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Hi, Bill Crystal here. I'm very happy to be joined today by Catherine Rampel, my colleague here

at the bulwark. It's midday Sunday, and we're going to discuss the economy, both in terms of the Iran War and what was happening beforehand as well. And obviously, you all read Catherine's excellent weekly newsletter, receipts, which comes out Thursday, I think, and the Catherine's obviously on many times on video and weighing in an excellent

discussion with Samson just Friday. But I thought, you know, this kind of changes pretty quickly.

And so worth, and plus we probably have somewhat different audiences. So worth going over,

trying to step back maybe a little bit more from the day that was really based on that day's news

and say, where are we three weeks into the war in terms of its economic effects?

Where were we before the war in terms of the economy? And give us the bottom line up front, as they say.

Sure. I guess I would say before the war started, the economy was kind of like chugging along, but there were definitely

some signs of fragility out there. So just as an example, if you look at the jobs numbers,

the Fed thinks that we have had zero job creation in the past six months. They think that, like,

if you kind of adjust for some methodological issues we've had no jobs added on top of

that of course you have inflation that is still higher than the fed wants certainly than the general

population wants and that's partly about you know inflation being elevated coming out of covid

a bunch of fiscal policy mistakes that

were also made, I think, by the Biden administration and by the Trump administration.

Inflation has been elevated for a while, like, I guess, close to five, around five years now.

...