Scott Horsley

Although even that future outlook's not all that optimistic.

And here's Scott Horsley.

Scott, thank you.

You're welcome.

The Commerce Department's inflation yardstick, which is closely watched by the Fed, shows prices in September were up 2.8 percent from a year ago.

That's a slightly larger annual increase than the previous month, but core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, was slightly lower than in August.

Investors think the Fed is more concerned about weakness in the job market than rising prices right now, so policymakers are expected to lower their benchmark interest rate by another quarter percentage point next week.

A survey by the University of Michigan shows consumers are feeling slightly better about the economic outlook than they were a month ago, but sentiment is still pretty gloomy compared to this time last year.

Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.

Netflix appears to have won the bidding war to buy the studio and streaming business of Warner Bros.

Discovery for $72 billion.

The deal would allow Netflix to produce more programs in the U.S.

and give the streaming service access to Warner Bros.'

vast catalog of movies and TV shows.

The deal does not include Warner Discovery's cable networks, such as CNN and TBS.

Netflix beat out rival bidders Comcast and Paramount.

Cloud computing provider CloudFair says it's resolved a problem with its firewall that was disrupting global traffic on sites like Zoom and LinkedIn.

It's the second major outage for the company in three weeks.

Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.

Lawmakers have written to more than half a dozen big companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Union Pacific Railroad, asking how much they donated to the ballroom and whether there was any discussion of a quid pro quo.