Highest level of 2015. Helping a bit today with the Energy Information administration raising its forecast for u. S. And Global Demand while also forecasting lower production of domestic crude. Jackie deangelis takes a look at another possible reason and its always a wild card. Reporter crude oil rallying for a second straight day. Traders highlighting the continued conflicts in yemen with the underlying reason. Reuters reporting that saudi air strikes hurt civilians, according to trade watched other middle east conflicts play out and add to crude volatility incidents like these sometimes raise the stakes in already tense situations. Crude prices actually managed to take a breather at the open after a supplies note for Goldman Sachs made the rounds. Goldmans takeaway say they need to stay lower longer to have impact on production but even that sentiment couldnt hold back todays rally. For nightly business report, im jackie deangelis. One thing that could eat into that rally a bit, late this afternoon, the American Petroleum institute said u. S. Crude envenn toirs more than expected. 3 barrels. The estimate was 3. 5 million. On the flip side the wall street journal report that Royal Dutch Shell in talks to buy bg group, a large british based oil and gas producer. Market value after 46 billion and that would make this one of the years biggest mergers if it actually happens. The potential deal coming as both Energy Companies have taken steps to adjust to falling oil prices. Joining us now to talk more about crude oil prices is francisco blanch. Head of Global Commodity Research at bank of America Merril Lynch. Welcome with us. Bottom for the foreseeable future do you think, or one of thes where its going to yoyo . I think its going to yoyo for a while. As you just reported have gone out in the past week against Market Expectations for even a potential draw at curbshing, potential price. So we think the market is oversupplied. A fourth million barrel with refineries at rates of 91 . Here we have a surplus in this country. Should keep ong f a few weeks. Do you explain the past two day rally in west texas crude as having everything to do with uncertainties in the middle east or what . Well its hard to explain. The last couple of days have been two data points that got the market very excited. As i mentioned, on monday it was a report around the potential draw at cushing, which is now going the other way with the other report we got today. I do think its really Short Covering on the one hand and a lot selling on a basis. It has rallied to your point but longer data contracts, its actually been falling. So were seeing a lot of producers looking at this postiran deal situation as an opportunity to start hedging 2016 17 and beyond. An outside pressure on those contracts just as the near data price moves up a little bit. Francisco, youre one of the most respected people in this whole area of following oil prices. What do you think were going to see over the next year . What is the trading band for west texas intermediate . Well we think were still going to see kind of low to mid 40s for wti and we could see prices going high as 60 maybe a little bit over 60. But certainly, its going to be contained and then going into next year things might, you know could be better. It all depends on the iran deal. If the iran deal comes through and we start to get a lot of oil from iran its going to be hard for oil to rally. Could put it in the market and put 6,000 of Oil Production and unfortunately, its going to to come out of u. S. Shale. That iranian oil takes market share from america. America will have to price that in. Thats a simple view. I was going to ask you what you see happening with u. S. Production. U. S. I guess is the largest oil and gas producer by some measures in the world. How do you think this oversupply is going to reverberate backwards to the supply chain here in the u. S. . Well, look. Just announced today theyre pumping 10. 3 Million Barrels of crude oil. Thats a lot more than we thought. We thought Something Like 9. 8, 9. 9 Million Barrels. Theyre pumping an extra half a Million Barrels. U. S. Production is going to start going the other way. Clearly, there is some market share issue here. Saudis want a greater market share. They made it abundantly clear, they do want to give that up and now the iranians have to come in too. I think u. S. Production is going to have to roll over. Certainly the collapse in the rik count is going to have to make that happen and the question is when is some of the shale going to come back . Is it going to come back in 2016 or do we have to wait another year 2017 for the shale to come back . I think thats going to depend, of course, o demand goes. If meaningful maybe we need u. S. Shale coming back into the market next year. Francisco, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you for enlightening us. Francisco blavrge with bank of America Merril Lynch global research. Oil ha a long way with deciding how americans feel about the economy and decidedly more optimistic. As Steve Liesman reports, theres more to the upbeat mood of the public. Reporter americans views of the state of of the economy reached new heights in the latest cnbc Home Economics survey. A record 27 judge the economy as excellent or good. The highest level in 8 years. A year ago, just 16 of the public gave economy good marks and it was just 4 at the beginning of the 2008 recession. The cnbc poll of 800 americans across the nation shows how far the publics attitudes on the ec come just the economic recession ended. But also how far there is to go. The level of optimism remains about 10 points lower before the financial crisis and yet, well above the worst levels during the downturn. Views on the economy were helped by an upbeat outlook on expectations for wage hikes and home values in the year ahead. On the outlook for the public econ recover. 