Oil hovers above $100 a barrel

And that is the opening bell on Wall Street. The online payments company Paysafe is celebrating its 30th anniversary by ringing the bell. Let's take a live look at the opening numbers as we begin the trading day. And immediately, we're seeing some pullback. The Dow Jones Industrial Average falling there a couple hundred points out of the gate. And I know, Kelly, one of the big, dominant topics we've had this week is oil prices. And we're seeing that psychological threshold of $100 a barrel now in the rearview mirror. How much is that playing into the bigger picture, bigger economic picture? No, I mean, it's definitely driving this concern that you're seeing in the market. It's driving what we're seeing in the bond market. It's driving what the Federal Reserve is probably going to do next week. Remember, they're looking at the inflation picture, and they're thinking, OK, do we need to hike interest rates? What I think is really interesting is the president has said the gas prices are going to come back down after the midterm, right? That was in part of his speech last night at the Dallas midterm or Republican midterm convention. And I hear all the time, how is that actually going to happen, right? Is there any other way than what is going on in the Strait of Hormuz and to actually reopen it? I think realistically, the answer is no. There's this Venezuelan oil agreement that people talk a lot about. That's going to take many years to actually see-- To reap the benefits. Right, exactly. It requires infrastructure investment. You could tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. Remember, that's what President Biden did quite a bit back in the summer of 2022. But you don't want to do that too much because that needs to be there if there's some big natural disaster that happens. And so I think really the only way to get out of this is for there to be negotiations for this war to end and for the global oil supply to not be as restricted. I think it's an important point you made, though. We've hit that $100 number. It's kind of a meaningless threshold. It's more about the trend. It just keeps going up. Then there is some other data, though, that tells us where we are economically. The PPI-- this is the Producer Price Index-- what is it showing? Anything encouraging for our viewers? Or I guess it depends on where you are in the economy. But what does it say? Yes and no. So the PPI, we like to look at this because it tracks how prices, the cost to produce the goods that you and I go by, how they are moving. Because if they go up, it likely means that you and I are going to end up paying more down the line in a couple of months. It came in at 0.4% on the month. It came in as expected. The point that I want to look at on the screen right here, Core PPI, 0.2%, that was better than we were hoping for. And why? Because when you take out food and energy-- those are things that move very quickly-- it was actually better. So what does that tell you? It's energy that's driving all of this, right? And that's bad, right, because we don't-- Back to our earlier point. But it's good that it hasn't seeped into the rest of the economy because once it starts to seep into the rest of it, it's really, really hard. It's too entrenched. But we haven't hit that point yet. So good and bad news. Well, that's an encouraging sign. There's a way out. Will we make it? Stay tuned to this show to see. Kelly, thank you-- I don't know if we can provide those answers. --great to get your analysis.