Hey there. Inflation slowed a bit in July, the government reported today, but the cost of living is still rising a hair faster than average wages. On “Marketplace” today, an expert called it “the cruise control economy.” That is, everything’s chugging along, just not as well as we might want. 

To that point, we’ll start today with oil and gas. Crude prices have fallen from recent wartime peaks, but they’re still elevated. And the fuel we make out of that oil is more expensive than it’s been in years. My colleague Elizabeth Trovall is going to break it down for us. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor  

Even before attacks on Iran earlier this year, the world wasn’t exactly overflowing with refining capacity.

“The market was sort of structurally tight, because what we'd seen was that refineries had shut down,” said Dan Evans, global head of fuels and refining research at S&P Global Energy. “They'd shut down in the U.S. There'd been some closures in Europe as well, and yet demand was still growing.”

That tightness made the refined products market sensitive to disruptions, and there have been some big ones.

“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” Evans said.

And Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining infrastructure, “which has reduced Russia's ability to export products,” he said. “We've seen them ban exports of diesel, and also the constraints that China is placing on product exports as well.”

The crude oil market, on the other hand, is feeling less pressure. Gregory Brew, an analyst for the Eurasia Group, said for one, there’s a sense that the U.S. has backed away from escalation in Iran.

“The other factor is the fact that Hormuz is not completely closed,” Brew said. “Available data suggests that a reasonable amount of crude is getting out of the Strait.”

But most consumers, businesses, and producers don’t buy crude oil. They buy jet fuel, gasoline, or diesel.

“Even if we see de-escalation in the Middle East and crude prices falling relative to that, product prices are probably going to remain high,” Brew said.

Susan Bell, senior vice president of downstream research with Rystad Energy, also believes higher prices are here for a while.

“Gasoline might weaken a little bit just because of seasonality,” Bell said. “[But] we do expect all of those key products to be very strong into the fall.”

And those elevated prices are not great for strong GDP growth globally.

“Because of the inflationary pressures, and consumers will feel the pinch,” Bell said. “They'll have to spend more money on the gasoline that they need to buy to get their kids to and from school and to get to and from work.”

Consumers are feeling pinched, so why are younger people splashing out for “little treats”? Scanlon sees this behavior as totally rational, given that Gen Z is putting off major financial milestones like buying a house and starting a family — maybe forever.

It’s been three years since “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” raked in billions at the box office and won a few Oscars. Christopher Nolan has already made a blockbuster follow-up in “The Odyssey,” but what about “Barbie 2”?

Variety reports Warner Bros. made the filmmakers its biggest offer ever as part of a yearslong negotiation, but director Greta Gerwig and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are holding out for a dream salary. The sequel may stay on the shelf forever; WB only has a few months to get a Barbie movie in production before the film rights go back to Mattel.