Americans Are Looking for Deals. That’s Good News for Walmart.

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by Genspark, your all-in-one AI workspace. Work like a boss.

Alex Ossola (0:10)

Walmart reports strong earnings as Americans of all income levels are on the hunt for deals. Plus, what's driving another wild day on Wall Street, as stocks rise and then fall.

Hannah Erin Lang (0:20)

When we see a reversal in really crowded trades like this, the momentum can just build and build on itself. So the slide accelerates, and I think there's an element of that going on today too.

Alex Ossola (0:31)

And investigators looking into the recent UPS plane crash find signs of fatigue and stress on the cargo jet. It's Thursday, November 20th. I'm Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

A long-awaited report from the Labor Department out today showed that US job growth beat expectations in September, rising by 119,000 jobs for the month. That's the strongest gain since April and well above economists' expectations. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey, rose slightly to 4.4%. But this September report, of course, is coming out nearly seven weeks late due to the government shutdown. WSJ Economics correspondent Harriet Torry joins us now to discuss how the report might influence the Federal Reserve. Harriet, this job's growth seems to have been positive. What can it tell us about the labor market?

Harriet Torry (1:29)

The reassuring thing about the jobs number is that it shows that we're not seeing a significant slowdown. This number was relatively broad-based. I mean, there were gains in retail and then also gains in the usual industries that we've seen most of the job growth in in recent months, which is education and health services. And also, to some extent, leisure and hospitality. And we also saw nearly half a million people join the labor force in September, which economists said was people coming back to work, coming back to school, teachers and so on. Overall, it's just a reassuring sign that the labor market doesn't seem to be deteriorating significantly. At least it didn't in September. Of course, this data is looking a little stale right now.

Alex Ossola (2:06)

Obviously, this report is from September, but can it inform what the labor market's looking like now?

Harriet Torry (2:11)

This data is a couple of months old now, and there isn't really anything comparable to the government report. There are some proxies out there that economists look at, but the jobs report from the labor department is the gold standard, and this does mean that the Fed is going into its next meeting without a jobs report for October and for November.

Alex Ossola (2:31)

Right, so does that mean that this report will take on an outsized influence to inform the Fed's decision for December?

Harriet Torry (2:37)

This is really kind of the last glance that they have at the labor market. For Federal Reserve officials, this is a report that has something for everyone, in a way. The unemployment rate has gone up, and that is something that people can point to as a reason why the Fed should maybe cut rates, because the labor market is deteriorating. But on the other hand, there was still pretty strong job growth. So that might be a reason to keep policy relatively restrictive, because that doesn't seem to be a sign of a big deterioration in the labor market.

Alex Ossola (3:05)

That was Wall Street Journal reporter Harriet Torry. The jobs report was just one piece of seemingly good news for investors today. After yesterday's Nvidia earnings, Walmart became the latest company to report a strong quarter. More on that in a minute. And data out today showed that October home sales rose to an eight-month high. But that didn't appease investors. At their peaks during a buoyant morning of trading, the three major US stock indexes were up more than 1.5%.

The reversal was dramatic, with the Dow falling more than 1,100 points from its high this morning. The Dow closed down 0.8%. The S&P 500 slid 1.6%, and the NASDAQ lost 2.2%. As for Nvidia, it dropped 3.2%. For more on what's driving markets today, I'm joined by WSJ reporter Hannah Erin Lang. Hannah, seems like there's some good news for investors out there. And yet markets were down today. What's going on?

Hannah Erin Lang (4:01)

Yeah, it was a really interesting day on Wall Street. We got Nvidia's earnings last night. Nvidia's the largest US company by market cap. So it's super important to the health of the stock market as a whole. Investors look to this earnings report as a gauge for faith in the AI trade. It's kind of like a financial Super Bowl. Investors seem to like what they saw initially. We saw those shares rise post-market. And we even saw shares in Nvidia and the major stock indexes turn higher when markets opened this morning. And then essentially what happened is that completely reversed.