Hey friends - the weekend is here. Spring is sprangin’ and March Madness is serving some nailbiters.

🌎 The Big Picture

The war is the main story, obviously. The bottom line is that the economy is doing decently at a high level. A lot of people are at their limit, and what everybody needed this year was for incomes to continue to catch up to the higher cost of living and for borrowing costs to come down.

That was the projected path, with a lot of optimism from most economists/analysts, for 2026.

• Life would get incrementally more affordable relative to wages.

• Tax refunds would be bigger than normal, giving people more cash.

• The housing market would pick up with lower rates.

• Clarity on trade policy and regulations would clear things up for businesses to hire and invest more.

But the war (and tariffs) is already disrupting that path and is on the brink of potentially making that hypothetical positive trajectory pretty impossible. Not to be a downer.

Fuel costs are already much higher, and the longer they stay high, the more it will feed into other costs, as businesses raise prices to deal with their higher expenses.

You’re already seeing this with USPS raising prices by 8% due to higher fuel costs.

That’s on top of the import taxes.

Business slowed in March to its weakest level in almost a year as prices surged.

The S&P Global Purchasing Managers Index, which tracks business activity across the US economy, has dropped for two months in a row. This was the first broad look at how the war in the Middle East has started to impact the economy, and things have slowed quickly. The services sector, which makes up most of the economy, slowed far more than economists expected. Businesses are starting to pull back. For the first time in over a year, companies reduced hiring as rising costs and uncertainty led firms to reduce overhead.

Rising costs are the main problem, and they’re rising fast. Higher fuel costs, on top of the higher import taxes implemented throughout the past year, drove businesses’ supply costs up by the most in ten months. Many companies are passing those costs on to their customers, reporting the largest monthly increase in average selling prices since the peak inflation of 2022.

These reports from US companies suggest that both businesses and households will need to plan for higher costs and slower spending this spring.

It’s not a good time for unnecessary price spikes.

Home insurance is getting more expensive, consistently. The average annual premium is projected to rise 4% in 2026 to about $3,057, marking the fifth straight year of increases, according to Insurify, an insurance comparison site.

Healthcare costs are forcing millions of Americans to make tough choices. A survey of nearly 20,000 adults by the West Health-Gallup Center found that 1 in 3 Americans cut back on food, utilities, or other daily expenses in 2025 to pay for healthcare.

Enhanced federal health insurance subsidies expired at the end of 2025 for roughly 22 million Americans who don’t have insurance through their employers or a government program like Medicare, causing premiums to more than double for the average person choosing their plan through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace. Nearly 1 in 10 people enrolled in those plans last year dropped coverage entirely due to the higher premiums, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

This reacceleration of rising prices has also disrupted the plan for interest rates.

Everyone expected it to get cheaper and easier to borrow money this year, which would spur more spending, home buying, and investing. There’s now a risk of it going the other direction.

Mortgage rates surged last week to their highest level since October. The steep jump in borrowing costs discouraged buyers and slowed home purchases a lot. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate jumped to 6.43%. Applications to purchase a home fell 5% for the week, as higher rates made monthly payments more difficult to afford and nervousness about the fate of the economy pushed some potential buyers to the sidelines.

People don’t expect policymakers to bring down short-term borrowing costs as much this year either, especially if inflation keeps getting worse. The Fed will have a hard time justifying cutting its benchmark interest rate with inflation rising every month.

So… a lot is riding on whether this war can come to a swift end. I’m no geopolitics expert, but the ones I listen to aren’t super confident that this can be neatly put back in the box.

🏭 The Companies Everyone’s Talking About

❔ The Big Question of the Week

Scoops app users: We have taken the beta app offline for a short period for some major updates. Can’t wait to show you all what we’ve been working on! Reach out if you have any questions.

We’re going to switch up the content in this spotlight for a bit to make sure you all have the info you need to master your week.