Savannah Guthrie returned to the “TODAY” anchor desk Monday, more than two months after her mother disappeared.

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“We are so glad you started your week with us, and it is good to be home,” Guthrie said at the start of the show. She wore a bright yellow dress, echoing the yellow ribbons and flowers left at her mother’s home.

“TODAY” co-anchor Craig Melvin, wearing a yellow tie, patted Guthrie’s hand and replied: “Yes, it is good to have you at home.”

The two anchors then turned to the morning’s top headlines, including an opening segment about the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. “Well, here we go, ready or not,” Guthrie said. “Let’s do the news.”

Guthrie, who has co-anchored “TODAY” since 2012, stepped away from her role in early February after Nancy Guthrie, 84, went missing from her home near Tucson, Arizona. Authorities have described the case as a possible kidnapping or abduction.

Guthrie told Hoda Kotb last month that she believed returning to the “TODAY” anchor desk is “part of my purpose right now,” even though it was difficult to imagine going back to a workplace she associates with “joy and lightness.”

“I can’t come back and try to be something that I’m not. But I can’t not come back because it’s my family,” Guthrie said in the interview, her first since the start of the ordeal. “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’ll belong anymore, but I would like to try.”

In the second hour of Monday’s show, Guthrie greeted “TODAY” fans gathered outside on Rockefeller Plaza, some wearing yellow pins and holding signs with her mother’s photo. Guthrie fought back tears as she held co-host Jenna Bush Hager’s hand and thanked her supporters for their prayers and letters.

“You guys have been so beautiful,” she said. “I’ve received so many letters, so much kindness to me and my whole family. We feel it. We feel your prayers.”

Nancy Guthrie’s family reported her missing around noon Feb. 1 after she did not show up at a friend’s house for virtual church services, according to the Pima County Sheriff’s Office. She was last seen the previous night around 9:45 p.m. after having dinner at her daughter Annie Guthrie’s home, according to authorities.

The investigation into her disappearance gripped the nation and put an intense spotlight on the quiet Catalina Foothills area of Tucson. Authorities have not identified a suspect or motive, though the FBI released chilling doorbell camera video of an armed and masked man outside Nancy Guthrie’s home on the morning she was reported missing.

The bureau described him as a man of average build, 5 feet, 9 inches to 5 feet, 10 inches tall, wearing a black Ozark Trail Hiker Pack 25-liter backpack.

Guthrie and her siblings, Camron Guthrie and Annie Guthrie, have provided updates on the case via social media. In emotionally wrenching videos on Instagram, they have thanked members of the public for their prayers and made direct appeals to Nancy Guthrie’s possible abductor.

“Someone knows how to find our mom and bring her home,” Guthrie wrote in the caption to a Feb. 24 video post.

The family is offering up to $1 million for information that leads to the 84-year-old’s recovery. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for “information leading to the recovery of Nancy Guthrie and/or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance.”

Kotb, a “TODAY” contributor, substituted for Guthrie. In that period, Guthrie withdrew from NBC’s coverage of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics; Mary Carillo stepped in to co-host the opening ceremony alongside NBC Sports’ Terry Gannon.

Guthrie visited the “TODAY” set March 5. In photos taken from outside the studio by a photographer for The Associated Press, Guthrie could be seen wiping tears and embracing her colleagues. The visit was not televised.

“I really wanted to come and see everybody. I just love this beautiful place that we call home, where we get to come and be every day,” Guthrie told Kotb, adding: “When times are hard, you want to be with your family.”

The average price of a gallon of gasoline hit $4 Tuesday for the first time since mid-2022, as the cost of oil surges due to the Iran war.

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In the month since the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the average price of unleaded gas has spiked more than a dollar a gallon. On Tuesday morning, the average price nationwide was $4.02 per gallon, motor club AAA said.

It’s not just retail gasoline. The diesel fuel used to power trucks delivering goods to stores, farm equipment and public transit has risen to $5.45 per gallon, more than $1.80 higher than it was a year ago.

Driving that is the soaring cost of crude oil worldwide. U.S West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude has risen more than 50% since the war began Feb. 28, while Brent, the international benchmark, has seen a jump of nearly 60%.

On Monday, U.S. crude oil settled above $100 per barrel for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Brent crude oil is poised to see its largest one-month increase on record.

