Hi, David Brancaccio here. This week on Marketplace Morning Report, I was asked to share a personal

story. My wife and I worked on a plan to move back to California with two of our offspring living in the

Golden State. In November, we made that dream a reality when we purchased a cozy bungalow in the city of Altadena.

Just a few weeks later, our home, along with so many thousands of others, is in ruins, total loss.

This week, we return to survey what little the wildfire left and to start planning what might be next for us.

I'm learning a lot, and some of it may be useful to others rebuilding after disaster from

cleaning up the mess to navigating insurance, mortgages, taxes, to securing contractors and more.

Listen to Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your podcasts.

This economy and how it's doing, to start, an update on the AI search wars, and then we wrap things up in Cumberland County, Tennessee.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl.

It is Thursday, today the 30th of January.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

There are days when the news of this economy is far from the most important thing happening. And attention today is rightly on the

victims of the crash last night at Reagan National Airport in Washington, 67 people.

The economy, though, does go on. And our lead story today is actually the economy,

specifically how much it's growing. That is measured in something called gross domestic product,

all the goods and services produced, bought, and sold here. And as it happens, we learned

this morning overall economic growth last year wasn't so bad. 2.8% in

24. Thanks, mostly to you, the humble American consumer. Your spending grew at the fastest

pace in two years. Marketplaces Kristen Schwab gets us going with why that is happening even

after the journey we've all been on with inflation and interest rates.

...