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The economic year that was and the year to come.

For Marketplace, I'm Novasafo in for David Brancaccio.

We're taking stock of 2025 as we look toward what might be in store for the economy in the year ahead.

The biggest economic story, of course, has been tariffs.

President Trump raised them to their highest rate in nearly a century.

Consequently, the word economists uttered the most this year was uncertainty. That said,

we wanted to see which economist was brave enough to look uncertainty in the eye and make some predictions for 2026.

And Bank of America's senior economist, Stephen Juneau,

obliged. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on. When it comes to the economy,

what do you expect will be the most spoken word that you will utter in 2026?

Continued outperformance. Maybe that's two words, obviously, but yeah. Okay. Go on, explain yourself.

Well, I think when we look to next year, there's good reason to expect that we can continue to see

the U.S. economy, just outperformance peers, continue to grow kind of above trend. There's a lot of

tailwinds for next year. You have an expansionary fiscal bill. You have

hopefully less tariff uncertainty, less uncertainty relative to this year. You have an easing Fed,

so lower rates should help on the margin. And then you have the AI-related CAP-X that should continue

next year that we saw was obviously a big reason for kind of the

resiliency this year in the face of all this uncertainty.

Where do you see the inflation headed and where do you see the job market, the labor market

...