLW and iHeartRadio Station Guarantee Human seven hundred WLW, HI Hard Radio.
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When it's time to hit the road, time is we're talking.
About this National Federation of Independent Businesses survey O the Optimism Report. And if you've missed that any of our previous segments for around of our shows, hit up that iHeartRadio app brought to you.
Buyer friends at Rust Truck Centers.
One of the key things in here that they bring up, and it's kind of almost a throwaway paragraph. The average rate paid on short maturity loans was seven point nine percent in November, down point eight percent from October. Now,
these are the short term borrowing that businesses do. If you're not familiar with that, you may have a situation where you're maybe a little short on payrolls, short on cash, not short on profits or whatever, but you just have a slow cash flow, so you need to borrow short term, like maybe thirty sixty ninety days. But the interest rate on that is seven point nine percent. Years ago, that was in the neighborhood of two and a half to
three percent. So now all of a sudden, your borrowing costs on just that short term loan goes up dramatically, and of course, that affects your bottom line. Some of the other key features out of this, they were saying that out of these areas, I think what was it they said, out of the numbers that there were of the increases, there were ten out of eighteen that were up and in the positive direction.
Some of them. Plan to increase.
Employment of nineteen percent, up four percent from the previous survey. Expect economy to improve fifteen percent. That's down five percent from the previous period. Expect real sales to be higher, up fifteen percent. Let me see expected credit conditions. They expect that to go down by five percent. So again, a lot of these things are trending in the right direction. And when you have things trending in the right direction, they tend to go in the right direction, and that
improves people's optimism. Now, cutting back to the survey or the overview commentary, let me get back here to that they're talking about. The economy has been doing reasonably well, and so have small businesses. Consumer spending is solid, but the real driver of GDP growth is the massive level of AI investment spending, including investment in electricity generation. The administration is making substantial policy changes elevating the level of
uncertainty as owners weight for resolutions. Again, when you're making policy resolutions, when you're changing certain policies, those are for the better, such as the emissions controlled the miles per gallon being reduced last week talking about how that's going to affect the overall price of cars. Owners have been frustrated by the lack of qualified workers available to fill open positions.
Job openings were above the historical.
Average all year compensation has increased, So compensation has increased. That's not tariff related. So if prices are going up because of a payroll then that's a whole nother story. But few new workers were actually hired. Excluding government supported jobs. Private sector job growth was weak. The most recent report September inflation rate was three percent, still above the Fed's
target range. Now listening of going through and some of the comments made by the respondents in this survey, we can expand, expand due to lack of raw materials and employees. This is from a business in Wisconsin, steady increase in pay over the years. We hire a ton of college students and it works out wonderfully. High school students as well, Struggling to find full time employees who will stay for more than one year. I am struggling with finding management
and good responsible employees who don't have other responsibilities. Labor costs are always high, on the thirty five percent on average or more. That's from a company in Missouri from a company in California. The general cost of goods and materials have significantly increased consistently since twenty twenty. Well, of course, I mean you're talking about a five year period of time. Payroll taxes are higher, and insurance is almost impossible to
afford health, liability and workers' compensation. How does that have anything to do with the tariffs? That is all government regulations and the government mandates. So it's that hidden cost of businesses. Taxes in general have increased, state and local and our property taxes have an itemization for tax codes a mile long. California is slowly suffocating and it is a desperate need of help. Many businesses, such as ours,
have already closed. I fear that unless there are more positive incentives, tax breaks, cuts, and affordable costs and materials, many more will close, relocate, or downsize or leave the state. Now that's California from Florida, labor needs to labor needs are never met. The quality of workers is very poor. Now, is that the quality of workers in terms of education levels, what they know, what their ability to show up for work or something along those. Is that a reflection on
our education system? Possibly? Job openings rise slightly after surging in September, fewer workers quitting their jobs. This is according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey better known as JOLTS. JOLTS reported on Tuesday talking about the job openings increased twelve thousand to seven point six seven million in October. Hiring decreases two hundred and eighteen thousand, quits decline the most in nearly two and a half years. The number of people quitting their job is down to
the lowest level in two and a half years. Again back to this no fire policy of where people are well. I guess in the past, when jobs were plentiful, people would actually quit their job before landing another job, thinking that the job market is so strong, you know, obviously it's generally the rule of thumb is that you make sure that you have a job to go to before
you quit your current job. But the number of people quitting their jobs is down to a two and a half year low, which I think is a very interesting trend. Let's see anything else in here. With the labor market wobbly, fewer workers are job hopping in search of greener pastures,
pointing to benign wage inflation. So people are not jumping because the informator of the stuff isn't out there now what we're seeing as far as gas and oil prices, again, the energy prices are important because they cross all segments. There isn't a business out there that doesn't rely on energy. Every business relies on electricity or energy to put on the lights, to run the machinery, to do anything within
that particular company. Looking at West Texas Intermediate CRUIT, it is at fifty eight dollars, well below that's sixty dollars a barrel margin, which people said, oh, it will never get below sixty dollars a barrel. Again, that's fifty eight dollars and twenty five cents, down sixty three cents from yesterday. Just since January, the twentieth West Texas Intermediate creued is down eighteen dollars and sixty four cents of barrel, or
twenty four percent. Talk about affordability. Well, when you whack off twenty four percent of the cost of anything, that's going to have an impact. As far as down the stream, Brent crude currently is sixty one dollars in ninety five cents of barrel, down a little over fifty cents a barrel. Just since January, Brent crude is down seventeen dollars and ninety five cents of barrel. That's a twenty two percent decrease. We're seeing gas prices come down. Current average gasoline nationwide
is two dollars ninety five cents. Diesel is a three dollars and sixty nine cents a gallon compared to this time. And again I've been stressing this, and when you go back down to the Trumpet administration in the first term on this in twenty twenty, in December of twenty twenty, gasoline was a two dollars and twenty five cents a gallon.
And what I've been saying all along is that if we look at the fact that that oil prices have come down twenty five percent, I would have expected to see gas prices come down twenty five percent as well. So if you're talking about a year ago when gas prices worth thirty three dollars and two cents a gallon. I would think that a ten percent reduction of that of about thirty thirty cents would take the current gas price down to about two sixty more in line with
that two dollars and twenty five cents. We're getting there. It's just a matter of time to get it down there, and that people that have its way to working its way through the economy, because if it's costing you less to fill up your truck, your cost of your operation is going to go up, or you know your your costs are going to go down and your profits are going to go up. There seems to be some discussions to whether or not there's going to be an oil glot,
but we'll see on that in the coming months. Well, folks, that does it for us, Stay tuned for EDI Radio at the top of the hour. I'm Kevin Gordon, America Struck In Network seven hundred WLW