Good Friday morning. Welcome to a special Black Friday edition of Squawk on the Street.

On the Shortened Trading Day, I'm Sarah Eisen with Carl Kintanian, David Faber. We are live, as always, from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Coming up this hour, we'll bring you the latest on what caused that Sammy outage that halted futures trading this morning. Plus, the CEO of L.L. Bean is with us with a warning about how inflation and tariffs could weigh on Black Friday spending.

And it's the final trading day of the month. And while it's

been a volatile November for tech, Apple has handily outperformed. We'll talk about whether

the holiday shopping period will give the stock an extra boost this year. But guys, we don't

have Fed speak. We don't have economic data. So I did want to dive

into the latest on what we did get from the Fed, which I think was underplayed because it came

out late Wednesday afternoon. And that is the beige book. We know the Federal Reserve pays

attention to this. And in the absence of some of the official economic data because of the shutdown,

I really wanted to zero in on what we heard. This is anecdotes from around the country on labor, jobs.

So here's the headline.

Overall, despite an uptick in layoff announcements,

more districts reported contacts limiting headcounts using hiring frieges,

replacement-only hiring, and attrition through layoffs.

A few firms noted that artificial intelligence

replaced entry-level positions or made existing workers productive enough to curb new hiring.

You know how every month we talk about the low-firing, low-hiring economy right now? We're not

seeing as much job growth, but we're not seeing firing. I thought that was good color to explain what's happening, reducing headcount, and even a mention of artificial intelligence, David, having an impact on the company's hiring ability, which we sort of knew was kind of happening.

But interesting to get it here from the Fed officially with their beige book.

Yeah.

I feel like we do still rely a lot on anecdotal sort of things when it comes to the use of AI and the enterprise.

I think next year will be much more definitive in terms of getting a sense from companies

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