Tariffs are in effect and in flux, the job market is unstable and artificial intelligence affects the way business is done. The longest shutdown in U.S. history has ended, but its effects are still being felt.
Consumers and businesses alike come face to face with all of it and more as the holiday shopping season gets underway.
On the latest episode of the Business & Society podcast, two University of Michigan business experts discuss the current state of the economy, unpacking the macroeconomic data and the uncertainty surrounding it. They are Ari Shwayder, faculty director of the Executive MBA Program and lecturer of business economics and public policy, and Michael Speigl, a lecturer of marketing who is dealer principal of WE Auto, an auto group in Michigan and Tennessee.
"I think what we've been seeing in consumer spending is what some folks have been calling a K-shaped recovery," Shwayder said. "That's the idea that you have upper-income households are still going strong, spending-that line is going up-and you have the lower-income households that are flat or cutting back-that's sort of a line going down. So you have a sort of divergence in the economy."
