National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett sat down with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Monday morning, looked into the camera and explained that your inflation problem has a simple solution: just reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“Core inflation is already just a smidge above target… Top line inflation is going to go down as soon as we get the straits open,” Hassett said. “And it’s going to go down a lot.”

A smidge above target.

Read that again while you think about your last grocery run. Your insurance renewal. The “service fee” that showed up on your restaurant bill.

The shrinking cereal box that costs $1.50 more than it did three years ago.

A smidge.

That’s about the most Washington thing I’ve heard all week.

Your Rundown for Friday, May 29, 2026...

Parallel Paths

Hassett pointed to falling Treasury yields and strong underlying economic momentum as signs that inflation pressures could continue easing in the months ahead.

Yeah, economic models look okay from 30,000 feet.

But Americans live on the ground floor. And down here, inflation never really left — it just got sneakier.

The official CPI might have cooled, but your wallet never got the memo.

Now, Hassett isn’t wrong that Hormuz matters.

When it gets squeezed, energy spikes — and energy is baked into almost everything: trucking, manufacturing, fertilizer, packaging. A shock there cracks outward like a windshield.

But making Hormuz the headline answer to inflation lets Washington completely off the hook for everything else.

It ignores decades of hyper-globalized, zero-redundancy supply chains that turned out to be catastrophically fragile. It looked genius during the boom years — right up until it didn’t.

If the strait reopens and prices don’t drop the way Hassett promises, there’ll be a new excuse.

If prices do dip slightly? Expect a victory lap that ignores the cumulative damage of three-plus years of elevated costs that never fully reversed.

The official inflation narrative and the experience of most Americans have been running on parallel tracks for years. And the gap between them is a policy failure, not a messaging problem.

Hassett knows all this. Which is exactly what makes the “Hormuz will fix it" framing so maddening. It's not a solution.

Market Rundown for Friday, May 29, 2026

S&P 500 futures are up 0.10% to 7,590.

Oil’s down 1.40% to $87.65 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold is up 0.45% to $4,553.10 per ounce.

Bitcoin’s down 0.25% to $73,160.