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Wall Street sell off intensifying to start the week. Decline hitting every sector with oil sliding to a new seven month low on signals of faltering demand in the US and China. And Exxon Mobile is fresh off results that beat estimates on earnings and revenue for the second quarter. Joining me now is Catherine Michaels, Exxon Mobile chief financial officer, Kathy. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me, Julie. Really happy to be here today.

So I just want to talk about the backdrop a little bit here because we do have this sort of shifting sentiment that's reflected in risk assets and stocks and oil, um, shifting sentiment around the Federal Reserve and economic growth. And I'm just curious what you're seeing in your business, whether you're seeing any signs of an economic slowdown, how that's affecting demand dynamics right now.

Yeah, I think it's really important to put it into context for our industry because we were coming off of record highs last year, especially in terms of refining margins and gas prices. And what we've seen more recently is that price and margins have come back into what we would call the 10-year range band. Um, so that's pretty consistent with a still pretty constructive market overall. It's really only our chemical business where we've seen and continue to see bottom of cycle conditions. And importantly, the work the company has done to improve our underlying earnings power, that's put us in a really good place in terms of just resiliency of that earnings power through any market environment. And so just this quarter, we saw our earnings increase a billion dollars relative to the last quarter. And I think that really reflects the decisions that we're making around our portfolio and investments and continuing to drive efficiency across our business.

Um, and then looking over the much longer term here, something that your CEO Darren Woods mentioned on the earnings call is that your global oil outlook is about to come out. And he kind of gave a little teaser here that global, uh, energy demand should rise 15% between now and 2050. As you think ahead and obviously that it's tougher the further out you go, but what would be sort of the main risks to that kind of outlook?

Well, ultimately, as we look at the outlook, we continue to see really strong demand. And so last year was a record high in terms of oil demand. We expect this year is going to build on top of that and that 2025 we'll see yet another build on top of that in terms of overall demand. And that's really driven in large part, uh, by countries trying to address energy poverty, right? Having low-cost reliable energy is one of the things that really drives economic growth and pulls people out of poverty. And so that's a big driver of growth. And then overall, oil demand, uh, is a feed stock that's used for industrial capabilities like chemicals. And so you continue to see the wide variety of uses for things like plastics and other chemicals that again drive oil demand.