Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your Friday market open.
Nasdaq futures are pushing higher this morning as technology stocks attempt to recover from Thursday's session, where a climb in oil prices and disappointing OpenAI revenue figures — annualized at roughly twenty billion dollars — weighed on the sector. Easing crude is giving traders room to breathe heading into the weekend.
Shifting to the inflation picture, the Federal Reserve's framing of price stability continues to diverge from how ordinary consumers experience costs day to day. A new piece from the Richmond Fed's Kartik Athreya walks through that gap, a timely reminder with Social Security's cost-of-living adjustment for twenty twenty-seven currently tracking at three point five percent — an unusually elevated forecast that will be confirmed when September inflation data drops on October fourteenth.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority has dramatically escalated its crackdown on so-called finfluencers, those social media personalities promoting financial products without proper authorization. Enforcement actions surged seventy-three hundred percent between twenty twenty-three and twenty twenty-five, signaling that regulators globally are losing patience with unlicensed financial promotion online.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
