Good morning, you're tuned in to Markets Desk.
On the skepticism front, a growing chorus of Wall Street analysts is pushing back hard on the government's June jobs report. Jamie Cox of Harris Financial called the data outright misleading, pointing to a negative print in leisure and hospitality during World Cup season as simply implausible. When institutional money managers publicly disavow official numbers, that matters for how the Fed reads the room.
Shifting to commodities, cocoa took a hit on Thursday with New York futures settling down over one percent and London contracts off nearly two percent. The culprit was pre-holiday position squaring ahead of Friday's US market closure, compounded by elevated ICE inventories that have been quietly building pressure on the long side. Traders unwinding before a long weekend accelerated the move.
And in the memory chip space, Micron's origin story is getting renewed attention as the AI buildout drives demand for high-bandwidth memory to levels the industry never anticipated. The company started by a handful of engineers in an Idaho basement is now a critical node in the AI supply chain, and its trajectory reflects just how dramatically the semiconductor hierarchy has been reshuffled.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
