President Donald Trump’s allies this week hyped up newly released data showing that the US economy grew by more than 4% in the third quarter of 2025, but economists and journalists who dove into the report’s finer details found some troubling signs.<\/p>\n
Ron Insana, a finance reporter and a former hedge fund manager, told<\/a> MS Now’s Stephanie Ruhle on Tuesday night that there is a “split economy” in which growth is being driven primarily by spending from the top 20% of income earners, whom he noted accounted for 63% of all spending in the economy.<\/p>\n On the other side, Insana pointed to retail sales data that painted a very different picture for those on the lower end of the income scale.<\/p>\n “When you look at lower income individuals, nearly half of them are using ‘buy-now-pay-later’ for their holiday shopping,” he said. “So we have this real split… People at the top are doing fine, people in the middle and lower income brackets are struggling a bit, to say the least.”<\/p>\n Dean Baker<\/a>, co-founder and senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, also took note of this split in the US economy, and he cited<\/a> the latest data showing that real gross domestic income, which more directly measures worker compensation over total economic output, grew at just 2.4% during the third quarter.<\/p>\n Baker also said that most of the gains in gross domestic income showed up at the top of the income ladder, while workers<\/a>‘ income growth remained stagnant.<\/p>\n The theme of a split economy also showed up in an analysis<\/a> from Politico financial services reporter Sam Sutton published on Wednesday, which cited recent data from Bank of America<\/a> showing that the bank’s “top account holders saw take-home pay climb 4% over the last year, while income growth for poorer households grew just 1.4%.”<\/p>\n Sutton said that this divergence in fortunes between America’s wealthy and everyone else was showing up in polling that shows US voters sour on the state of the economy.<\/p>\n “In survey after survey<\/a>, a majority of Americans say<\/a> they\u2019re straining under the pressure<\/a> of rising living expenses and a softening job market,” Sutton said. “The Federal Reserve<\/a> Bank of Boston says low-income consumers have ‘substantially’ higher levels of credit card debt than they did before the pandemic<\/a>. Even as growth and asset prices soar, Trump\u2019s approval ratings are sagging.”<\/p>\n