1 point improvement from last quarter but postrecession high from 2012. Optimism low gasoline prices and americans finally starting doing something with the money. In a prior survey 61 reported doing nothing w as a result of cheap gas, but that number has dropped to 42 . One in four americans now report paying down debt with the wind fall and 17 say theyre spending it. Putting in the bank and saving it. The poll asked what americans do as a result of the stronger dollar but ended up not being a good question. A third of the public was even aware the dollar had gone up in value. For nightly business report, im Steve Liesman. A little later, well share r nugget from the survey. The surprising thing some americans see as a threat to their employment. On wall street today, stocks faded late in the day giving up what had been a triple digit gain at one point. One of the reasons cited by investing pros cautiousness ahead of tomorrows minutes of the last Federal Reserve meeting and the start of the earnings season. For the day, the dow lost about 5. 5 points to 17,875. Nasdaq gave back 7 and the s p 500 was lower by 4. One of the early drivers for stocks today was fedex. The company is buying the dutch Package Delivery firm tnt express for nearly 5 billion cranking up the competition against rival ups. This time overseas. Fedex shares were up about 3 while ups was off a fraction. Morgan brennan has the details. Reporter the acquisition of tnt express will dramatically expand fedexs reach in europe a market up until now has had little share of. Ceo fred smith said there were many reasons to do this deal now. The dollar and change ratio was very favorable. The quantitative easing and the Lower Oil Prices mean that the european economy has a better outlook now than it has for some period of time and we thought that the planets lined up perfectly for this move. Reporter in recent years, fedexs global reach much more focused on asia where its a democrat nant player. By acquiring tnt express, has european presence absorbing network and consisting largely of ground operations allowing it to cater to ecommerce customers at a time when diesel is less expensive. Analysts say this is a good move for fedex, in competition with two biggest companies, ups and dhl. Fedex good historically of buying companies. Look at runway package services. They expanded and blew into fedex ground. They bought american freightways, vikings and watkins and produced the largest lcl carrier called fedex freight. Fedex is good at buying fixer uppers and doing exactly that, fixing them up. This is definitely a fixer upper. Reporter it wi come down to Regulatory Approval watched closely since competitor ups tried to buy the same company at a higher price several years ago. Regulators eventually blocked that deal due to worries about pricing because, unlike fedex, ups already has such a large presence on the continent. On a european loss has to deflect the fleet of cargo planes but ultimately expected to approve the deal. For nightly business report, im Morgan Brennan in new york city. Comi is it only a matter of time before robots replace workers like you . Well tell you whose jobs on the we told you last night about viacoms restructuring and the suspension of Share Buyback program. Today, investors sold shares sending the stock down nearly 2 . But as Julia Boorstin rotells us viacom is hardly alone in facing challenges as more and more tv viewers get their fix digitally. Reporter the Company Behind knick loadnin nickelodeons spongebob has been struggling with plummeting ratings and ad dollars. Nickelodeon and mtv are geared towards younger audiences and fracturing more intermediate consumption. Youtube and other programmin viacom announcing massive restructuring taking 187 million pretax charge with reports that ceo fileap jaman purchasing Share Program until october. Viacom saying the reruns that channels relied on csi, community and entourage less appealing to viewers. In the first quarter, Comedy Central off 17 . Mtv and nickelodeon off 4 in the target demographic. Viacom faces more competition. Mtv and Comedy Central target questioning whether its worth paying for the cable tv bundle. Viewers have an explosion of digital options. Viacoms restructuring comes as time warner launches a stand alone streaming app, hbo now. The companys first move outside the pay tv bundle. Plus theres an infinite amount of niche content on youtube and not to mention original new shows on netflix, amazon and hulu. Its dictating even more of a focus on programming given the dollars on the screen. So you have to really gut the costs that are not essential youre not seeing on the screen. Reporter last fall doman increased the amount of revenue to other platforms not mentioned by nielson from 30 to 50 . Now the company said theyll put savings from its restructuring into Data Analysis and Tech Development so it can compete better in this new Digital Content world. For nightly business report, im Julia Boorstin in los angeles. Informatica in the biggest buyout of the year. We begin market focus. Company bought by European Private Equity firm called promira and Canada Pension Plan investment board. Price tag more than 5 billion under the terms of the deal informatica get 49 each in cash for each share of common stock they own. The stock popped 4 to 47. 