Oil prices had already started rising before the Iran war began, fueled by fears that a conflict was imminent. Since the start of the year, the cost of U.S. crude oil is up more than 80% and Brent has skyrocketed almost 90%.

In response to strikes by the U.S. and Israel, Iran has effectively blocked shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical channel off its southern coast. Tehran has also attacked its Gulf Arab neighbors, who are major oil producers.

Typically, more than 20% of the world’s oil supply moves through the waterway. But Iran has repeatedly threatened to attack ships if they move through the strait without permission or if they’re associated with the U.S. or Israel. Several tankers have been hit.

As a result, many tankers are stranded in the Persian Gulf, unable to deliver their products to markets.

Some tankers have been allowed to pass through the strait, including one associated with India and three associated with China. But overall traffic through the waterway is down more than 90% in March.

During the first 28 days of the war, a total of only 55 to 60 tankers have cleared the Strait of Hormuz, according to the ship tracking website TankerTrackers.

Before the war, more than 100 ships per day made the passage, it said.

“This rise in gasoline spending could potentially dampen consumers’ ability to spend on ‘nice-to-have’ or discretionary categories,” Bank of America economists recently wrote.

This year, the average U.S. household will spend an additional $740 on gas because of the jump in oil prices, according to economists from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“The consumer has already seen the sticker shock from rising gasoline prices and increased airline ticket prices from the rising cost of jet fuel,” longtime industry analyst Andy Lipow said. “However, the full effects of the higher diesel prices has yet to be felt and that will flow through the economy over the next few months.”

As American consumers adjust to higher gas prices, oil dependent nations in Europe and Asia are already facing much more severe energy shocks. Inflation, oil and gas rationing and sharp pullbacks in economic growth estimates are impacting billions of people worldwide.

Global oil prices continued their recent climb and the S&P 500 closed lower Monday after a weekend when Iran-backed Houthi militants launched ballistic missiles at Israel and 3,500 additional U.S. troops arrived in the Middle East.

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The conflict between Iran, the U.S. and Israel has entered its second month, with disruptions to oil and other energy and commodities supplies starting to reverberate around the world.

Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, gained 1.5%, to more than $114 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude climbed almost 5%, to about $104 a barrel, settling above $100 for the first time since 2022.

Rising oil prices are one of the more immediate consequences of the war. Average U.S. gasoline prices hit $3.99 a gallon Monday, according to AAA, the highest since the summer of 2022. Patrick De Haan, chief analyst at Gas Buddy, projected Monday afternoon they would rise to $4 within 24 hours as the average price of gasoline in Florida surged to $4.29.

De Haan estimates that U.S. drivers will soon have spent an additional $10 billion on gasoline since the conflict began just one month ago.

The S&P 500, one of the broadest measures of stocks, fell 0.4% Monday and is now within less than a full percentage point of having declined 10% since its most recent high in January. The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index is already in correction territory, down more than 13% from its October high.

Some investors have begun to question President Donald Trump’s ability to reassure financial markets without material progress on the ground.

Investors also increased their purchases of U.S. government bonds Monday over fears of an economic slowdown, sending bond yields lower and dragging down stocks.

Traders now believe higher oil prices may put a damper on overall demand for goods and services.

Bloomberg News reported that U.S. officials and Wall Street analysts have begun considering the prospect that oil prices could surge to as much as $200 a barrel as the largest oil shock in decades continues to reverberate.

That prospect has led analysts to project a global economic slowdown that would hit a U.S. economy already facing suddenly higher gasoline prices.

Earlier Monday, Trump said “great progress has been made” in talks with Iran. At the same time, he threatened to destroy Iran’s civilian energy and water infrastructure if a deal to end the war and reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz is not reached soon.

Tehran has said U.S. proposals were “unrealistic” and “unreasonable.”

“I think we’ll make a deal with them, pretty sure, but it’s possible we won’t,” Trump told reporters late Sunday. He later said a deal could come “soon.”

Trump also said that Iran “gave us most” of a 15-point plan the U.S. sent Tehran to end the war, which Iran has yet to publicly confirm, and that 20 boatloads of oil — on top of 10 the previous week — will be passing through the Strait of Hormuz beginning Monday “out of a sign of respect.”

