Good morning. Friday delivered a genuine surprise on the US jobs front, a much better one from Tesla, and a painful update from Nepal's mountains. Let's get into it.

Friday's Employment Situation report landed with a thud: US employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, against economists' forecast of roughly 90,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%. On top of the miss, July's already-weak number was revised down further, from +21,000 to a net loss. Average hourly earnings edged up only modestly, and the average workweek held flat, both signs that employers aren't scrambling for workers the way they were a year ago.

Why this one stings more than a typical miss: this report lands just 26 days before the Fed's October 28 rate decision, and it arrives on the heels of a Fed that only just delivered its first hike since 2023. A labor market this soft usually argues against more tightening, so expect rate-hike odds for October to fall sharply off the back of this data, reversing some of what pushed Treasury yields to 24-year highs this week.

Why you should care, even from Kathmandu: US jobs data moves the dollar, and a weaker dollar generally makes imported fuel and goods marginally cheaper for countries like Nepal that price them in dollars. It's a small mercy, but a real one, right as Dashain season drives both travel and spending.

The bigger picture: this is now two straight months of payroll growth well below the 100,000-a-month pace economists consider healthy. One soft month is noise. Two is a pattern worth watching into November's report.

The death toll from the September 28 avalanche on Himlung Himal in Manang district has reached 15, after rescuers recovered eight more bodies Thursday from the mountain's base camp. One person remains missing. All of the dead are Nepali nationals, guides and support staff who had traveled to the 7,126-metre peak two weeks earlier to prepare base camp for the autumn climbing season. No foreign climbers were present when the avalanche struck during a stretch of continuous rain and snowfall that has also driven this season's landslides and flooding elsewhere in the country.

It's a grim bookend to a season that was supposed to bring relief after August's catastrophic flooding. Nepal's autumn climbing window, usually one of the most reliable income periods for mountain guides and support crews, has instead opened with its own disaster.

Elsewhere in Nepal: Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal left for Fiji on Friday, leading a delegation to the Pre-COP Leaders' Event in Fiji and Tuvalu, where he'll address the Leaders' Plenary on October 6, part of preparations for November's COP31 climate summit in Turkey. Separately, more than 150 containers of Chinese imports remain stuck at the Korala customs point in Mustang after a road disruption.

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*The data presented below are from the official sites of NEPSE, NASDAQ and London Bullion Market Association respectively.

🇺🇸 Nasdaq: rose Friday on the soft jobs data, which markets read as reducing the odds of another October rate hike, even as the Dow and broader market stayed more cautious on what weak hiring says about the economy.

🥇 Gold: holding around $4,182 an ounce, little changed, as a weaker dollar from the jobs miss offset some pressure from easing rate-hike bets.

🥈 Silver: trading near $61 an ounce, broadly steady.

Flydubai has suspended all flights to and from Israel while investigators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel work to determine whether Wednesday's cockpit attack, in which a co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to crash a Tel Aviv-bound jet, was a planned act of terrorism or the work of one person acting alone. Israel's Foreign Ministry has described the incident internally as an attack on the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Gulf states. The suspect, reported to be an Omani national, has been transferred to the UAE for further questioning, and Israel says it will tighten pilot vetting procedures as a result.

Why it matters: the Gulf-Israel flight corridor is a tangible symbol of the Abraham Accords working in practice. Suspending it, even temporarily, signals how seriously authorities are treating the possibility that this wasn't a lone, spontaneous act.

Amazon signed a 20-year, $3 billion deal with Constellation Energy to expand a nuclear power plant in Maryland, aimed squarely at meeting the electricity demands of AI data centers. It's a reminder that the AI race isn't just about chips and models, it's increasingly a race for guaranteed, always-on power, and nuclear is becoming the preferred answer for companies that need it at scale.

Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter, comfortably beating Wall Street's roughly 461,000-461,974 consensus by about 5%, though still down 2.1% from last year's record 497,099. The company produced 464,391 vehicles and worked down its excess inventory from earlier in the year, a sign of healthier demand-supply balance than the company has shown in some time. Energy storage deployments of 13.7 GWh came in below the 15.9 GWh analysts expected, the one soft spot in an otherwise strong report. Shares jumped roughly 5% on the news.

Why it matters: this is Tesla's second straight quarter of beating its own delivery consensus, after a rough 2024-2025 stretch. The real test, analysts say, comes October 21, when Tesla reports full Q3 financial results and investors find out whether those deliveries translated into actual profit.

Last week's question on Gulf-Israel flight routes is still collecting replies. We'll share results soon.

New question: Given this week's weak US jobs data, what do you think the Fed does on October 28? Reply with A, B or C:

Answers just below. No peeking. 👇

Soft landing (say it: SOFT LAND-ing)

Meaning: when a central bank manages to slow inflation and cool an overheated economy without tipping it into a recession, the ideal outcome policymakers aim for.

Example: "A weak jobs report like this one is exactly the kind of data that makes economists start asking whether the soft landing is slipping away."

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