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- [00:00]
A
Vrbo's last minute deals make chasing fresh mountain powder incredibly easy. With thousands of homes close to the slopes, you can get epic pow freshies, first tracks and more. Find last minute deals with the last minute filter on the app. Book a private vacation rental now@vrbo.com two.
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B
Faced January meets the economy that also looks two ways at once. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. It is official Greg Abel is is now boss of one of the most storied of American companies, Berkshire Hathaway. It's a filling big shoes story. Abel replaces a man named Buffett who turned a textile firm into a money making powerhouse. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer joins us now. First, Nancy, you look under the hood in a lot of industries and it's often Berkshire sitting there.
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C
Absolutely. Berkshire Hathaway is a huge conglomerate. Over the years, it's swallowed up companies like Geico Insurance, BNSF Railway, Bell Laboratories, and Warren Buffett also became known as the Oracle of Omaha for his stock picks and his ability to keep beating the market.
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B
Now it's Mr. Abel in the chair. Been around, right? Yeah.
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C
Abel is hardly a newcomer. He was already vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He ran the companies it owns outside of the insurance business. And he's been a more active manager than Warren Buffett, who's pretty hands off. At Berkshire's annual meeting in 2025, Abel said he would keep advising the leaders of Berkshire's various businesses.
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D
But if there's opportunities to see where maybe you've seen something in another business or an opportunity I may see in their industry, we're going to discuss it and see if that's something we should pursue or are we properly addressing the.
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B
Risk Now, Nancy, how Warren Buffett invests is the subject of entire libraries. How's the new guy go about it?
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E
Yeah.
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C
Over the years, Berkshire Hathaway bought such a variety of companies that in some ways it's seen as a bellwether of the US Economy. And Berkshire is sitting on a pile of cash. Buffett has been selling stock and Eeple doesn't seem to be in a rush to go out and spend that money in the market. He says Berkshire's cash is an enormous asset. That'll be a cushion if there's an economic downturn.
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B
All right, Nancy, thank you. It is the first business day of the new year, and we can now tell you the popular S&P 500 stock index went up 17% in 2025, went about 10% as the average return. The NASDAQ index fueled in part by artificial intelligence. Mania went up 20% in the year just ended. But there is more to life and the economy than stocks going up. Let's consult Diane Swonk, chief economist at the audit, tax and advisory firm kpmg. Diane, happy New Year to you.
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F
Happy New Year.
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B
All right, so Jan U ery gets its name from. I know you've been thinking about this.
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F
Yes. The God Janus, the only truly Roman deity and their most important, which had two faces on one head, one looking forward to the future and one firmly looking back to the past.
- [03:11]
B
And it's a bifurcated idea wrapped in there. And you know, that's the economy we have. I mean, I was just doing the stock market. Happy days are here again. But. But what about the job market?
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F
Exactly. It looks like employment. Even if we get a good December, which I expect we will, will be the weakest in 2025 since 2020 and the second weakest year for employment gains since the global financial crisis in 2009. That's simply stunning. Even as the economy accelerated over the summer, employment further stalled.
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B
Here you are comparing it to 2020, which was this disastrous pandemic year, and all these zesty headlines about AI powered growth, and you're reminding us about what it's like to find a job out there.
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F
If you have a job, you're clinging on right now. If you don't have a job, you're left wanting. And that is what's been so hard about the economy, along with increases in inflation. And we know in December, even as we got past the government shutdown, consumer attitudes continue to sour, both the labor market and what they're dealing with in terms of price hikes.
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B
Right. So not mass layoffs, certainly many layoffs. But the big story is companies unwilling to add new positions.
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F
Exactly. We're not hiring enough people to accommodate those entering the labor force. That includes everyone from new college grads to people returning from the labor force after maybe losing a job, may be giving up on looking for a job and now looking again. Also important is that unemployment claims have fallen recently, but we know that the seasonal factors during the holidays artificially suppress some of those numbers. So the layoffs may be higher than we're actually seeing in the official data.
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B
Diane Swonk, Chief Economist at KPMG. Thank you.
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F
Thank you.
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B
To start 2026, the market indicators are mixed. The Dow is down 67 10% in early trading, but the S&P 500 is up 6, 10%. Nasdaq up a lot, 1.3% at this point, the word from Rome is the Trump administration's proposed 92% import tax on Italian spaghetti linguini cavatelli strozza pretti will come way down. According to Italian officials, the tariff is likely going to be 2 to 14% increase. U.S. officials say there's no final decision, but that Italian pasta makers have addressed many concerns. If you can just look it up on Reddit or Rotten Tomatoes, do pro movie critics have a future? Tom Brook with our newsroom partners at the BBC reports.
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E
Back in analog times it was newsprint and the sacred words that film critics wrote which held sway and guided moviegoers. But that has changed. Now full time critics and newspapers and other media outlets face possible extinction. There's talk of an escalating crisis confronting traditional film critics. Alyssa Wilkinson at the New York Times is one of America's top film critics.
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G
This year has been pretty rough on the full time film critics in America in particular. A lot of people have lost their job. A lot of companies have been laying off their film critics or reducing the size of the budgets that they have to pay freelance film critics.
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E
New York's Museum of the Moving Image recently held a special panel discussion on the so called film criticism crisis. Participating were top critics who recently lost their jobs. One of them, Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair, was chief film critic for 12 years. His concern for the future of film.
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H
Critics everywhere it's a really big problem. I think there was something important about people being able to make a living doing it because that means they can see more, they have more time to really devote their passion to it, which helps everyone. So I'm nervous. I don't see a lot of the jobs that are going away coming back.
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E
Outside this New York cinema, filmgoers don't appear that concerned. Many don't really read traditional film reviews, relying instead on TikTok and different social media and other sources to determine what films. They will go and see people's recommendations.
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G
Online, like Instagram reviews and stuff like that.
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H
I think critics just have a lot.
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B
Less influence than they do in general in all fields.
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E
Defenders of traditional film criticism will argue that it's being marginalized because the claim is made that we live in an age when the characteristics of a critic which include knowledge, expertise and independence of thought, are not valued as much as they once were.
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G
Alyssa Wilkinson Again, criticism complicates art, right? It tells you that there are shades of meaning, that there's a range of reactions that you can have to work of art, even that different people can have different reactions to a work of art, that we don't all have to have the same kind of response to art. And that scares people. That scares people in power. That scares people who would prefer for us to all kind of be uniform in our reaction to the work around us.
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E
Filmmakers, too, are alarmed by the thinning ranks of critics. A few years ago, a low budget documentary, Detropia, portraying the decline of the city of Detroit, got a lot of recognition. One of its co directors, Heidi Ewing, claims that only happened because of a film critic. But the stark reality is that the traditional film critic in many countries has now become an endangered species.
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B
Tom Brook, BBC. We're from apm, American Public Media.