Consumer sentiment in December was 53.3, a decrease from over 70 in January and near historic lows. Despite low sentiment, consumer spending continues, with retailers reporting signs of a solid holiday shopping season.

The total number of billionaires across the globe reached new heights in 2025, due partly to the soaring valuations of tech companies and rising stock markets. Some 2,900 billionaires now control $15.8 trillion, up from about 2,700 billionaires with a cumulative wealth of nearly $14 trillion a year earlier. The number and wealth of billionaires as a whole were boosted by the second-highest number of new billionaires minted in a year—287.

The OECD forecasts U.S. economic growth of 2% this year and 1.7% next year, a slight upgrade from previous projections. Global economic growth is projected to slow to 2.9% next year from 3.2% this year, with risks from increased trade barriers.

Deal value in the U.S. so far this year is up more than 40% from the same period in 2024 to about $1.9 trillion. And there have been roughly twice as many deals valued above $10 billion than in the same period in 2024.

Business investment in AI might have accounted for as much as half of the growth in gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, in the first six months of the year.

The dollar-denominated value of outstanding loans from centralized crypto lenders and decentralized lending platforms ballooned to a record high around $74 billion at the end of September, exceeding the previous record of $69 billion set in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Consumer sentiment declined in November, with the index falling from 53.6 to 50.3. The reading is now just slightly above the levels that sentiment sank to amid the historic inflation that hit in 2022 during the Covid-19 pandemic, making it among the lowest results recorded in the survey’s decades of history.

Americans gained more than $63 trillion dollars in wealth from the first quarter of 2020 through the second quarter of 2025. Real-estate wealth rose more than 61% during that span, while wealth from stocks and mutual funds went up 127%.

Year to date, employers have announced 1,099,500 job cuts, up 65% from the first ten months of last year.

The top 10% of earners accounted for 49.2% of national spending in the second quarter of 2025, a record high, with their spending up 4.4% year-over-year.