Catherine Rampell

There's weird stuff happening.

Yeah, and the question is, how credible is it?

If the United States says the Strait is open, if the Iranian government says the Strait is open, if you are a company thinking about sending your commercial tanker through that Strait, do you believe it, right?

Do you believe that you're not going to get hit by a drone or a mine or anything else?

Does your crew believe it?

Let's say it is officially open.

Insurance company.

All of those things add costs.

Even if the tankers, you know, resume going through, resume transiting at the same rates that they were before, which I think is not likely to happen anytime soon.

It's going to be much more costly because of all of that risk that's baked in there because people cannot unsee the fact that it has been closed and dangerous for a very long time.

You know, you can't just like pretend it goes back.

Yeah, I mean, that's already happened.

To be fair, it's more than two months because it started with Liberation Day when he raised tariffs.

Because what happens is

Interest rates are related to what's happening in inflation, right?

I think typical consumers are like, well, higher interest rates make things more expensive, so they're part of the problem.

They're actually the solution to the inflation.

It's not super intuitive.

But basically what happens is when you have prices going up a lot,

That means the Fed is more often than not going to raise interest rates to try to like squelch inflation.