Rachel Siegel

Hi, Kimberly.

Well, I completely agree with everything that Courtney just said.

And I also feel like it's hard to parse out different stories coming from different types of consumers and different types of spending too.

So there's this big looming question about higher end consumers, how much they're willing to absorb, how much bandwidth they continue to have for higher prices.

And then I feel like there's this sort of additional question that follows from there of how much that kind of spending impacts

is dwarfing lower income consumers or people who are not necessarily the drivers of that kind of consumer spending, economic growth.

And I feel like the kind of big numbers, the resilience and those higher end consumers has a real ability to kind of dwarf the story that's happening on the lower end of the income spectrum.

And I'd be really curious to see what happens there, too.

You know, if there are ways that lower income consumers continue to change their spending, ways that they shift to, you know, different types of stores, different types of saving, and what both of those stories tell us about the economy moving forward.

Yeah, I feel like some of it reflects back to what we were just talking about, the makeup of the kind of spending that we're seeing in the economy, who's sour on the economy, who continues to maybe not even have had that kind of jump in sentiment in the first place.

And I cover housing, so if I was just putting my housing hat on for a minute, I feel like there were kind of a lot of

unfulfilled hopes and expectations and promises that maybe we're supposed to make that gap a little bit narrower, right?

We were supposed to see all of this new housing come online and maybe rents were going to fall and all of that new supply was going to make housing more affordable and maybe interest rates were also going to come down.

And that picture really hasn't materialized.

Instead, the housing market is one that continues to block so many people out of homeownership,

or makes it so that affordable rentals are really hard to see.

So I feel like maybe there's this kind of additional chapter to the way we talk about the K-shaped economy that's a reflection not just of the inequality that we saw coming out of the pandemic, but one that really wasn't resolved even with certain policies or economic changes that we expected to come to fruition since then.

I feel like a lot of journalists, we can start stories by using a data point and then going and finding examples that tell that story or the other way around.

And I feel like I've been tilting towards the latter, not necessarily seeing a data point published and assuming that it's reflective of what the whole story is.

So maybe that's just something that I feel like is going to be shaping some of my reporting.