Once upon a time, ride on the edge of the forest

and if a golden-haired girl, this golden yellow-haired girl's name was Goldilocks.

Once upon a time, that time being 2019, the US economy was doing something very strange and very good.

And she came across the house of the bare family in between the trees.

Two things were happening. Inflation was low, but not zero. There was growth.

And unemployment was low. But there were still out-of-work people to fill new positions.

She tipped her spoon into the smallest one.

This part just need her cold or too hot.

It was just right.

It's today explained I'm Noel King.

Coming up, the bare market is getting closer. The Goldilocks economy has fled out a back window.

What is coming next?

It's today explained I'm Noel King. I have reunited with my old friend Jacob Goldstein.

He's the host of What's Your Problem, which is a show about entrepreneurs and engineers

and the problems that they're trying to solve.

But once upon a time, Jacob and I worked at NPR's Planet Money, where we covered the Volcker

Rule and the Phillips Curve and Moral Hazard and all of these other economic terms in phenomenon.

But I don't remember us covering the Goldilocks era, which was the period we were living in then.

The Goldilocks era I'm thinking of is the period leading up to the pandemic, right?

The sort of late teens. In the US, in the late teens, there was this combination of things happening

that you shouldn't be allowed to get. There was super low inflation, which is a big deal,

important, nice for the economy. The government was running pretty big deficits,

...