Kimberly Adams

So let me stick with you for a second, Rachel, about the K-shaped economy, as we call it.

And I mean, this was a big topic during the pandemic, but kind of receded into the background a bit because we did see a lot of that wage growth coming out of the pandemic, boosting lower wage workers.

Why is this coming back now, this big divide and what seems to be getting a bigger divide between higher and lower income consumers?

And Courtney, it's not just affecting consumers.

This is showing up on the business side of things as well.

It's funny you should mention data because I wanted to ask you both about, you know, the fact that it was a big year for talking about economic data, delayed data because of the shutdown, is data being politicized, data sets that we lost under Doge.

So real quick, in the last minute we got left, Courtney, how are you changing your data game in 2026?

What are you looking at?

What about you, Rachel?

What's your data game in 2026?

Well, thank you so much.

That's Rachel Siegel at The Washington Post, Courtney Brown at Axios.

Happy New Year, you two.

Same to you, Kimberly.

Not a ton of new info out today for traders to work with, but markets were open and it was still an up day and week on Wall Street.

We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

So since we were talking about consumer spending, there may be some folks out there who possibly overdid it a bit with their holiday spending and might be looking forward to a holiday or year-end bonus to help them get out of the hole as the year winds down.

You know, that extra check or bump in pay that some people get if their company is doing particularly well or as a thank you from a client or company as a way to say thank you.

hand out extra cash around the holidays.

Marketplace's Carla Javier called up some experts to understand who's still offering those checks and why.