The Federal Reserve said today it’s holding interest rates steady while the economy struggles with high gas prices and uncertainty from the war in Iran. Keeping prices stable is half of the Fed’s job. The other is maximizing employment. Our colleague Mitchell Hartman starts us off by explaining why achieving both simultaneously is so difficult. Then we’ll look at the high price of shrimp, a red yarn shortage, and a dentist who’s trying to stay afloat. — Tony Wagner and Carrie Barber, newsletter editors

The economy added 156,000 jobs in the past 12 months. Over the year before that, it added more than a million.

 

“For some time, it’s been clear the market has weakened,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at consulting firm RSM.

 

But the market has stabilized quite a bit recently, said Christine Cooper, chief U.S. economist and managing director at CoStar Group.

 

“We had some job losses in February, we had job gains in January, some losses in December, and [they] seem to kind of offset each other,” Cooper said.

 

But the labor pool is shrinking, she added, with the Trump administration cutting immigration and baby boomers retiring. Slower job growth might not be such a big problem — except for the sharp uptick in long-term unemployment.

 

Workers who still have a job are starting to fall behind financially.

 

“Given the stagnancy we’ve seen across many sectors in the labor market, it’s not surprising to me we’ve seen wage growth decline,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at jobs website Indeed.

 

The wages employers are posting on Indeed are up just 2.1% from this time last year. Consumer prices are up 2.4%. And that brings things back to the “dual mandate.”

 

Brusuelas said the Fed can’t attack both ends of it at the same time.

“Given the oil and energy shock which is shaping up to be the largest since the 1970s, the Federal Reserve is going to find itself in a tension between price stability and maximum sustainable employment,” he said.

 

Control over inflation will be the first order of business for the Fed, Brusuelas said, before it does anything to stimulate the labor market, however much it might be struggling.

 

“Price stability is a precondition of maximum sustainable employment,” he said.

 

That’s because without price stability, employers won’t feel confident enough in the economy going forward or have the financial resources to ramp up hiring again.

Roughly three-quarters of Americans have dental insurance, but about nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults told Humana they’ve delayed dental treatment to take care of other expenses. But dental patients aren’t the only ones facing higher costs. All this week, our series “My Economy” is bringing you surprising stories of real people scraping together a living in health care.

Knitting stores are seeing a run on red after a Minneapolis-area yarn shop unearthed a 1940s hat design to protest 2026 immigration enforcement. The $5 pattern, with roots in Norwegian anti-Nazi protests, caught on all around the country and one supplier told “Marketplace” the demand for red yarn is five or 10 times higher than normal.

It’s not the first time crafters have picked up their needles in solidarity. Remember the pink, cat-eared pussy hats of 2017? Throngs of demonstrators wore them at women's marches the day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration — the lucky ones who could find pink yarn in time. Back then, there were more fabric stores, too.