Chapter 1: How did the U.S. economy perform in 2025?
It's almost the end of the year, which gets a nerd like me thinking, how did the economy do this year? Fortunately, I know some people who know things. We have a Wall Street Journal economic dream team here. So could each of you introduce yourselves? Sure. I'm Jean Whalen. I'm an economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Chicago.
I'm Justin Lehart. I'm an economics reporter in New York.
I'm Rachel Wolf, an economics reporter focused on consumers and based in New Orleans.
And if you could summarize the state of the economy right now in a single word, what would it be? Uncertain. Meh. Meh. All right, Rachel. Top uncertain and meh.
Asymmetrical.
Based on those answers, uncertain and asymmetrical, I'm starting to get the impression that you guys think it's not such a great economy right now. It really depends where you're sitting. For older people, for people with more savings who own their homes, it's a great time. The value of their homes has gone way up. The value of their 401ks has really soared incredibly over the last few years.
But people on the lower end of the scale, things for them are looking worse. So that's the old, what economists sometimes call the K-shaped economy. So it really depends where you're sitting.
And young people in particular are having a tougher time in the job market. We know that they've been priced out of homeownership. And so we're seeing a lot of frustration, especially among people in their 20s and early 30s.
It's very, very confusing. It doesn't look like it's a recession right now, but it's not going great guns. And we know that people's views of the economy, you know, generally are really, you know, strikingly bad.
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Chapter 2: What impact have tariffs had on the economy?
That's after the break. The stock market has done really well this year.
We are on track for another record close here on Wall Street. AI is certainly the investment theme of the last few years. NVIDIA has become the first company to be worth $5 trillion.
The Nasdaq is up about 15% this year, thanks in large part to just seven tech companies.
The so-called Magnificent Seven make up nearly 30% of the S&P's market value, and gains from just those companies, which include Microsoft and Apple, have accounted for more than 60% of returns over the last 12 months.
So how do you make sense of this just up and to the right in the stock market amid uncertainty in the economy?
We know that people who own stocks are feeling really good about the economy. And so the growth has been so good that that's really not only changing stock owners' economic mood, it's also prompting more people to get into the stock market.
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.
Yeah, it's so interesting. But we do know that people's preference in the stock market drives their spending outside of it. So it is related in that way, that even if people aren't cashing out their stocks to spend money, some of them are. But even if they're not doing that, it makes them more willing to spend otherwise because they're like, look, I'm doing well.
People are kind of using it as their savings accounts.
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