Hiring stalled at 29,000 in September and American stocks rallied, because the only question left on the tape is what the Fed does in three weeks. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, October 5, 2026.
The number Friday was 29,000 against forecasts in the eighties and nineties, unemployment up to 4.2, with July and August revised down sixty thousand between them. The S&P closed up about seven tenths of a percent on that, within a percent of its record, Nvidia (NVDA) dragged the Nasdaq to an intraday high, and the odds of an October hike fell from almost seventy percent a week ago to under twenty. The ten year, which touched above 5.3 percent Thursday, the most since early 2002, came back in. A labor market losing its footing was received as a gift, which it is, if you are a bond.
A reader in Boston wrote in Thursday to say the 2002 comparison is being misused, and he is right, though not for the reason he gave. The last time the ten year sat here it was falling toward this level from above. Now it is rising through it. Same number, opposite verb. I spent an hour Friday pulling old sheets to see what this desk was long in 2002. Nobody now in this chair was in it then, and the one man who was has a house in Valais and does not return calls. I keep making the comparison anyway.
Here is what got sold instead. OPEC+ met Sunday and held November production flat at just over 31 million barrels a day, extending the pause rather than adding supply, and crude fell toward ninety dollars on, we are told, signs of rising global supply. That same weekend the Houthis took the Bab el-Mandeb, which is the route Saudi Arabia had been using to move barrels while avoiding Hormuz. A chokepoint changed hands and the price went down. Core PCE has run above three percent every month this year, much of it energy, out of a war still running. The market has decided the inflation was a labor story all along, and the labor market obliged on Friday by weakening.
ISM services lands this morning and is expected to show the fastest expansion since February, which would sit badly with everything built since Friday lunchtime. Wednesday brings the minutes of a unanimous hike, to be read closely by people who already know what they think.
Keel Infrastructure (KEEL) is down about thirteen percent for us since September 22, eight sessions, against roughly half a percent for the S&P over the same stretch. It is a bitcoin miner that turned its grid interconnections toward data centers, bought on the premise of a lease signature at one of three sites. The signature has not arrived. That is the entire position and the entire loss.
Gold is around 4,171.60 an ounce, though quotes disagree by a few dollars either way, with WTI near 90.13, Bitcoin about 86,400, S&P futures 7,783.25 and the ten year at 5.26 percent. Gold losing three percent on the week is what happens when real yields reach 2.9 and the metal has to compete.
Weak hiring is good news right up until it is the news. Have a good one.
Salomon