This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On our show last weekend, Vox's future perfect, Brian Walsh, explained how and why the economic disruption caused by our war with Iran has not been reflected in the financial markets. I mean, we were puzzled.

We're in the middle of a war. We've got oil prices spiking, and yet stocks are soaring.

And more new highs for the stock market today than Azdaq composite with a huge gain on top of a market that's already been super hot

and continuing to see just honestly jaw-dropping strength

at this point.

The thing that bothers the heck out of me right now

is oil's sitting in the mid-90s.

So it's near its highs or it got to a high point, you know, about a month ago.

And then you got the stock market at an all-time record high. One of those things is wrong.

Brian said that this staggering mismatch between economic reality and financial markets

is an actual phenomenon known as economic blindness.

It was a great conversation, but after we edited it down to 10 minutes to fit the show,

we realized that too much good stuff had landed on the cutting room floor.

So here's a longer version.

He starts by recalling his own bout of a similar blindness while reporting on

the emergence of the COVID pandemic in February of 2020. I had been writing about pandemics

literally for more than 15 years. I'd written about the first SARS in Hong Kong. I'd read about

bird flu. I'd written about H1N1, the one we

all forgot in 2009. And I'd even written this cover story for Time magazine just a few years before

the pandemic started that literally warns how we were not ready for the next pandemic in big, very

scary letters on the cover. And yet, as I was going back to those weeks, my overwhelming feeling was, well,

this doesn't look great. And yet, even going into February, well after Wuhan had already

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