MARK ZANDI

All market eyes Tuesday will be on the release of the Labor Department's consumer price index.

Going into Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden sees a nation with a glowing economic future.

It can be hard to tell if lawmakers are getting close to a deal, but there will be signs of progress — or lack thereof.

The question now is how much more evidence policymakers will need to see before they take their foot off the brake.

Inflation continued to moderate in December, a welcome sign for consumers. Gasoline prices plummeted and many other categories are pulling back.

For months, the outlook for the U.S. economy has been a mostly bleak one: Inflation hitting a four-decade high, consumer spending weakening, interest rates surging.

December's strong job growth combined with slowing wage inflation is fueling optimism that the economy might just see a soft landing.

Whether deep or shallow, long or short, the idea the economy is heading for a recession is pretty much the consensus view among economists.

At times, 2022 felt like the 1970s or early ’80s.

Health insurance prices deflated the last two months, per the consumer price index, and are poised to fall more. That may not reflect what consumers pay.

Inflation was cooler than expected in November amid a slowdown in several broad consumer categories, according to the consumer price index issued Tuesday.

Pain is on the way even if interest-rate hikes work as intended—which is not a given.

"I think our biggest problem, at least for the foreseeable future, is high inflation," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told CNBC. The Fed can raise interest rates to slow inflation, which ultimately makes the cost of borrowing higher for everyday Americans, and that can be just as painful as inflation. Fiscal policy enacted by Congress and power wielded by big business can help fight rising costs. "Congress has much more targeted tools," Claudia Sahm, former Fed economist, told CNBC. Watch the video above to learn more about how corporations and Congress influence inflation, why the Fed doesn't have to take on rising costs alone and what it will take to normalize the U.S. economy.

Rising prices on everyday items have many Americans living paycheck to paycheck. But there are ways to spend and save smartly.

Thursday's GDP report is expected to show the U.S. economy grew in July, August and September, after shrinking in the first half of the year.

Prices should cool enough for the U.S. to avoid recession, according to Moody's Analytics chief eocnomist Mark Zandi.

Falling stock markets have wiped out $9 trillion in wealth from U.S. households, putting pressure on family balance sheets and spending.

From a red-hot job market to negative GDP growth, economists are divided on the health of the U.S. economy.

Home loan costs have roughly doubled over the last year, pushing many house-hunters to the sidelines.

Household cash flow has been declining, but consumer income will begin to grow after the holidays, making a recession less likely, according to Goldman Sachs.

Inflation may finally be cooling, thanks to falling gasoline prices and fading supply chain issues.

Employers were expected to have added a robust 258,000 jobs in July, but the pace of payroll creation is likely to slow in coming months.

Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's views remained a mystery as party leaders eye votes later this week on their emerging economic legislation.

Economists are forecasting the economy barely grew in the second quarter, and some expect that it actually contracted.

Forecasters say inflation likely hit a new, four-decade high last month, fueled in part by record high gasoline prices. Gas prices have since fallen, but overall inflation is still elevated.

The U.S. dollar has been surging so much that it’s nearly equal in value to the euro for the first time in 20 years.

Low-income workers are the only group not to touch their savings yet due to strong wage gains, a new analysis finds.

As some economists raise the odds of a recession happening, here's what you need to know.

Lawmakers have long worried that suspending the gas tax would allow oil companies to reap additional profits.

Lawmakers have long worried that suspending the gas tax would allow oil companies to reap additional profits.

Facing stubbornly high gas prices that average about $5 a gallon nationwide, President Joe Biden has urged Congress to suspend federal gasoline and diesel taxes for three months.

President Joe Biden is calling on Congress to suspend federal gasoline and diesel taxes for three months — an election-year move meant to ease financial pressures.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell won praise for his deft leadership during the maelstrom of the pandemic recession.

The average price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline rose above $5 nationally for the first time, and prices look set to continue to rise into the summer months.

Economists expect inflation in May continued to burn white hot, with energy, food, rent and health care costs all rising.

Stagflation.

"Recession risks are high — uncomfortably high — and rising," one leading economist says.

During the past two years, home prices nationally have soared more than 30%. Rising mortgage rates make affording a home even harder. That has many people wondering if we're in another housing bubble.

AA reports that the national average cost of gasoline as of Tuesday is $4.37.

The stock market may not literally be the economy, but the distinction between the two is getting increasingly harder to draw.

April's job growth was strong and wage gains were solid, yet fewer Americans were working or looking for jobs than in March.

The economy was expected to have added 400,000 jobs in April in a tight labor market, but economists say the number of new payrolls could soon start to slow.

Consumer price inflation in March is expected to have risen the most since December 1981, driven by higher food costs, rising rents and runaway energy prices.

The Fed is expected to raise interest rates by a quarter point, a major step in reversing the easing it put in place to help the economy through the pandemic.

