Evergreen explainers on prices, wages, housing, and the machinery of the U.S. economy — how the money side of American life actually works.
The $45,000 sticker price that almost nobody pays, the discount machine behind "merit aid," and the state budget line that quietly decides your public tuition. A tour of university finance, from Baumol's cost disease to the 56% discount rate.
Most grocery prices ratchet up and stay. Egg prices rocket, crash, and rocket again. The reason is biology meeting industrial structure — a supply chain where one virus in one barn can erase millions of layers overnight, and rebuilding takes months.
The federal government owns the loan, a contractor answers the phone, and your interest rate was set by a Treasury auction the May before you borrowed. The $1.7 trillion student loan machine, taken apart piece by piece.
Inflation cooling doesn't mean prices fall — it means they climb slower. Here's the machinery that makes grocery prices a one-way ratchet, from sticky wages to the 11.8-cent farm share.
America builds fewer homes than it forms households, and has for years. A data story about the lost decade of construction, why estimates of the gap range from 1.5 to 5.5 million homes, and the mechanics that keep supply stuck.
The Fed doesn't set your mortgage rate, your credit-card APR, or even "the" interest rate. Here's the actual chain — from an FOMC vote to two administered rates to the prices banks charge you — walked end to end.
