Top Of The K-Shaped Economy Starting To Crack? | Danielle DiMartino Booth

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**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (0:31)
What's bothering us is that when you look inside the top income earners, whether you're talking about Conference Board or University of Michigan, it's those top earners whose confidence is coming down the most quickly.

**Adam Taggart** (0:49)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. The continued challenge in cost of living is still at the forefront of most Americans' minds, but the stock market, trading at near record highs still, just appears it couldn't care less. And the economy continues to chug along nicely too, currently forecasted to grow at 2.5% here in Q2.
And even despite consumers' stated concerns, retail sales remain resilient, even though they surprised to the upside last month.
Are those worried about a consumer-driven slowdown, perhaps even a recession, just too pessimistic? Or is there greater danger lying beneath the surface data than most are aware of? To find out, we've got the great good fortune to welcome back to the program today, Danielle Booth, CEO and Chief Strategist for QI Research, and author of the book Fed Up, an insider's take on why the Federal Reserve is bad for America. Danielle, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (1:46)
Happy to be here. Happy to be here. Happy summer.

**Adam Taggart** (1:48)
All right. Thanks. Full disclosure for folks, Danielle and I are restarting here because I made a technical goof.
We're going to very quickly just summarize a few things we talked earlier. Lots going on in the world, Danielle. One of the nice things that's going on is the Americas 250th. There's a lot to take pause and celebrate around that. I'll let you mention it again, but you were saying Peggy Noonan has a great series on that, and you and I were talking about how wonderful it's been to see the world through the eyes of a lot of the FIFA tourists here, and realize that there's a lot of great things about America, and we have to remind ourselves of that, and then also perhaps underscore for ourselves the importance of fixing what's broken and preserving all these great things.

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (2:34)
You couldn't have said any better.
It was so refreshing to read Peggy and the series. I've come back from Scotland and I visited some clients in London, and it's so nice to hear people on the ground, admiring our spirit and our happiness and our culture, and Bucky's beef jerky, you know. It's all been lovely.

**Adam Taggart** (3:00)
And ranch dressing, apparently.

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (3:02)
Ranch dressing. I mean, let's just embrace it all. But I don't think that our happiness is a nation, and our pride and our patriotism necessarily reflects in the Big Mac or economy.

**Adam Taggart** (3:20)
No, it doesn't. And again, I'll condense some of the conversation we had before I botched things technically.
Feel free to repeat any of this, but you basically said, hey, look, if you look at it from a jobs loss perspective, layoffs perspective, you and your team at QI think that a lot of 2025 was basically spent in recession for many consumers. I have pointed out that it's pretty hard. Whoops, sorry. Do you want to?

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (3:50)
No, I just want to clarify because it's not a thought process. It's just the hardest data that exists. So just to clarify, non-farm payrolls that's reported every non-farm payroll Friday, that is a survey.
And that survey is checked against the hard data, which is the quarterly census of employment and wages, which requires all US employers of all sizes, more than 95% of them report headcount on a quarterly basis. So that survey data is checked against the hard data from the quarterly census of employment and wages. And that from US employers told us that in the first, second and third quarters of 2025, there were net job losses. So that goes beyond the definition of a recession.

**Adam Taggart** (4:35)
Okay, great, great clarification. And if I took good notes again of our previous conversation, I think you said the US economy lost about 600,000 full-time jobs in 2025? That's about the order of magnitude you're talking about?