Kristen Schwab

Yeah, I mean, it's never good when

a slice of the inflation pie starts to have something going on, right?

So for a long time, housing was an indicator that was really keeping overall inflation pretty elevated.

And what's, I think, additional about oil and fuel and gas prices is that they can really seep into other parts of the economy really quickly.

There are a lot of industries and businesses that have that pretty baked into their supply chains.

And so if you see that digit on the inflation dashboard starting to go up,

I don't think it would be all that surprising that it would start to spread and make overall inflation even harder to tame.

Yeah.

On that note, another figure we got today was GDP.

Economic growth was slower at the end of 2025 than expected, growing at just seven-tenths of a percent.

And I wonder if that means we should bring the word stagflation into our vocabulary.

Yeah.

I mean, it's one that no one wants to have in their vocabulary, right?

It's a particularly...

nasty situation to have inflation that lingers over a normal target and sticks around there for a long time while growth is also slowing.

We've also got the labor market stalling out a bit as well.

I think that's definitely going to be a question, right?

That goes in front of Jay Powell next week, because that is the picture kind of regardless of the war in Iran or not.

And so to the extent that Fed officials can help us understand what the baseline picture was going into this war is

and how they expect it to progress, I think is going to be really key to having any sense about where the economy is headed.