Trump separately told the Financial Times on Sunday that an Iran deal could be made “fairly quickly” and that he wants to “take the oil in Iran.”

Stocks surged Tuesday, with the S&P 500 closing up 2.9% while the Nasdaq rose 3.8% and the Dow gained 1,125 points.

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But this very good day capped off what was a very bad month for U.S. equities. The S&P 500 fell 5.09% in March, and the Nasdaq Composite declined 4.75%.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the near-total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, Iranian controlled waterway through which a fifth of the world’s crude oil typically transits every day, weighed heavily on markets throughout the month.

Tuesday was also the end of the first quarter of the year, one when the S&P 500 and Nasdaq posted their worst annual starts since 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine rocked markets.

For the first quarter, the S&P 500 dropped 4.6% and the Nasdaq declined 7.1%.

Oil prices, meanwhile, soared over the past month, driving up the cost of fuel and triggering a domino effect of higher prices around the globe.

Brent, the international oil benchmark, posted its largest monthly percentage increase ever, after having risen more than 60%. The price of U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude oil also soared in March, climbing more than 50% in its biggest one-month gain since 2020.

For millions of drivers in the U.S., the increases manifest as higher prices for gas. And here, too, the past month was remarkable. The average price of unleaded gasoline hit $4 per gallon Tuesday, up more than 34% in just four weeks.

But it’s not just gas prices that hit U.S. households this month.

More than half of all adults in the U.S. own stocks, often via their retirement accounts and the broader funds those managed accounts invest in. Most of the time, market moves up and down don’t swing the value of those kinds of diversified retirement accounts.

But March was a different story.

“Stocks have been following the lead of oil prices at an unprecedented rate over the last several weeks, and if the U.S. just walked away from the Middle East with the Strait still blockaded, energy markets would likely remain incredibly supply-constrained, keeping prices high,” analysts at Bespoke Investment Group wrote Tuesday.

“The longer prices are high and supplies are limited, the worse it’s going to be for the global economy and ultimately stock prices,” they added.

The wild market swings of the second Trump administration are in sharp contrast to how Donald Trump said the markets would react if he were elected to a second term in 2024.

“There are many people that are saying that the only reason the Stock Market is high is because I am leading in all of the Polls, and if I don’t win, we will have a CRASH of similar proportions to 1929,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in May 2024 as he campaigned for the presidency.

Shortly after he was re-elected in 2024, Trump was asked whether he believed market indexes were good barometers of his performance in office. “To me … all of it together, it’s very important,” he told CNBC.

But during the first 14 months of his second term, U.S. markets have faced some of the sharpest drawdowns in history.

In February and March of last year, Trump’s sweeping tariff policies roiled the market, pushing the S&P 500 into its seventh-fastest correction of all time. A correction is when a stock or an index declines 10% from its most recent record high.

Just over a year later, the S&P 500 isn’t far from doing it again. As of Tuesday’s closing bell, the index had tumbled 6.7% from its most recent high in January.

As oil prices rise, stocks typically fall given that higher oil prices typically lead to higher prices across a number of industry sectors over the long run.

Already, inflation is on the rise around the world. On Tuesday morning, eurozone inflation came in at 2.5%, from 1.9% the month before, according to the European Central Bank.

On Tuesday, the Nikkei 225 in Japan recorded its worst month since 2008. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 index posted its worst month since 2022.

Two near-corrections in just over a year illustrates just how volatile the administration’s policies have been for markets.

Still, since Trump took office for a second time, the S&P 500 is up 8%, although last year global stocks far outpaced the broad U.S. index.

In 2025, global stocks as measured by the MSCI ACWI ex USA index rose nearly 30%, while U.S. stocks rose just 16%. Global stocks haven’t beaten American equities by that much during the first year of a presidential term since 1993, according to data from Bloomberg.

In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly touted the Dow’s recent 50,000 milestone as a sign that the markets are doing well in his presidency.

“You know, it’s sort of crazy, I hit 50,000 on the Dow,” Trump said at an investment conference in Florida on Friday. “People said that wouldn’t be possible within four years.”

“And then we hit 7,000 on the S&P,” Trump added. “People said that’s even harder than hitting 50,000 on the Dow.”

As of Tuesday, the Dow had plunged more than 3,600 points since it hit 50,000, a drop of nearly 7.5%.