Market participants will find out this week how quickly the world’s largest economy expanded during the final quarter of 2025.

I know what you’re thinking: “My God, I’m on tenterhooks.” I’m right there with you. But try, if you can, to suppress the sarcasm. We’re professionals. Macro mavens, all of us. We’re obliged to care. Or at least pretend to.

Economists expect to hear the US expansion slowed to a still respectable 3.0% in Q4 from a prior-quarter 4.4%, which counted as the briskest pace in years.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker was still tipping a 4%+ pace until last week’s retail sales report which, you’ll recall, saw the control group print a decline for December. A downward revision to November’s control group readout was insult to injury.

Concerns around the health of the US consumer — fanned, perhaps, by a New York Fed report which showed rising mortgage delinquencies, particularly among lower-income cohorts — helped push 10-year Treasury yields below 4.05% to the lowest since December 3 just ahead of the long holiday weekend.

Indeed, last week was (very quietly) the best stretch for the long-end (20+ years) ETF since the week that included the “Liberation Day” tariff unveil. (Treasurys sold off sharply the following week.)

There’s the simple chart. For some folks, it’ll scream: “REFI!”

As BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Vail Hartman noted, the proximity of a three-handle 10-year seems remarkable in the context of a super-warm super-core CPI read (admittedly a product of post-pandemic seasonality) and, more to the point, a sharp upturn in January job creation flagged by the BLS.

“We’ll argue that the bid for Treasurys represents growing apprehension regarding the health of the consumer,” Lyngen wrote, adding that the above-mentioned December retail sales control group miss “implies greater consumer stress.”

Suffice to say the personal consumption component of GDP will be watched more closely than the headline this Friday. Economists expect a 2.6% pace there, and a 0.4% print on the monthly personal spending readout for December which, clumsily, will be released at the exact same time as the advanced read on overall Q4 growth.

The December personal income and spending release will of course be accompanied by PCE prices for December. In all likelihood, core PCE will show a 0.3% advance. The implication: Real personal spending was probably flat-ish to close 2025.

So: Who you gonna believe? The consumer and bonds or the BLS’s contention that jobs growth at the beginning of 2026 evidenced a sharp upturn? Recall that the raft of revisions accompanying last week’s BLS release found headline payrolls for January of 2025 revised to show a 48,000 net job loss versus a pre-revision estimate of a 111,000-job gain.

Also on deck in the US this week: A smattering of housing updates and the January FOMC minutes.