Jobs Jolt, Hugging Face’s First Investor, and Where the Pricing Power Is 9/4/26

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**Kelly Evans** (1:01)
A strong jobs number out of nowhere today. Although the markets are starting to question maybe how strong. I'm Kelly Evans and welcome to The Exchange. The US adding 162,000 jobs last month. That's triple the number that was expected. And July's decline, that was revised away too. Yields were up a touch initially, as you can imagine. So were federate high gods. But now the 10 year is a touch lower. The Russell 2000s, which were under pressure earlier, they are now the outperformer. We also have a snap back in memory and the AI hardware trade. Not enough to keep the S&P and the NASDAQ in the green right now. The NASDAQ is down about three-tenths of a percent. And shares of Asana are down 14 percent. They've lost 40 percent of their value over the past year. We'll ask the CEO today how they can thrive in the AI era. Plus an early backer of Hugging Face joins us today. We'll ask about the company's evolution from a chat bot to a key AI infrastructure layer, and we'll get the latest on another attack by a swarm of AI agents that was just uncovered. It comes as OpenAI launches an even more advanced version of its AI model this week. But let's begin with Jobs. The big rebound in August hiring has September rate hike odds back above a coin flip today.
Our next guest thinks we still get two hikes this year. Even as President Trump responded to the number today by insisting the US should have lower interest rates, even warning, quote, lower the rate or I'll stop trading with countries with which we have a deficit. Diane Swonk is the Chief Economist at KPMG. She joins us for our opening exchange along with CNBC Senior Economics Reporter, Steve Liesman. Diane, what would you do if you were the Fed? I guess we know you'd still hike. But Waller, yesterday, not so. It feels like a lot is going to ride on what we hear from CPI next week.

**Diane Swonk** (2:46)
Exactly. Well, clearly the CPI number is very important, but the jobs numbers basically underscored that many of the workers that we thought we were losing to the temporary protected status, about 75,000 of them in June and July instead of in August, and those were recouped with 65,000 in leisure and hospitality in the month. We also saw in the beige book, pockets of labor shortages, some small businesses even complaining that they were asking for California wages in Texas as they couldn't fill those low wage jobs, and that is where we did see some wage acceleration as well. Overall, we also got that bounce back in education. After losing 50,000 jobs in education in July, we got some back in the month of August. That's that seasonal quirk. So yeah, it nets out to not be as strong, but at the end of the day, this is not a number that the Fed is worried about. The Fed looks at 4.1% unemployment, considers it below what they consider full employment and many workers may disagree with that. But at the end of the day, inflation is what they're concerned about and I think that's what they should be concerned about given what we're also seeing in terms of manufacturing and service sector surveys, which show the inflation pressures in the pipeline are accelerating.

**Kelly Evans** (4:05)
Steve, does the president have a point when he gets frustrated, he was just putting out a truth social post on this again saying the market should go up, not down when we get strong data, that strong growth isn't necessarily inflationary. In other words, kind of the job growth that we're seeing now.
You know, that would be the case for not hiking here. And a little bit of what Waller, Barry Knapp talking about this too, others have said the same thing this week, that, you know, if we hike in response to tariff, this is what I think Waller's point, those tariff pressures are easing now. We've gone from 4.3 on the CPI, 3% or something like that. So I kind of get the argument for not hiking here, I do.