Brian Stewart, our director of news at Seeking Alpha, welcome back to another week of Wall Street

Roundup.

Great to be here.

I should add another week of government shutdown.

I should add another week of some shutdown. I should add another week of some earnings.

What is top of mind for you this week?

Yeah, I think starting in the macro is the right way to go.

You mentioned the shutdown.

This would have been Jobs Day had they're not been a shutdown, but no jobs data is coming out earlier.

This week, we had Challenger Gray and Christmas released their layoff figures, which were pretty sobering.

More than 150,000 job cuts in October.

That was up more than 180% from September number and about 175% from October, 2024 through October through October so far, 1.1 million job cuts that compares to 761,000

for all of 2024. So we're already 44% higher with two months left ago. So what you and I were

talking about last week where we were seeing more kind of anecdotal company announcements of layoffs, the one that we were talking about was Amazon, that this is data that's underlining, that that's a real trend.

It's not just some one-off companies.

You're seeing a lot of cuts in the data.

The analyst at Challenger noted that there there's some correction from

the hiring boom that happened during the pandemic but also there's there's structural changes

going going into this process the AI adoption there's also cyclical softening consumer

and corporate spending so you see a bunch of different factors factors going into the job cuts that have been happening lately.

Meanwhile, you have the shutdown going on.

We don't have the normal jobs data coming out.

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