Diane Swonk

It's still well above the 6.2% we saw back in 2019, but it is a move down and an important move down for those

who are really struggling to get a job.

What we're starting to see is some of the ice melt in the labor market now and things beginning to shift a bit.

We need to keep up that momentum for workers.

On the flip side of it, it keeps the Fed on the sidelines longer.

Well, we are seeing a major shift in things like leisure and hospitality in terms of quit rates.

Quit rates in that sector have soared even as they've cooled and sort of come to a near standstill across the economy.

In the job openings and labor turnover survey, we saw

those quit rates really soar.

That has not been accompanied by a lot of wage pressures in the economy that was very weak last year.

And in fact, vacations actually went down a bit over the course of the year.

We saw only the affluent households continuing to spend heavily on vacations.

And that showed up in the breakdown in terms of people paying to go to the front of the bus, in terms of the planes and luxury hotels.

continue to do extremely well, but the rest of the economy side of vacations did not in 2025.

Well, I think the important issue is that we know that fewer firms and fewer households are counting for more of the economic gains in the US economy.

And that's where you get to the K-shaped economy.

We've talked about it a lot, but it's showing up in just about everywhere and every strata, even with higher income households now trading down and going to big box discounters, trying to get more value because they're feeling strained as well, unless they have a large stock portfolio.

So there really is this delineating

thread that goes through the U.S.

economy in terms of wealth versus nonwealth.