Your Evening Briefing
Your Evening Briefing
Wall Street on Friday seemed fine with a jobs report everyone dreaded on Thursday. Investors saw the hiring rate—coming in below earlier estimates—as not bad enough to spark recession fears, but just bad enough to squeeze another rate cut out of the Fed. Chair Jerome Powell seemed to paint the same, moderately happy picture when he spoke in the afternoon. As for American workers, their wage growth came in at its weakest in more than a year. The question now is whether things stay the same or continue to deteriorate.
Here are today’s top stories
Top American diplomats helped craft a proposed announcement by Ukraine’s president that he would investigate unsubstantiated claims by President Donald Trump related to former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son. Also, a day after Vice President Mike Pence supported Trump’s unprecedented call for foreign countries to investigate Biden, Congress asked Pence for documents about his own role in the scandal.
The latest Hong Kong democracy protests ended with a plain-clothes police employee shooting a protester as demonstrators called for a mass show of defiance against the government’s newly imposed ban on masks. Earlier this week, police shot another protester at point-blank range.
A Chinese company is building subway cars in two U.S. factories, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Industry rivals warn that it may soon take over the entire rail car industry.
The U.S. Treasury’s inspector general said he is investigating how the department handled a request from Congress to turn over Trump’s tax returns. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected the request.
The Trump administration recently created a new space agency over the objections of the Air Force. No, we’re not talking about the “Space Force.” There’s another one, and the Pentagon wants $11 billion to pay for it.
For years, Europeans, Americans, Chinese and especially Britons dreamed of retiring in Thailand because it’s warm, beautiful and inexpensive. Well, it’s still warm and beautiful.
What’s Luke Kawa thinking about? The Bloomberg cross-asset reporter says, even before today’s underwhelming jobs report, the week was filled with data indicating that the U.S. is succumbing to global economic gravity. The debate now is whether the slowing economy is just America coming down from the sugar high of Republican tax cuts that largely benefited corporations and the rich, or the beginning of something worse.
What you’ll need to know tomorrow
- Microsoft alleged that Iran tried to hack the 2020 U.S. campaign.
- Facebook is looking for a few good investment analysts.
- All you need to know about Brexit as the deadline approaches.
- Now that Neumann is gone, a WeWork bloodletting is coming.
- Thousands more workers will soon be fired by HP, too.
- Apple just made the world’s best phone camera.
- How to get super-rich selling super-yachts.
What you’ll want to read in Bloomberg Opinion
Trump’s allies are running out of excuses. When the story of Trump’s impeachment is written, Oct. 3 is going to be one of the big days, Jonathan Bernstein writes in Bloomberg Opinion. It started off with Trump publicly asking China and Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, which was followed by bombshell after bombshell into the evening. Put it all together, and one thing is clear, Bernstein writes: The normal defenses that a president’s allies in Congress would mount in such a situation are increasingly unavailable.
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