A week away from the desk can mean returning to a story that has moved on without you. This time the story mostly stood still, which is its own kind

Last week’s letter left the Federal Reserve walking into a crosscurrent: a wall of data that argued for patience and a reopened energy shock that argued for vigilance. This week

The last letter promised a stretch of data dense enough to test every forecast on the board. This letter will cover the last two weeks. The data arrived, and most

Last week’s letter left an open question hanging in the air: Would the labor market’s slow warming ever reach the people standing inside it? This week supplied a partial answer,