Hey everyone, it's Jess.

And Ryan, we have a live event coming up that you do not want to miss.

It's in Los Angeles, on Tuesday, April 28th at the L. Ray Theater.

We'll have Emmy winner and Oscar-nominated actor Riz Ahmed.

Who is in the Star Wars movie Rogue One.

And TV and film producer Franklin Leonard.

We'll be talking about the future of Hollywood, and we'll have a few

other surprises. Tickets are still available. Grab yours now via the link in our show notes. See you, April 28.

So before the war in Iran started, how were things going with the U.S. economy?

So at the start of the year, if you looked at surveys about business or consumer confidence, they were actually quite high relative to recent history.

Our colleague Dave Uberti covers markets in the economy.

Inflation was coming down, and consumer spending was pretty robust.

You had an economy coming into the year where there was a lot of tailwinds.

There was optimism that the uncertainty from the tariff turmoil of last year was dying down.

There was optimism that President Trump's tax cuts would boost the economy in certain ways.

And there was optimism that the U.S.

consumer was pretty resilient after the last several years or so.

Dave says back at the beginning of the year, there were some downward indicators, stagnant job

growth, for example. But overall inflation seemed to be mostly under control, higher than in

years past, but moving in the right direction.

That is, until a new report dropped last week.

New inflation numbers are not good, tripling in just a month, and driven by the biggest spike in gas prices in six decades.

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