Good morning, you're listening to Markets Desk.
The jobs report is the story of the morning. The U.S. economy added just fifty-seven thousand nonfarm payrolls in June, roughly half the one hundred fifteen thousand the Street was expecting. The unemployment rate ticked down to four point two percent, but make no mistake — this is a soft number, and it puts renewed pressure on the Fed to move sooner rather than later on rate cuts.
Shifting to equities, Meta is making a serious push into cloud computing, looking to monetize the vast AI infrastructure it has spent billions building. Wall Street is watching margin compression closely — cloud is a capital-heavy business, and investors will need convincing that the revenue upside justifies the squeeze on profitability. Meta shares will be under the microscope.
And in the digital finance space, Open USD is launching with backing from over one hundred forty institutions, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, and Stripe. This is not a fringe stablecoin play — the coalition behind it signals a serious bid to reshape how money moves globally, and CFOs in banking and payments need to treat it as infrastructure, not novelty.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