79. Starbucks faces questions over its tax practices in europe. This according to a report today in the wall street journal. The coffee chain reported losses in biggest european operations even as it notched hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales over there. The deal the company made in the netherlands to lessen tax burden is also reportedly being called into question. Starbucks European Headquarters is in the netherlands. Shares off slightly to 94. 07. The canadian government has unloaded its multibillion dollar stake in General Motors which weighed on shares of the auto maker today. The stake estimated to be worth more than 2. 5 billion sold to Goldman Sachs for an undisclosed amount. The stock fell 2. 5 to 35. 73. And Warren Buffett is upping his bet on the u. S. Auto industry with his latest investment. Buffet took a half billion dollar state in kpalexalta who makes coating in the auto industry. Shares about 10 higher 31. 11. And analyst upgrade said shares higher of spelunk. Rates the Data Management company and Software Firm overweighed up from neutral. The recent slide in the stock created better risk reward scenario. Shares up 3 to 62. 09. So how worried are you about a robot or other Technology Replacing you at work . The latest cnbc all American Economic survey found one in four low income americans live in fear of losing their job to technology in the next five years. Katherine is a columnist for the Washington Post where she focuses on economics and Public Policy. Katherine, always great to see you. I admire your work. I guess we could say here the benefits of technology this is nothing new, this happened before folks, have slowed this time maybe more than ever in the past to capital rather than labor and thats why people especially at the low end scale are as worried as they are. Thats probably part of the story, yes, but you have what economists referred to as skill bias technical change that a lot of the Technological Advancements weve seen in the last few decades are basically complementary to the skills of higher earning people. If youre a boss basically you can control more capital than ever manage more workers with a click of a button. That advantage is the higher skilled and leaves lower skilled and lower paid at a relative disadvantage. Put this all into context of prior technological cycles where similar fears have been aroused and similar results have probably been seen. Is it different this time, you just cited one reason how. Well certainly, there have been mass freakouts over automation and robots taking our jobs many many times before. This goes back hundreds actually thousands of years during the Industrial Revolution when, you know we used to be a farming country and people were replaced by machinery. When the Printing Press was invented all the people who were scribes, written everything by hand lost their jobs. So weve certainly seen this kind of pattern before. But everybody flips out. But thats kind of the nature of creative destruction. That you have some destructi of jobs some displacement of jobs with new technology but what typically happens is there are new opptunities new types of jobs that are created that are, again, sort of complementary to those technological examples. Katherine, do we then as an economy and as a nation sit back and let the Natural Evolution just have run its course or is there a Public Policy response that needs to be considered here . Well i think basically Technological Progress is inevitable. Some automation displacing jobs is inevitable. We cant turn back the clock. So the question right now is what Public Policy should be doing, if not to sort of keep the robots at bay . And i think the job of policy makers is to ease the transition for people who are displaced, whether that means retraining for example, or, you know guiding young people into what kinds of majors they should be studying in college so that their careers will be more robust to these types of changes and maybe some potential, you kn policy changes as well that might help more of the gains from the Technological Progress be captured by regular people workers, and not just the people at the top. Katherine, thanks very much. Katherine ranpel with the Washington Post. If you dont read her stuff, you should. Thank you. What to do with the tax refund you may get and first, could new billing requirements cause your doctor to take her shingle . The growing concern among mds next. Here is what to watch tomorrow. Not a lot on the agenda but well have the minutes from the federal open market meeting as people pore over that one. Reports unofficially kicking off earnings season and two things to watch on wednesday. Well this fall the entire u. S. Health system has to switch to a new coding and billing format. Big deal you say . Not so much. The growing concern that mistakes will strain the system and long reimbursement delays could even put some doctors out of business. Bertha coombs has the details. Reporter andrew klinemans priority is spending time with patientsc surgeon worries next fall hell spend all his time on billing problems when new medical codes go into effect. The advice from a consultant . We should have reserves either in a credit line or in cash of 3 months of income because we might not be getting any income for a while. For a small practice that could be devastating and could put some people out of business. Reporter i