Jeanne Whalen

So how do you make sense of this just up and to the right in the stock market amid uncertainty in the economy?

It almost feels like the stock market is becoming like an economy unto itself.

So many people are investing in it and so many people continue to invest in it and they're making so much money that they're putting back in the stock market that it's just becoming this like self-sustaining beast.

Where it's become a force that actually can like propel economic activity just by the fact that it's like continuing to be positive.

I heard that recently from a real estate agent when I was writing about housing on the North Shore of Chicago, you know, really high-end housing above $4 million, just that she felt she was seeing more people bidding a lot on houses, partly because their stock portfolios were doing so well.

It gave them a lot of confidence to go out and spend.

Another economic indicator that is strong?

Consumer spending.

The National Retail Federation is expecting consumers will spend more than a trillion dollars this holiday season.

Ho, ho, ho.

But the caveat here is that the bulk of consumer spending is coming from a small group of people at the very top of the economic ladder.

And is that something that is an unstoppable force?

Or could there be one little speed bump that derails all of that spending?

Everyone's worried that the AI bubble will burst and that it will be sort of an emperor has new clothes situations when we all realize that these companies that are building AI models really don't have a way to monetize them, that there's not a way for them to earn money selling this service and that that will cause a lot of stocks in this space to fall.

So there's some dominoes out there.

What are your, we'll just go around, what are the biggest questions that are on your mind about the economy heading into 2026 or the things that you'll be watching for?

I'm interested in how the housing market and rates shake out.

We have this huge number of people who are just sitting on their low mortgage rates from the pandemic era of 3% or 3.5% and don't want to sell their houses.

And what I've heard from real estate agents is that if rates can get down into the 5% range, that might be the golden age.

zone for some people to say, OK, that's low enough for me to sell my place and buy again, even though that's higher, a higher rate than I have now.