Most Recent Posts

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health recently polled 1,081 African-Americans about their lives. One of the areas respondents were asked about was their perceptions of their financial status.

As Code Switch's Gene Demby reported in an earlier post, the effects of the housing crisis and a recession — both of which disproportionately affected African-Americans — didn't seem to dampen a sense of optimism and overall life satisfaction among respondents. But the survey did reveal a dramatic — if not exactly surprising — split between two evenly divided groups of respondents: 49 percent who saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 50 percent who described their finances as "poor" or "not good."

This finding mirrors attitudes of African-American respondents to a 2001 survey by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Then, the stats were similar: 49 percent polled saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 51 percent considered them "poor" or "not so good."

Robert Blendon, a professor of public health at Harvard and one of the 2013 study's co-directors, told NPR's Kathy Lohr that many African-Americans who don't consider themselves well-situated financially still have a sense of optimism. A combined 81 percent of respondents said they would one day attain the American dream — owning their own home, gaining financial security — or already had. Only 16 percent said they felt the dream was out of reach.

Supplies of oil have been surging this year, and U.S. drivers, who have been switching to more fuel-efficient cars, are using less gasoline.

That would seem to be the right economic combination to push down prices at the pump, but gasoline prices have remained stubbornly high this summer.

Even some people in the industry are wondering whether the law of supply and demand somehow has been repealed.

"I'm actually quite dumbfounded," says Azam Zakaria, vice president of Lone Star Petroleum, a family owned company that owns and operates 15 gas stations in the Houston area.

Zakaria, who has been in the business for nearly three decades, used to believe that more oil would mean lower prices, but he hasn't been seeing that lately.

The disconnect between supply and demand seemed to get even wider Wednesday, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration released its latest data, showing that U.S. crude oil inventories rose by 0.3 million barrels last week. Most experts had been expecting the oil inventory to decline by 0.6 million barrels.

That sort of surprise keeps happening as more and more domestic oil gets pumped. In fact last year, the United States saw the largest-ever yearly rise in oil production, according to a statistical review released last week by BP, the global oil giant.

At the same time, global oil reserves continue to grow, the BP report says.

The price of crude oil, however, continues to hover around $100 a barrel, and an average gallon of regular gasoline is still running above $3.62 nationwide. At the start of this year, the price was about $3.20 a gallon.

Zakaria worries that speculators are pushing up prices beyond what the usual balance of supply and demand would dictate. "Just to be blunt with you, I think that it's a commodity now that is being exchanged at Wall Street," he says.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health recently polled 1,081 African-Americans about their lives. One of the areas respondents were asked about was their perceptions of their financial status.

As Code Switch's Gene Demby reported in an earlier post, the effects of the housing crisis and a recession — both of which disproportionately affected African-Americans — didn't seem to dampen a sense of optimism and overall life satisfaction among respondents. But the survey did reveal a dramatic — if not exactly surprising — split between two evenly divided groups of respondents: 49 percent who saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 50 percent who described their finances as "poor" or "not good."

This finding mirrors attitudes of African-American respondents to a 2001 survey by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Then, the stats were similar: 49 percent polled saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 51 percent considered them "poor" or "not so good."

Robert Blendon, a professor of public health at Harvard and one of the 2013 study's co-directors, told NPR's Kathy Lohr that many African-Americans who don't consider themselves well-situated financially still have a sense of optimism. A combined 81 percent of respondents said they would one day attain the American dream — owning their own home, gaining financial security — or already had. Only 16 percent said they felt the dream was out of reach.

NPR's Uri Berliner is taking $5,000 of his own savings and putting it to work. Though he's no financial whiz or guru, he's exploring different types of investments — alternatives that may fare better than staying in a savings account that's not keeping up with inflation.

My taste of the commodities market started with a headline I read a few weeks ago: Cooling Coffee Prices Hit A 3 1/2-Year Low.

I like coffee. Most people like coffee. That's not going to change. So maybe, just maybe, I could buy coffee low and sell high, not by hoarding sacks of actual coffee beans but with a bet on the futures price.

The futures market largely determines the price of the most basic commodities used in everyday life — oil, wheat, soybeans, corn, hogs, cattle, coffee and much more. Despite their significance, futures are a mystery to most people, including many investors and journalists. I caught up with Jack Scoville at the Price Futures Group in Chicago. He's a futures broker who analyzes the market for agricultural commodities, including coffee. He ticks off reasons why coffee prices have tumbled.

More Coffee Reading

The Salt

Exploring Coffee's Past To Rescue Its Future