Employers added 29,000 jobs in September, far below the roughly 90,000 expected. Stocks rose Friday. But the 10-year Treasury yield still finished near 5.27% to 5.28%.
The weaker jobs report made another Fed hike look less likely to traders and helped stocks. The high Treasury yield did not fit neatly with that relief.
Jobs Changed the Rate Bet
The September jobs number was only part of the slowdown. Job gains for the prior two months were revised down by a combined 60,000. Unemployment rose to 4.2% from 4.1%, while annual hourly pay growth slowed to 3.0%.
Traders put the chance of another Fed hike in late October at about 20%. The week before the report, they had put it at roughly 70%. New York Fed President John Williams and Vice Chair Philip Jefferson had already signaled no urgency for another move after September’s quarter-point hike.
Stocks responded Friday. The S&P 500 gained 0.7%, the Dow gained 0.5%, and the Nasdaq gained 1.2%. The jobs report helped shares, but the 10-year Treasury yield stayed high.
The next U.S. inflation report is due October 14, before the October 27 to 28 Fed meeting. It gives investors another reading to weigh alongside the weaker jobs report.
Oil Keeps Inflation in the Story
Euro-area inflation rose to 3.8% in September from 3.2%, above forecasts. Oil remains part of the inflation concern.
G7 leaders agreed to release 100 million barrels of crude and diesel from emergency reserves over four months. The aim is to ease fuel prices tied to the Iran conflict.
There is disagreement over how much supply has recovered. Kalshi, citing Vortexa, reported that Persian Gulf crude exports through Hormuz had rebounded to 14 million barrels a day, or 80% of pre-conflict levels. The Last Emperor disputed that reading. It said the rebound came from emergency stock releases and called the headline misleading.
A blog from @geopoliticaleconomyreport describes another part of the oil picture. It says China cut crude imports from 12 to 13 million barrels a day to about 7 million after the U.S. war against Iran began. It also says Chinese authorities ordered refiners to stop exporting diesel and gasoline in early March.
According to the blog, China had more than a billion barrels of oil in inventory. It used reserves while importing less, then recently increased imports to replenish part of those reserves. The blog links that renewed buying to the shortage and higher energy prices.
The blog also points to electric vehicles making up a majority of Chinese car sales. It says China installed more than twice as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined.
SpaceX Shares Face More Unlocks
A post on $SPCX says more than 2.3 billion shares have become eligible for trading since August. The stock ended the week at $158.96, roughly 52% above its 2026 low.
Two more groups of roughly 328 million shares each are scheduled to unlock in October. Larger releases are scheduled after Q3 earnings and in December. The post says earlier unlocks caused volatility but did not stop the stock from recovering. Shares becoming eligible for trading does not mean every eligible share will be sold.
The same post reports that Starship reached orbit and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. It says SpaceX completed three launches in roughly 13 hours, including NASA’s Crew-13 mission, Google’s Project Suncatcher AI experiment, and NROL-97. The post says $SPCX rose more than 7% Friday.
It also says October starts full-rate billing under a reported Alphabet AI compute agreement worth roughly $920 million per month.
A separate post by @themuskuniverse calls $TSLA, $SPCX, and $NVDA the future of technology. It claims Terafab brings chip production to the U.S., that $SPCX leased GPUs to Anthropic and Google, and that Tesla’s Optimus will bring in revenue.
Retirement Balances and Two Other Market Posts
Fidelity says the average 401(k) balance rose 10.5% from March through June, its biggest quarterly increase since 2020. Participants invested an average 14.4% of pay, including employer contributions. That is just short of Fidelity’s recommended 15%.
Average balances were $75,200 for participants in their 30s and $156,800 for those in their 40s. More than 8 in 10 contributed enough to get their full employer match. The article calls its retirement benchmarks rough guides.
Conor Kenny says the U.S. Treasury plans to buy back $6 billion of its debt next week.
An AI-made post using S&P 500 data since 1950 says October returned +3.0% in midterm election years and was positive 73% of the time. It says November returned +2.7% and was positive 79% of the time. The post cautions that seasonality is not destiny.