Courtney Brown

It just, it doesn't look like it.

It looks like we're still stuck.

And that's frustrating if you don't have a job and you want one, or if you have a job and you want to leave it and maybe make some more money elsewhere, you're just stuck.

Yeah, Neil and I, I think in our macro newsletter, we were a little gloomy this week, but that's only because we got some indicators that price growth was a little hot in January.

And historically, January can be a hot-ish month for inflation, but even hotter than usual by some measures.

We get CPI next week, of course, the Consumer Price Index.

But I think the big story here is, is companies that were holding the line on prices in 2025...

Are they finally at the point where they're just saying, I can't hold the line anymore.

I need to pass some of this cost on to consumers.

And January is an ideal month to do that because that's when companies usually reassess their pricing strategies.

And we don't even have a decision on whether the bulk of Trump's tariffs

are legal yet.

The Supreme Court still has to rule on that.

And so I think we're going to see a much more movement, perhaps, perhaps on the inflation front and the higher prices front with respective tariffs.

Thanks, Guy.

At this particular moment in time, people are thinking most about kitchen table issues.

Their top two concerns are the persistence of high prices as well as weakening labor markets.

Joanne Xu, who runs the Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan, says people are more worried now about the possibility of losing their job than they have been since the early months of the pandemic in 2020.

The pain of high prices, that's something that has been cited by consumers for the last four years.

But when it comes to the labor market, that's actually relatively new.