What tariffs were recently overturned by the Supreme Court?
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Lately, five days in this economy has enough news to feel more like six. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kyra's doll. It's Friday, March 13th, and it's good to be here with you. There are lots of eyes on what's happening abroad. Also, lots of eyes on a bunch of data we got today about the economy here.
So let's get into what we can with the handful of minutes we have. Today, it's just me and Rachel Siegel at The Washington Post. Hey, Rachel. Hi. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. So before we get into specific data numbers that we got today, I kind of want to ask a bigger question. And that's, does the data matter? Because we're talking about January PCE, January jolts, fourth quarter GDP.
These numbers are all coming from a pre-war economy. They are. And that economy feels like it might be pretty far away. I don't think the data is useless. It's always good to know what baseline you're working with. It's good to know what set of information is the freshest snapshot that policymakers are going to have. And I should say, it's good to know when the data gets revised.
We got a little bit of a more clear sense about what happened at the end of 2025. But then you're looking forward and you're trying to figure out what to do with that data. And I think once again, we've got economists and policymakers businesses and households saying, okay, but now things feel totally different. And how am I supposed to make any sense of it?
Well, let's look back into some of that data and start with PCE. Core inflation broke 3%. And, you know, for a while, energy prices have helped keep inflation moderate. Now we're kind of, you know, looking at a barrel of crude in the 90 plus dollar range. What do you think that means for inflation? 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.
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