Justin Ho

It's like people are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Ravi Dhar at Yale says that shoe is income, be it a stock market crash or a housing market crash or, most consequential, a job market crash.

Ravi says consumers are likely to keep spending pretty steadily until they can't.

I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

What the trimmed mean inflation measure is trying to do is it's trying to exclude price jumps.

Price jump, she says, like... When you and I are paying for our streaming, you know, our Disney Plus, it's not like we're getting incremental price increases every single month.

They have these kind of bigger adjustments, you know, maybe once a year or once every several years.

It's sort of trying to understand, you know, what are inflationary pressures maybe that are more ingrained, you know, that would tell us more about the underlying state of the economy.

That's more than half of the measure.

And it's asymmetric, which means you're throwing out more of the inflationary measures rather than the ones that are bringing inflation down.

How you trim matters substantially.

If you look historically, it's actually the historical bias of that measure is to be above core inflation.

So just because the trimmed mean is under core today doesn't mean, you know, in six months' time or even a year's time that it'll still be there.

Working in health policy right now sort of feels to Camille Richu like being the scientist at the beginning of the Godzilla movie.

Where you're like running in and you're like, Godzilla's about to destroy the city.

And no one is heeding your warning.

Richu, who works at the non-profit Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, says it feels that way because of the looming cuts to Medicaid.

We know what happens when people don't have health coverage.

You have

More uncompensated care, more medical debt, more providers not able to stay open because they're losing patients.