Overnight, a wartime economy
Marketplace
Marketplace
4.6 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s too early to know how long the U.S. and Israel war against Iran will last. One certainty? All-out war comes at a cost. Already, Qatar has cut natural gas production, bond yields and gas prices are up, and shipping firms are rerouting cargo. The extent of the economic impact, however, remains to be seen. In this episode, we break down how the conflict is already shaping the economy and what to expect if it continues.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | in which the theme of the program today is risk from american public media this is marketplace |
| 0:11.0 | in los angeles i'm car risdall it is monday this one is the In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. |
| 0:23.3 | It is Monday today. |
| 0:24.5 | This one is the second day of March. |
| 0:26.7 | Good, as always, to have you along, everybody. |
| 0:29.0 | With a nod to Donald Rumsfeld, a little bit ironically, but also historically and syntactically, |
| 0:35.2 | what we have, after the event of the past 72 or so hours |
| 0:39.2 | is a long, long catalog of known and unknown unknowns. And they are making the global economy |
| 0:47.2 | a bit riskier today than it was on Friday afternoon. Since you already know what the news is, |
| 0:52.8 | we are going to talk first today about what the news means for us in our particular line of work. And we're going to do it with Robin Brooks. He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Robin, thanks for coming on the program. Great to be with you, Kai. |
| 1:05.5 | As we sit here, 72-ish hours later, how do you perceive the macroeconomic state of risk right now? |
| 1:14.3 | You know, this is a great question. And in a way, the U.S. economy is a puzzle because we've |
| 1:21.9 | been throwing all these shocks at it and the U.S. has been doing just fine. We threw huge tariffs at it just fine. We have |
| 1:31.9 | massively changed immigration policy. The U.S. has kept trucking. The disconcerting thing is that |
| 1:40.2 | no one really understands why the U.S. economy hasn't fallen out of bed yet. No one really knows. |
| 1:48.5 | And so now we have a big shock to oil. Cost of living is a major issue for many U.S. households. |
| 1:57.2 | The U.S. consumer has been holding the U.S. economy up. |
| 2:07.2 | So risk and risk of recession have been going up, and that's really worrying. |
| 2:11.0 | I'm going to continue with my somewhat tortured metaphor here about Donald Rumsfeld. |
| 2:14.4 | Is this perhaps the mother of all shocks so far in the Trump administration? |
| 2:21.9 | You know, so let's talk about the oil market and how big this is, |
| 2:31.6 | first of all. So when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russia is a major oil producer globally. They produce 10 million barrels of oil a day. The day of the invasion, oil prices |
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