Welcome back to Markets Desk, here's what's moving this hour.
Lean hog futures closed the week firmly in the red, with losses ranging from eighty cents to a dollar twenty-five across the board. October contracts shed three dollars and forty-two cents on the week, while the CME Lean Hog Index slipped another seventy-nine cents on September fourteenth, settling at eighty-five dollars and two cents. Seasonal demand softness and managed money positioning are weighing on the complex heading into the weekend.
Shifting to Washington, the IRS has released a draft two thousand twenty-six Form ten-forty that includes a citizenship question for the first time in modern memory. The addition raises serious questions around enforcement priorities, taxpayer privacy, and whether immigrant households — many of whom currently file and pay taxes — will pull back from compliance out of concern, which could have meaningful downstream effects on federal revenue.
And on the energy front, nuclear technology is getting smaller and in some cases, quite literally, more mobile. Small modular reactors are advancing rapidly, with some designs now engineered to float offshore. Proponents argue the economics improve dramatically at smaller scale, and floating deployment sidesteps the land-use and permitting battles that have long delayed conventional nuclear projects onshore.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
