POTUS on Tuesday: “We’ll have a shutdown and it might set us back a tad… but it’s going to be great. People are paying too much for government. That’s the only problem with us. We have to get the spending down a little bit.”

POTUS today: “Markets are at all-time highs. You’re welcome.”

Sure enough, Uncle Sam officially locked the doors and shut off the water after Congress got their panties in a wad… probably not helped by Trump’s latest AI troll on IG where he dressed himself up as a mariachi singer, mustache and all, roasting the Dems’ negotiating skills. Yes, that really happened.

Anyways, roughly 750,000 federal workers got an unpaid “staycation,” the Labor Department is shuttered tighter than a Chick-fil-A on Sunday, and ADP says the economy just lost 32,000 jobs in September… the worst print since (checks notes) March 2023. 

And yet the S&P 500 still hit a fresh all-time intraday high. The Nasdaq tacked on 0.4%, the Dow added 0.2%, and Wall Street pretty much said “who gives a flying f***? This happens every year” in response to the political clown show going on in our nation's capital.

Traders see one thing and one thing only: rate cuts. With official data frozen by the shutdown, the Fed is all but flying blind, and historically, when Jay Powell can’t see, he cuts. Markets are pricing in a near certainty of an October cut and another in December. That’s enough to keep buyers piling in even as the economy looks suspect.

After Pfizer’s big deal with the Trumpster yesterday, the whole sector juiced up. Regeneron jumped 7.8%, Moderna popped 8.6%, and Merck, Lilly, and Amgen all tagged along for the ride. Pfizer’s tariff-for-Medicaid swap was the rising tide that lifted all the pharma syringes.

Ford also chipped in, reporting an 8.2% sales jump in Q3 with EV sales up more than 30%, while Intel ripped 6% on a rumor that AMD might actually let them manufacture some of its chips… basically the Coke bottling Pepsi scenario nobody saw coming.

As for why stocks are laughing at the shutdown circus, prediction markets have it lasting about 11 days. VP JD Vance tried to play good cop, promising it won’t drag on, then immediately reminded federal workers that layoffs are “on the table.”

Oh and to end on a positive note, the dollar is already down 10% on the year (its worst showing since 2003)... so maybe go buy a bit of Bitcoin which also jumped 2.91% because shutdown chaos + weaker dollar + Jerome’s flying blind rate cut bets = Bitcoin up.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Moderna, Merck, Ford, Intel, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi as mentioned in the article.