As we ring in the new year, what might 2026 hold? In the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report by the BBC World Service. I'm Will Bain. Good morning.

The last 12 months have brought lots of turbulence to global economies from fast-changing US tariff policies to the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence and the trade and geopolitical

tensions that have come along with that. So let's hear from some of the BBC's top correspondence

on what could be coming up in 2026. We'll start with the BBC's Deputy Economics editor,

Darsini David, and our North American business correspondent, Michelle Flurry.

Darshini tariffs have been the story. We knew coming into the year it would be given President Trump's election campaign, but did we underestimate the scale to which it would be the story?

A lot of economists are saying, 2026, that's when we'll see it. And guess what? We got it in April,

of course, that so-called Liberation Day and that big board of tariffs. And as the years sort of gone on, we've been going, oh, hang on a minute, there's some resilience here. Even though we saw a bit of a climb down from the president, various trade agreements coming into place, you know, are things working out in a better way than perhaps some had expected, certainly, this has been the year we saw the World Trading Order turned on its head

much quicker than we thought, and much more dramatically. Yeah, really interesting thought. Michelle,

bring us to today and the impact where you are in the US of a year of tariffs. It's absolutely

true that tariffs, when they were first unveiled,

sent a huge shock not just around the rest of the world, but also in America. A scale of those

Liberation Day tariffs on April 2nd, when we had the board, and which were quickly ratcheted

up in the case of China to over 100%. I think people didn't expect it to go that hard. I think now

the expectation is that the impacts are still, because they were delayed, because we saw that back

and forth, they're actually going to show up in 2026. What does the resilience look like then in the

US right now? You're seeing a kind of two-pronged economy. I mean, I think economists refer to it as

K-shape. And by that, I mean that those who have more money, and especially those who are

more maybe exposed, in other words, have money in the stock market, are feeling probably not

too bad at the moment. The AI boom that we keep talking about is creating a wealth effect where people

are feeling, actually, you know, I'm going to spend more on holidays. If you look at the most recent

Black Friday here in the United States, early reports suggest that it was the higher income

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