Courtney Brown

Will consumers keep spending or will they start to be more cautious?

That's a massive question for the economy going into next year.

Right, right.

My motto, at least in my head lately, has been everything is K-shaped.

There is a real big divide in all of the big aspects of society right now where it's starting to become more apparent.

Even in the stock market, you can see the divide between businesses that have an AI theme.

Those are doing really well versus those that may not have such a big role in the AI boom.

you're starting to see kind of a K-shape develop there as well.

But I really wonder, again, going back to this question about the consumer, I wonder how much the higher end consumer can continue to carry consumer spending the way that we've seen.

Just based on corporate anecdotes, we know that lower income consumers are starting to pull back, shift their spending, as Rachel was kind of alluding to.

And high income consumers just keep chugging along powered by stock market returns or what have you.

What happens if there is sort of an interruption in the stock market boom?

How does that show up in the economic data?

That's something I'll be watching for next year.

I feel like everyone else's private sector data has become a bigger part of my, if you will, data diet.

And that was just kind of by force during the government shutdown, right?

But I think that will continue next year for me personally, because I think there are a lot of questions about, you know, what's happening with the labor market as there's this massive population change underway with immigration crackdown.

It's getting very difficult to understand

how many jobs are being added and what that means for the labor market.

Happy New Year.