Kai Ryssdal

Remember that, right?

And GDP grew at a measly 0.5%.

But if you look at consumer and business demand back then, which ignores all the government spending that didn't happen, growth was actually close to 2%.

Which is why soon-to-be former Fed Chair Jay Powell always talks about the central bank watching this as a better sign of where the economy might be going than headline GDP.

How healthy indeed, because the calendar is kind of interesting here.

We're going to get two more updates on first quarter GDP and obviously, along with it, final domestic demand.

Only one month of which, March, will have included elevated government spending on the war.

But then in late July, we'll get an early whack at second quarter data, which will, as things look now, have lots of government war spending.

And we will turn to final domestic demand to know what's really going on here.

I haven't actually counted, but I would guess that I have said the market is an idiot maybe half a dozen times on this program the last two months.

The price of a gallon of gas in this country is up by more than half since the war started.

Natural gas prices are squeezing Europe and Asia really hard.

Estimates by people whose job it is to study and predict this stuff say it could be years, literally years, before things are back to something even resembling normal.

And yet, the S&P 500 yesterday hit another all-time high.

Brian Walsh is Senior Editorial Director at Vox, where he wrote the other day about why markets are so bad at pricing in, you know, reality.

Brian, welcome to the program.

It's good to have you on.

Good to be here.

Take us back, would you, as you do in this piece, to the closest analog, I think, that applies here, COVID and the way the markets reacted.

And here now we have the Strait of Hormuz closed.