Justin Wolfers is an economist who hates predicting the economic future.

The state of our world is a bit uncertain, wouldn't you say?

The problem for Justin is that whenever I have him on the show, I am asking him to do just that.

Yeah, if you had to like aim one of those temperature check things at the economy, what would it tell you?

It would tell you there's so much fog this instrument is not currently reliable.

What's hanging over all of us is Iran.

The economic consequences of that will range between minor and enormous.

Depends a lot on what happens in the war.

The way that plays out could be between brief and everlasting.

Hard to know. everlasting. Hard tonight.

Right now, the world economy is holding its breath because of the straight of Hormuz, of course, that extremely narrow waterway that connects a whole lot of the world with Middle Eastern oil and gas. Shipping traffic has come

largely to a halt. That has spooked our own government enough that over the weekend, the

president told Iran to open back up, or the U.S. would hit Iranian power plants, starting with the

biggest ones first. A couple days later, Trump backed off this threat.

He said the U.S. was negotiating with Iran.

The Iranians denied that.

There was a really interesting episode, I think.

The president said, we've been negotiating with the Iranians, things are going well.

Financial markets rose dramatically. They believed

that there was some probability the president was telling the truth. When the Iranians came out

and said, no, we never called, markets fell. What you learn from that is that markets are not sure

that they can believe the American president, when talking to the American people about America's intentions in a war America started.

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