It is kind of a choose-your-own economic misadventure with this war. What are you more worried about?

Inflation or growth from Americandahl. It is Thursday, today the 26th of March. Good as always, to have you along, everybody.

The risks of this war come in many forms, as we know, and most of them are being covered in-depth elsewhere.

But for us, what we're worried about falls into two big buckets, threats to global economic

growth and threats to global inflation.

Along those lines, this news item today, a projection from the Organization for Economic Cooperation

and Development that says short-run global inflation is going to be 1.2% higher on average than it would have been had the past three weeks never happened.

Also relevant, the OECD didn't, as in did not, raise its forecast for global growth as it was expected to, again,

three weeks ago.

So, which risk ought we worry about more?

Marketplaces Nova Safo starts us off.

Before the war in Iran, the global economy was on a relatively strong footing.

With inflation around the world, coming under control and growth going to be pretty decent.

Ishwar Prasat, professor of economics at Cornell, says economies have been benefiting from

AI infrastructure spending and lower overall tariff rates in the U.S.

after the Supreme Court struck down a bunch of

them. At one level, one could argue that it's good, if good can be used in this context,

that, you know, the world economy is being hit with a negative shock at a time when it looks

somewhat resilient. That shock, of course, is the effect of closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The OECD's figures underscore Prasad's point.

It's projecting slightly slower global growth than expected, but still growth, at 2.9%.

Joseph Gagnon is with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

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