--:-- Kate Bullivant: In today's market, one of the most precious commodities you can add to your portfolio is certainty, the kind you get with a multi-year guarantee annuity from American National Insurance Company. Your money grows at a steady rate, guaranteed, no hidden fees, no market risk, no surprises, just a bedrock of certainty you can depend on to be there when you need it most. You can get more details and fund an annuity online at annuities.americanational.com. You got this.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: The White House is increasingly worried about political backlash over healthcare cuts. Plus, the government shutdown means it's jobs Friday, but without the monthly employment data. It sends people looking toward alternative data sources, which people are always looking at, but now it's really come front and center. And Putin scoffs at claims that Russia is behind drone incursions as new sightings cancel flights overnight. It's Friday, October 3rd. I'm Kate Bullivant for The Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: It's the third day of the government shutdown. And on the surface, President Trump is showing confidence that he's winning the messaging war over Democrats. Both sides yesterday continued the finger pointing while signaling that they were keen to find a way out of the current impasse to end the shutdown.
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--:-- Kate Bullivant: Here's House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
--:-- Mike Johnson: Call your senators, your Democrat senators, the 44 people who want to shut the government down. You should call them right now and tell them to get here and get to work and open the country up for the people.
--:-- Hakeem Jeffries: Let's find a bipartisan path forward and let's address the Republican health care crisis.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: However, despite the public bravado, Republicans are becoming increasingly concerned that their party will be blamed for allowing health care subsidies to expire, increasing costs for millions of Americans. Inside the White House, aides are discussing proposals to extend the enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance plans. We understand that Trump hasn't yet decided whether he will endorse such a proposal. Republicans say they'll only hold negotiations with Democrats on the matter after the government is reopened.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: It comes as voters have expressed deepening frustration with Trump's handling of the economy in recent polls. And those concerns about the economy are likely to be compounded today, as the government shutdown means we won't be getting the usual monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
--:-- Justin Lehart: Yeah, so the BLS will not be reporting the September jobs report on Friday. Usually, that's something that people get very anxious about. They're refreshing the page. They're digging into the numbers. They're trying to figure out what's going on with the labor market. And we're not going to get that.
--:-- Justin Lehart: And as long as the government shutdown persists, there's going to be a lot of other data that isn't going to be available. The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics produces inflation data. The Commerce Department has retail sales. It has trade data. So there's just all kinds of statistics on the economy and the health of the economy that we're not going to be seeing.
--:-- Justin Lehart: If you think about this, that would never be a good thing. It's maybe particularly not a good thing right now because we're at this moment where the job market appears to have really deteriorated. At the same time, spending seems pretty good. And inflation is above where the Federal Reserve would like it to be.
--:-- Justin Lehart: So all these sort of moving parts that make it very hard to interpret what's going on and now, you know, really kind of flying with instruments. What is the immediate impact of that when people don't have access to this data?
--:-- Justin Lehart: As you say, it comes at a crucial point where we've seen this weakening. So what does that mean for the data we're expecting and for the people that read that data? I mean, the data will eventually come out. It'll be postponed. The Fed has a meeting this month. Some of the data might not be in hand.
--:-- Justin Lehart: So what it does is it sends people looking toward alternative data sources, which people are always looking at, but now it's really come front and center.
--:-- Justin Lehart: As you say, this comes at a time when some have been questioning the reliability of the jobs data, looking to other places. Might this accelerate that?
--:-- Justin Lehart: And what are the standout data points that people may be looking to? So ADP, which is a large payroll processor, processes about 26 million people's paychecks. So they have employment data that came out on Wednesday. It looked rather weak.
--:-- Justin Lehart: There's a sort of a newcomer called Reveglio Labs that scrapes data from LinkedIn and other networking sites to also come up with jobs data. They came out with their number on Thursday. It wasn't as bad as ADPs. They actually suggested using their data plus ADPs to kind of triangulate what is actually happening.
--:-- Justin Lehart: And you come up with a fairly weak number that way. When it comes to things like retail sales, people will look at credit card spending data or bank card spending data. When it comes to inflation, there are people who scrape websites for prices, primarily an outfit called PriceStats.
--:-- Justin Lehart: So they'll be looking at that to try and get a read on inflation. So all of this stuff is out there. And for sure, there have been problems and concerns with the government data. Most economists still want the government data. It includes things that aren't available in some of these private data sets.
--:-- Justin Lehart: And in fact, a lot of these private data sets are built on the scaffolding of government data. Let's say you want to know what inflation is and you have like all of the prices. But you need to know how much people spend on different things to come up with an idea of an inflation basket, a price basket, right?
--:-- Justin Lehart: That's data that comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They do the surveys to create those baskets. Without those baskets, you don't really know what's going on with inflation, right? So they need that stuff.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: Coming up, the rest of the day's news, including another drone incursion in Europe and what may be the album launch of the year.
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--:-- Kate Bullivant: We're exclusively reporting that senators on both sides of the political aisle pressed the Pentagon's top lawyer to provide a better legal explanation for striking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.
--:-- Eric Matthews: [referring to a classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing] I repeatedly referred to President Trump's designation of some Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
--:-- Eric Matthews: Matthews, the Pentagon General Counsel, said that designation granted the Defense Department unilateral authority to use military force against them.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: In a confidential notice to Congress yesterday, which has been viewed by the journal, Trump said that the U.S. is in a so-called non-international armed conflict with the cartels and that the U.S. had, quote, determined their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: Israel is deporting activists, including Greta Thunberg, after their aid vessel headed for Gaza was intercepted by the Israeli military. The move to intercept the flotilla has sparked backlash from the international community, with protests erupting across major cities, including Paris, London and Istanbul.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: Here, it's the Italians in the city of Brescia. President Trump said earlier this week he was on the verge of a deal to end the war in Gaza warning Hamas to accept his peace plan or face even more military pressure from Israel with the full support of Washington.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: Hamas has indicated it might support the effort. And in Germany, Munich Airport has reopened this morning after several drone sightings grounded flights overnight, affecting nearly 3,000 passengers.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: It's the latest in a string of interruptions in European airspace that have spurred NATO members to retune defences. A moderator at a forum of foreign policy experts yesterday asked Russian President Vladimir Putin why he was sending so many drones to places like France, Portugal and Denmark.
--:-- Vladimir Putin: Putin gested that he won't do it anymore and cast the claims of Russian involvement in drone incursions as part of, quote, NATO efforts to inflame tensions.
--:-- Vladimir Putin: This is also one of the ways to escalate the situation in general, to fulfill the Washington boss's orders and increase defense spending.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: And finally, Taylor Swift's 12th studio album has hit streaming platforms everywhere after being released overnight. The Life of a Showgirl is her shortest album yet at just 40 minutes.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: And according to data from Spotify, the download traffic broke all records. It was back in August that Swift revealed on the New Heights podcast, hosted by her fiance, Travis Kelsey, and his brother, Jason, that the album was written while on the Era's tour.
--:-- Taylor Swift: It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. And so that effervescence has come through on this record. And like, as you said, bangers.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: Well, whether you're spending this morning listening to pop bangers or not, we hope your weekend gets off to a good start. And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning.
--:-- Kate Bullivant: Today's show was produced by Daniel Bark. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Kate Boulivant for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.
