NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Stacey Vanick Smith.

And I'm Darien Woods.

And I'm Adrian Ma.

And we are all gathered here together on this very special day because it is 2022.

It has been a very strange couple of years.

I feel like as a country we've just seen indicator after indicator after indicator, it's

almost hard to know where to look.

And the story of these indicators tell feels really mixed.

On the one hand you've got airlines shutting down routes because they don't have enough

staff because they're sick.

You've got schools going virtual.

But on the other hand you've got unemployment at low rates.

We've got people buying a lot of stuff and then you've also got inflation really high.

So it is such a mixed picture out there.

So we thought, are there like a few underrated indicators that we could pay attention to

that might give us a clue of where this pandemic economy is going this year?

And so that's what we did.

Today on the show, indicators for 2022.

Three indicators of how the economy might be doing once we get to the end of this year

and signs about whether or not we have kind of transcended through this current mess

...