Megan McCarty Carino

Like a lot of savvy shoppers, when eggs became a luxury good, I got myself a black market egg dealer.

Well, a family friend who keeps chickens.

So I actually hadn't bought eggs from the grocery store in quite a while.

Okay, I'm at my local Lucky supermarket and looking for the cheapest eggs.

I see a dozen eggs.

Large cage-free eggs, $2.99.

Been a while since I saw egg prices in the two range.

The national average was $2.50 for a dozen large grade A eggs last month, after hitting a high of more than $6 a year ago.

The shock was specific, but the high cost of eggs came to feel like a symbol of everything that was unaffordable, says Gregory Dacco, chief economist at EY Parthenon.

Stores might not post the price of eggs on giant signs like gas stations, but consumers have a strong mental anchor of how much a staple should cost.

But the drop in egg prices might not stretch as far as consumers hope, says David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University.

Beef prices have been climbing for years and aren't likely to come down anytime soon.

The cattle herd is the smallest it's been since the 1960s, and you can't snap your fingers to increase supply, says Phil Lempert with Supermarket Guru.

Now, a new complication, much of the world's fertilizer, key to feeding those cattle, flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

The computing power in data centers is basically the new oil, says analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush.

It's the essential resource that so much of our digital economy runs on.

So it was only a matter of time until this critical infrastructure was targeted, like oil pipelines have been in war.

The industry has been focused on the threat of cyber attacks, says Justin Sherman at Global Cyber Strategies.

Most of the cloud is run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which Sherman says are well-resourced to defend against hacks.