Weak Employment Data Eases Rate Concerns as Disney and Mattel Make Headlines

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning. Well, this is John Terry to tell us how the markets have done and what they’re going to do and what we have to look forward to. John Terry, give us a report.

0:10 Speaker 2 Well, you know, Joel, it’s really funny because actually the markets were on a bit of a wild ride last week. But if you look at the NASDAQ and the S & P 500, even if they’re down, they’re actually not that far away from their all-time highs. Of course, the big story of last week came on Friday when we

0:25 had the government jobs report for the month of September, the so-called non-farms. Only 29,000 jobs added in the month of September. Not the 90,000 economists have been expecting. Unemployment rate up to 4.2% from 4.1%. Average hourly earnings up just one-tenth of 1%. Now, the thing is, the markets rose on that news because when you combine it with

0:46 other data that’s been coming in, it’s all looking pretty good when it comes to the next Fed meeting. For example, yesterday, the weekly jobless, or rather on Thursday, the weekly jobless numbers, they came in about 1,000 lower than had been anticipated.

0:58 And PCE, which is the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, personal consumption, and expenditure, the core, which you get when you take out food and energy of that, was 3%. And all of this takes the pressure off the Fed to raise rates when they meet again on the 27th and the 28th of this month. Company news this week,

1:15 a couple of stories that really stood out to me. The Walt Disney Company cutting hundreds of jobs at its TV stations, its network, and I think at ESPN as well. And what’s interesting about this is that Disney makes regular cuts to its television divisions as well and other divisions.

1:30 They’ve been laying off a lot of people in recent history. The Disney shares were more or less unchanged, but they were up a bit. And then Mattel, the giant toy company in California responsible for Barbie and American Girl and Hot Wheels. It was said by the Wall Street Journal midweek that Mattel is the subject of a takeover bid

1:46 by authentic brands. Well, Mattel stock rose by about 18 to 20 percent on this news. But what’s interesting to me is authentic brands. They don’t really make anything. What they do is they go around buying premium brands. And I thought it might interest you to know that among the brands, they have about 50 of them. Among the

2:02 brands that they own these days, the name and therefore everything about Elvis Presley. and Marilyn Monroe. The crypto story of the week was that the man that wrote the Clarity Act, which failed in the Senate a couple of weeks ago, had a victory this week because he wrote a new bill and it’s passed. They’re going to scrap

2:18 the penny. That’s the one cent of what they’re going to allow retailers to round up bills, particularly in restaurants, by five cents. This gets around a legal problem that has been looming. And they’re also putting cheaper materials into the nickel, the five cent in future, to make it cheaper to make those. It has passed the Senate now.

2:36 It will go to President Trump for signing. And in the week ahead, quite a quiet week coming up. We’ve got third quarter earnings getting underway, though. At the end of the week, we’ll hear from PepsiCo, based in New York State, and Delta Airlines, based in Georgia. And the big bank earnings start a week on Tuesday, the 13th

2:52 of October, with J.P.

2:53 Speaker 1 Morgan. John. pretty fast. I mean, some of the bank stocks are way down. Bank of America is way down. And, you know, they should all be doing well.

3:07 Speaker 2 Well, the bank earnings usually kick off the quarterly earnings season. It’s usually the first big news of it. So we’ll see what happens when we get to that in just over a week’s time, John.

3:17 Speaker 1 All right. Thank you so much. And we’ll catch up with you again real soon. Yep.

3:23 Speaker 2 See you next Sunday. Thank you so much. Bye.