About the only improvement was in gasoline prices, and they’re going back up now.
The ‘improvement’ in Gasoline prices was solely do to oil Fracking which pushed huge amounts of oil into the US and world markets.
Despite the low prices, the economy was crap in most of the country EXCEPT for those oil producing states. Then the Saudi’s dumped HUGE amounts of oil into the world market to destroy the US fracking industry and those states lost all of the jobs they created. With the loss of the jobs, that decreased US usage of oil and continued to depress the price of oil.
Now that the ‘competition’ of the Saudis has effectively been eliminated for the near future, we are seeing a slow but steady increase in the cost of oil.
We are getting hammered in multiple directions economically. Even low gas prices won’t help us now.