Hurricane Helene Follow - Chimney Rock , NC

Natural disasters significantly reduced US job growth for October (Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

US job growth slows on hurricane impact, but negative revisions are the bigger worry

October numbers are well below expectations and the job growth trend has slowed to 2012 and 2019 levels.

11/1/24 8:38AM

Nonfarm payroll growth tumbled to just 12,000 for October, well below the 100,000 economists were anticipating.

We knew the hurricanes that ravaged the East Coast would have an impact on this report — we’d seen the fingerprints of these natural disasters all over the weekly initial jobless claims data — so there was always going to be extreme uncertainty on this particular month’s reading.

According to the BLS, 512,000 Americans in nonagricultural industries were unable to work in October because of bad weather, about 10x the historical norm for this month from 1995 through 2023.

But what’s much more concerning are the whopping -112,000 in negative revisions to the prior two reports. August job growth — first reported as +142,000 — is now down to 78,000, the worst reading since December 2020.

We’ve been a little whipsawed by US labor-market data lately, with jobs growth coming in below expectations in July and August only to crush estimates in September. Stepping back, the underlying trend in US job growth is clearly slower, and to a concerning degree. The six-month average — excluding this report — is now at 147,833.

That’s on par with levels we saw in 2019, when the Federal Reserve was cutting rates from a much lower starting point than at present, and in 2012, the worst stretch for job growth during the prepandemic economic expansion.

Bonds are rallying sharply, with 10-year Treasury yields down almost 10 basis points from pre-jobs levels.

Tasha Matsumoto

Big Tech sends stocks lower

Stocks were dragged down by yesterday’s Microsoft and Meta earnings as investors rotated out of Big Tech names.

Polar bear Sprinter bites into a pumpkin carved with Halloween faces in the Adventure Zoo in Hanover, Germany, 22 October 2015.

J. Edward Moreno2h

Moderna soars after STAT reports “a buyout or a large partnership” are on the table

Moderna rose nearly 15% on Thursday after STAT reported that the company has flirted with the idea of tying up with a larger drugmaker.

The Covid vaccine-maker has talked to at least one large drugmaker on a deal "of significant scope" that could either be "a buyout or a large partnership," a source told STAT.

How Moderna, the company that helped save the world, unraveled

Luke Kawa4h

OpenAI appears to be definitively answering its doubters’ biggest question

The AI boom is power constrained. It’s chip constrained.

But it will not be capital constrained.

That’s the top takeaway from media reports from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters that OpenAI is plotting an IPO.

That message is also corroborated by anecdotal reports that the order book for Meta’s $25 billion bond offering is roughly $125 billion (!), per a source familiar with the situation.

My colleague David Crowther recently wrote that OpenAI would likely need to raise $50 billion to $75 billion to fund its spending ambitions, which are poised to drive $115 billion in cash burn through 2029.

The most common question raised by OpenAI skeptics has been, “Where is OpenAI going to get all this money?”

A mulled IPO might suggest that OpenAI’s ability to raise money from private markets is reaching its limits. But it also tells us the answer to that question is “from literally anyone who wants to.”

And in a world where SPACs are back and speculation is rampant, something we should have known all along is that people want to. The technology and the unit economics of AI will have to prove their failures, or reach a much higher level of saturation, before capital will shy away from an opportunity billed as this transformative.

Per Reuters, OpenAI is looking to raise about $60 billion at a $1 trillion valuation from the offering — significantly reducing any funding needs through 2029 in one fell swoop.

OpenAI has started work on an IPO that could value the company at $1 trillion

That message is also corroborated by anecdotal reports that the order book for Meta’s $25 billion bond offering is roughly $125 billion (!), per a source familiar with the situation.

The most common question raised by OpenAI skeptics has been, “Where is OpenAI going to get all this money?”

Per Reuters, OpenAI is looking to raise about $60 billion at a $1 trillion valuation from the offering — significantly reducing any funding needs through 2029 in one fell swoop.

Max Knoblauch5h

Bearish options flow sends Lucid lower

Shares of luxury EV maker Lucid are being dragged down by bearish options trading on Thursday morning, with a put/call ratio of 5.8 as of 11:10 a.m. ET, versus the 1.05 it’s averaged over the prior 20 days.

If sustained, this would be the most bearishly tilted options activity for a single session for Lucid since June 21, 2024.

More than 32,000 put options have changed hands as of 11:10 a.m. ET, already above Lucid’s 30,794 20-day average for a full session. Lucid shares were down about 3% on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, Lucid and Uber announced that their planned 20,000-robotaxi fleet would begin operations in the autonomously crowded streets of San Francisco starting next year. Earlier this week, Lucid also said it’s partnering with Nvidia to build autonomous vehicles for personal use.

Luke Kawa5h

Boeing slumps as Trump-Xi meeting produces no purchase announcements, Deutsche Bank downgrades to “hold” from “buy”

Blackwell chips weren’t the only thing that US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t talk about that was supposed to be on the agenda.

Andrew Bishop, global head of policy research at Signum Global Advisors, flagged that “multiple previously-mentioned items were seemingly left out of the deal,” including purchases of Boeing aircraft by China.

Shares of Boeing are selling off amid the lack of a purchase agreement for the American company’s planes in the one-year deal and a downgrade by Deutsche Bank. Analyst Scott Deuschle lowered the stock to “hold” from “buy,” cutting his free cash flow estimates and writing that the company remains “constrained by the burdens of the past.” He also reduced his price target to $240 from $255.

The plane maker recently reported quarterly results, in which it booked its first quarter of positive free cash flow since its door plug blowout in January 2024.