There are more important things than inflation, such as defending democracies. But the longer the war goes on, the bigger the economic costs are likely to be.

Moscow’s war on Ukraine and the ferocious financial backlash it’s unleashed are not only inflicting an economic catastrophe on President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Powell is tasked with telling Congress that the central bank will be doing more to control inflation at a time when markets expect it will be doing less.

The Federal Reserve’s path toward higher interest rates may become cloudier if tensions continue to rise between Russia and Ukraine.

The U.S. economy grew last year at the fastest pace since 1984, but growth was tempered by successive waves of the pandemic.

LBJ tried jawboning.

The coronavirus pandemic has taken the jobs market through the looking glass and produced what one economist calls an Alice in Wonderland job market.

Companies added 571,000 for the month, beating the 395,000 Dow Jones estimate and just ahead of September's downwardly revised 523,000.

The U.S. economy likely slowed sharply in the third quarter as the delta variant and persistent supply chain woes weighed on growth. The months ahead should be better.

Calling fellow Democrats to the White House, President Joe Biden is pushing in person for them to hasten work on his “build back better” agenda.

Signs of slowdown are everywhere after huge increases in vacation bookings, traveling and eating out earlier this year. Southwest Airlines, Airbnb and restaurants are starting to see a pullback.

The new federal vaccine requirement for large companies has raised concerns over whether it will now be even harder to retain workers or find new ones.

While the delta variant has postponed return to office plans for many companies, workers will return at some point to a changed workplace enviroment.

Private payrolls rose just 374,000 for the month, well below the Dow Jones estimate of 600,000 though above July's 326,000, according to ADP.

But impact could deepen if the storm leads to a prolonged shutdown of Gulf Coast energy facilities.

With more than 1 million customers in Louisiana and Mississippi having lost power, Hurricane Ida is sure to take a toll on the energy, chemical and shipping industries that have major hubs along the Gulf Coast.

The GDP report Thursday showed prices rising at a 6.5% annual rate.

The U.S. economy grew at a 6.6% annual rate last quarter, slightly faster than previously estimated, the government said Thursday in a report that pointed to a sustained consumer-led rebound from the pandemic recession.

Sharp post-pandemic price increases in some parts of the economy appear to be fading, but rent is expected to show up as a longer lasting factor in inflation.

The surge in consumer prices has likely peaked. In July, inflation was about as hot as it should get post pandemic, economists say.

Predictions of a second “Roaring Twenties” have proved premature.

U.S. President Joe Biden's proposal for a global minimum corporate tax will get another going over at a meeting of top finance officials.

The American economy delivered 559,000 added jobs in May.

This satellite image from Cnes2021, Distribution Airbus DS, shows the cargo ship MV Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal near Suez, Egypt, Thursday, March 25, 2021. The skyscraper-sized cargo ship wedged across Egypt's Suez Canal further imperiled global shipping Thursday as at least 150 other vessels needing to pass through the crucial waterway idled waiting for the obstruction to clear, authorities said. The iconic shipping journal Lloyd’s List estimates that goods worth $9.6 billion pass through the canal every day. Jim Burkhard, who heads crude oil research at IHS Markit, said the impact on the global oil market will be limited if the canal is cleared soon. Wood Mackenzie analyst Lucas Schmitt said only a few LNG shipments were near the canal when the blockage occurred.

GDP in the October-December quarter rose from an estimated rate last month of 4.1%, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. AdEconomists believe all the government relief measures will boost GDP in the current January-March quarter to 5% or higher. Boussour forecast GDP growth for the full year of 7% with annualized growth rates close to 10% in the spring and summer. GDP fell at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic ended the country's record-long economic expansion, which was in its 11th year. GDP plunged by a record 31.4% rate in the April-June quarter and then rebounded by a record rate of 33.4% in the third quarter before slowing to the 4.3% gain in the fourth quarter.

That gain had followed a record-shattering 31.4% annual plunge in the April-June quarter, when the economy sank into a free-fall. The damage from the virus caused GDP to contract at a 5% annual rate in last year's January-March quarter. Housing grew at a sizzling 33.5% annual rate, business investment at a 13.8% rate. That was the deepest annual setback since the economy shrank 11.6% in 1946, when the economy was demobilizing after World War II. That was lower than the 1.6% annual GDP gains during the Obama administration, a period that also included a recession.

Fed officials themselves, including Chair Jerome Powell, have sounded a similar message. In mid-March, when the virus first hit hard, the Fed accelerated its bond purchases to try to ease disruptions in the Treasury bond market resulting from the outbreak. The central bank later modified the rationale for its bond purchases by saying they would help support the economy — the same reason it gave during earlier bond purchases that it engineered to bolster the weak recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. In the past, critics have asserted that the Fed's aggressive bond buying risked destabilizing financial markets and triggering runaway inflation. “Fed officials have made it pretty clear they need help from Congress at this point.”

