Good morning. This is Jeff Sparshott with the latest on the economy. You can send questions, comments and suggestions by replying to this email.

Workers called it quits less frequently in 2023, a sign confidence in the labor market is falling as the economy is expected to slow and Americans are taking longer to find new jobs. That is a turnaround from the years just after the pandemic took hold, when resignations surged and companies faced labor shortages. Last year, workers quit 5.6 million fewer jobs from January through November than the same period in 2022—a decline of 12%, according to the Labor Department. WSJ's Austen Hufford will have the latest on quits, hiring and job openings when the Labor Department releases its December report at 10 a.m. ET.

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home-price index for November is expected to climb 5.7% from one year earlier. (9 a.m. ET)

U.S. job openings are expected to hold steady at 8.8 million in December, unchanged from the prior month. (10 a.m. ET)

The Conference Board's consumer confidence index is expected to rise to 115 in January from 110.7 one month earlier. (10 a.m. ET)

The Federal Reserve begins its two-day policy meeting.

China's official purchasing managers indexes are due out at 8:30 p.m. ET.

Amazon is cutting hundreds of jobs. So are Macy’s and Wayfair. But one retail worker is still in high demand: Walmart superstore manager. Walmart is giving bigger bonuses and adding stock awards to their annual pay packages, pushing the total compensation for the best ones to more than $400,000 a year. The retail giant has thousands of store managers who act as midlevel executives. Many start as clerks and climb the ranks without college degrees, Sarah Nassauer reports.

The highest quality office buildings have had much better success navigating the industry’s turmoil. Now, even premier towers are starting to wobble. Rents at the highest-end buildings have been falling, while the rate of leasing has been slowing. WSJ's Peter Grant looks at the fate of elite buildings as more companies have accepted the reality of hybrid work schedules.

• For Retailers, Business Is Back and Landlords Say No More Rent Discounts (Read)

Oil prices have climbed, and not just because of the recent turmoil in the Red Sea. Futures on Brent crude gained more than 6% last week to settle at $83.55 a barrel Friday, their highest level since early November. The rise came after winter storms slammed U.S. oil production and new data showed the country’s economy has remained resilient, suggesting robust demand for fuel ahead. WSJ's Bob Henderson takes a look at what is driving the oil market’s unexpected moves in recent weeks.

• U.S. Oil Drillers Are Going Electric—if They Can Get the Electricity (Read)

Some influential dealers are pressing General Motors to introduce hybrid models, worried they risk losing customers who aren’t ready to make the switch to fully electric cars. GM has largely bypassed hybrids, which pair an internal combustion engine with a small battery and electric motor to boost fuel efficiency. The dealers expressed concern that more customers are looking for a middle ground between conventional gas-engine cars and EVs, Mike Colias reports.

• Toyota Remains World’s Top-Selling Carmaker (Read)
• BYD Shares Fall as China’s Auto Price War Weighs on Bottom Line (Read)

Europe’s economy stagnated in the final three months of last year, expanding a divide between a booming U.S. and a European continent that is increasingly left behind. The European Union’s statistics agency Tuesday said gross domestic product in the eurozone was unchanged in the final three months of last year. During 2023 as a whole, Eurostat recorded growth of just 0.5%, while the U.S. economy expanded by 2.5%. The fresh economic data showed higher borrowing costs had compounded the earlier impact of higher energy prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Paul Hannon reports.

The yield on China’s benchmark government bond dropped to its lowest level in over two decades on growing expectations that Beijing will deliver more monetary policy easing to help bolster its economy. China’s 10-year bond yield touched 2.47%—its lowest since about 2002—before clawing back some ground. Analysts say the move reflects mounting hopes of more action from policymakers, and a positive reaction to the central bank’s recent steps in the wake of a bruising selloff in Chinese stock markets, Jiahui Huang and Fabiana Negrin Ochoa report.

Donald Trump in 2018 said, "trade wars are good, and easy to win." So did the U.S. win his clash with China, the European Union and other nations? "The trade war has not to date provided economic help to the U.S. heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered U.S. employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negative employment impacts, primarily in agriculture; and these harms were only partly mitigated by compensatory U.S. agricultural subsidies. Consistent with expressive views of politics, the tariff war appears nevertheless to have been a political success for the governing Republican party. Residents of regions more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress," MIT's David Autor, the World Bank's Anne Beck, University of Zurich's David Dorn and Harvard's Gordon Hanson write in a new working paper.

Real Time Economics comes to you from WSJ reporters and editors around the world. Today's issue was curated and edited by Jeff Sparshott (@jeffsparshott) and Greg Ip (@greg_ip) in Washington, D.C., and editors in London.

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