Kai Risdahl

That rarely happens when things are just fine.

And inflation, we do have to see it.

A week of this 35% surge in oil is worrying if that sticks around for four weeks or six weeks.

then it's going to embed in inflation expectations.

They're going to have people kind of starting to panic.

They'll pull back on spending.

And, yeah, you do then get this stagflation scenario.

Courtney, let's turn to the geopolitics tax that we're all paying now.

And that's not my original phrase.

I saw it somewhere on the socials, and I would credit it if I remembered.

But Katharine Pell, our sometimes colleague here on Fridays, now at the Bulwark and MSNOW,

She wrote the other day and said, look, if the president wanted prices to go up, what would he be doing differently?

And I wonder, I mean, look, you're an economics reporter and not a political scientist, but it does seem that that's exactly the result of all of these policies, that these prices are going up because of what the president's doing.

Right.

And so there's the war, but there's also, you know, in the backdrop, the trade war is

and tariffs that might be going higher.

The president has made it very clear that what the Supreme Court scrapped, he wants to replace in full.

So you have those two forces and many other forces kind of coming together and making the environment look more expensive for consumers who are already very upset about how expensive things are.

They don't really care about inflation, right?

They care about price level and prices are high and they just don't want to see prices go even higher.