Colin Risdahl

The phrase short squeeze is what you're looking for.

Marketplace's Kaylee Wells has today's explainer.

For whatever reason, I decide that I think Avis is overpriced, and I'm looking for a way to make money off of this.

They have to actually go into the market and buy that stock in order to return it to whoever they borrowed it from.

Live by the meme stock, die by the meme stock, right?

A little bit of labor market news before we go on.

First-time claims for unemployment benefits last week, basically flat.

Low hire, low fire continues to be the byword in the American labor market, except...

For this, the Wall Street Journal reports that Meta told its staff today it's going to lay off about 10% of the total workforce, comes to almost 8,000 people.

It's also not going to hire for about 6,000 other positions.

Why, I hear you ask?

Efficiency, the company says.

Oh, and also because it's going to spend more on artificial intelligence.

Stocks down, oil up, bonds just marking time.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

The hard economic data today came from S&P Global, its first estimate of US manufacturing for this current month.

And what do you know?

Factory output rose this month at the fastest rate in four years, fueled in part by the biggest jump in new orders to factories since May of 2022.

Good, but not, as Daniel Ackerman explains.

When you drill down into the survey data, says Chris Williamson of S&P Global Market Intelligence, you start to see that the picture's not quite so rosy.