Back in June, the Federal Reserve raised its interest rates to five and a quarter percent. It’s a single number that tells a much wider story about the impact of world events on our economy. Often what we read in the news feels worrying in some abstract form—it’s simply a loop that we can’t close, some unwelcome chaos that’s sufficiently distant from our observable world that it’s gone again by the time we put our phone away. But this isn’t that.
Our country’s economic health affects just about everything in our observable world: the price of boiling the kettle while we check the news on our
