Kyle Risdell

This is the 5th of February.

Good as always.

Stab you long, everybody.

The standard caveat applies here.

Stock market, economy, not.

But stock market vibes?

Economy-ish.

The major indices today, as you have perhaps seen or already heard, not good in a kind of substantive way.

People are a bit wigged out over the big software companies and what AI might do to them.

Google, as we mentioned yesterday, is going to spend $175 to $185 billion on AI this year.

There is some agita out there about that.

And then there's the labor market, of which we have spoken often recently and about which we have some new numbers today.

The first number, that is, is 213,000.

That's how many people filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week, a not small jump of 22,000 from the week earlier.

The next number is six and a half million.

That is the number of job openings across this economy in December.

That's from the latest job openings and labor turnover survey.

The fewest openings since back in September of 2020.

Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman is on the labor market beat for us today.

Wall Street today, as I said, traders did not much like what they were seeing.