Even with that surge, the world’s largest economy has yet to fully rebound from its plunge in spring when the virus first erupted. Already, in the United and Europe, some governments are re-imposing restrictions to help stem the spread of the virus. Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, noted that the record-high third quarter growth in the nation’s gross domestic product “tells us little, if anything, about momentum heading into” the current quarter. But for the U.S. economy as a whole, the prospect that the virus could roar back is a growing fear. Without additional aid, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has warned, those dynamics could re-emerge.

Well be paying into Social Security through the general fund.But aides to the president on Thursday sought to walk back Trumps comments. In comments Wednesday to reporters, Trump said at least four times that he would end the payroll tax. The 12.4% payroll tax split between employers and workers funds Social Security. It is highly unlikely that economic growth would be enough to offset the loss of the payroll tax. Payroll tax cuts are among the least effective ways to promote growth during a recession, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody Analytics.

That would be more than triple the previous worst quarterly economic fall, a 10% drop set in 1958. On Thursday, the government will issue its first of three estimates of economic activity, as measured by the gross domestic product, for the April-June quarter. Sohn noted that the economy needed 6 years to regain the ground it had lost in the 2007-2009 Great Recession. Were trying to do everything we can, day by day, to keep the health of our business, Farish said. ___AP Business Writer Joyce M. Rosenberg in New York contributed to this report.

While Senate Republicans struggled to roll out their own $1 trillion proposal, Pelosi implored the White House and GOP lawmakers to stop the infighting and come to the negotiating table with Democrats. Our priority, our objective, should be restarting the economy.As bipartisan talks unfold, the White House is now suggesting a narrower relief package may be all that's possible with Friday's approaching deadlines. Pelosi has resisted tackling a relief package in piecemeal fashion, arguing that broader aid is needed for Americans. She panned the Trump administrations desire to reduce the $600 weekly unemployment aid to ensure no more than 70% of prepandemic wages. Friday is also the end of a federal eviction moratorium on millions of rental units that the White House said it wants to extend in some fashion.

CHICAGO President Donald Trump has always been a big numbers guy. )The presidents premature claim to economic victory reflects an artful relationship with numbers that Trump has long displayed. Left unsaid by the president was that African American unemployment inched up to 16.8% last month, the highest its been in more than a decade. Asian American workers' unemployment rate also rose from 14.5% to 15%. Trump scoffed at an African American reporter who noted the disconnect between Trumps comments and what minority workers are enduring.

BALTIMORE U.S. businesses shed 2.8 million jobs in May, significantly less than the 9.3 million job losses that were expected. The payroll company ADP reported Wednesday that businesses have let go of a combined 22.6 million jobs since March, with the bulk of the layoffs occurring in April. Other sectors that suffered as part of April's 19.6 million job losses saw their layoffs slow sharply. The leisure and hospitality industrywhich includes hotels and restaurantsshed 105,000 jobs last month, down from a revised 7.7 million losses in April. Economists expect the Friday report will show 8 million job losses in May as the unemployment rate approaches 20%.

On the other is the wait-and-see Senate hitting pause on swift action and carrying on with nonpandemic business. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., at the White House to discuss the next steps on an aid package. You wouldnt even know theres a COVID crisis, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York told ABC's The View. Crazy. Its just so wrong.While the House works remotely, the lights-on Senate has the legislative stage to itself. Trump arrived on Capitol Hill for an impromptu visit to the Senate Republican lunch Tuesday that quickly turned to politics.

It’s also bedeviling policymakers and central bankers who are struggling to assess the economic damage from an outbreak that's reached 37 countries and territories, infected 80,000 people and killed 2,700 worldwide. Yet if they respond too slowly or timidly, they risk having the economic damage deepen and spread. When the virus began grabbing headlines last month, most economists were relatively sanguine about the economic damage it could cause. What happens in China carries far greater economic weight than it did 17 years ago. But he said it's "still too soon to even speculate about either the size or the persistence" of the coronavirus' effects.

The retail apocalypse over the past several years has devastated America's department stores, chains and mom-and-pops. NEW YORK - The retail apocalypse over the past several years has devastated America's department stores, chains and mom-and-pops. Store closings could accelerate and layoffs in the sector a major provider of American jobs could spread. And retail is one of the biggest sources of employment in the US economy, with 15.8 million jobs, or more than 10% of all jobs nationwide. The retail sector has lost nearly 200,000 jobs since the start of 2017, with most of those jobs losses coming from traditional department stores and clothing stores.

NEW YORK - Warning bells are going off about a possible recession in America, perhaps in time for the 2020 election. So far, consumer spending has held up pretty well. Because consumer spending accounts for about 70% of the nation's economic activity, that's all good news. Despite strength so far, there are some worrisome signs in consumer spending. "When you move it generates a lot of other consumer spending.