July and its scorching temps didn’t just slow your ability to run errands on the weekends: Job growth in the US last month also simmered to a crawl. And with unemployment rising for the fourth straight month, everyone is now looking to the Fed to do something about it—stat.

A solid D+: If the labor market had to show the jobs report to its parents, let’s just say yesterday would not have ended in a pizza dinner. The economy only added 114,000 jobs last month, far fewer than the 185,000 economists expected.

• Unemployment rose to 4.3% from 4.1%, tripping an alarm for economists known as the Sahm rule that signals a recession is imminent.
• But Claudia Sahm (the economist the rule is named after) said that the economy isn’t about to plunge into a recession, as unusual recent conditions have impacted the numbers.

The pressure is on for Powell

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday, after the latest Fed meeting, that the central bank wasn’t cutting interest rates that day but hinted that its next meeting, in September, might include the chop as long as more data suggested inflation was cooling.

But after yesterday’s lackluster jobs report, investors, politicians, and economists are asking, “How much more data do you NEED?”. Some have accused the Fed of moving too slowly on rate cuts.

• The Dow slid 900+ points yesterday, while the S&P 500 had its worst reaction to a jobs report since 2022, and the Nasdaq dropped into correction territory.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the Fed’s loudest critics in DC, said on X yesterday, “Powell needs to cancel his summer vacation and cut rates now—not wait 6 weeks.”

Looking ahead…investors are so bullish on a rate cut that you’d think it just walked into their offices wearing a hoodie and bragging about dropping out of college. Citigroup and JPMorgan are predicting half-point cuts in September and November, not just quarter-point cuts.—MM

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The US sued TikTok over alleged child privacy violations. As if the US government didn’t already have more beef with TikTok than the parents of a Sephora teen, the DOJ and the FTC sued TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, yesterday, claiming that the app unlawfully collected data from users under age 13. The suit alleges that TikTok ran afoul of an earlier legal settlement that required the company to delete data on young users at their parents’ request. The suit comes as TikTok is already facing a law that requires ByteDance to sell off TikTok’s US operations or face a national ban on the app (which the company is challenging in a different court case).

Chevron ditches California for Texas. The oil company said yesterday that it’s relocating its headquarters from California to Texas after 145 years in the state to get away from stringent regulations and climate policies. Chevron already has ~7,000 employees in Texas, and the state’s governor welcomed the move with an X post, saying, “Texas is your true home. Drill baby drill.” Chevron’s decision to trade vocal fry for twang comes after other companies, including Tesla and Oracle, have shifted their home bases to Texas, where regulations are lighter and taxes are lower.

NFL gets $4.7 billion Sunday Ticket verdict tossed. The NFL scored a touchdown when a California judge agreed to throw out a jury verdict that would have forced the league to pay $4.7 billion to subscribers of its Sunday Ticket bundle—and could have led to the league coughing up three times those damages. The judge found that the damage awards “were not based on the ‘evidence and reasonable inferences’ but instead were more akin to ‘guesswork or speculation,’” finding fault with the expert witnesses from the trial. The decision (which the NFL said it was “grateful” for) is the latest twist in a legal battle that dates back to 2015 over whether the package for watching out-of-market games is anticompetitive.

Your local pharmacy locking up the toiletries is allowing Amazon to lock down new customers.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday that brick-and-mortar drug stores taking extreme measures to thwart shoplifting have pushed customers to load up their online shopping carts because they don’t want to ask an employee to unlock a glass case.

There’s evidence to back up Jassy’s belief that keeping merchandise under lock and key has hurt IRL stores:

• Hundreds of Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid locations have closed over the past few years, some of which coincides with when these retailers began believing that Danny Ocean and his crew were coming for their deodorant.
• In a Harris Poll from November 2023, 71% of shoppers said glass cases made them less likely to frequent a store. That figure was 89% among Gen Z respondents.
• In February 2023, Joe Budano, the CEO of anti-theft technology company Indyme, told Axios that the cases can cause sales to drop between 15% and 25%.

Zoom out: Despite this sales bump for Amazon, its Q2 earnings, announced on Thursday, underwhelmed, and its outlook for Q3 fell short of market expectations. Amazon shares finished down 8.8% yesterday, since even if consumers don’t like pressing the button that calls for the pharmacy employee with the key, investors are still willing to hit the panic button.—DL

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Algerian welterweight Imane Khelif (left) achieved one of the fastest wins in Olympic boxing history this week, but some were outraged over how hard she punched in the punching sport.

At the 46-second mark, Italian opponent Angela Carini (right) tapped out of the preliminary women’s boxing match on Thursday after sustaining a few hits to the face. When Khelif was named the winner, Carini collapsed to her knees in tears, later telling reporters that she withdrew to “safeguard” her life because she “couldn’t breathe anymore” and had “never been hit with such a powerful punch.”

Anti-trans misinformation quickly followed. Countless people who apparently didn’t do a Google search before clicking “Post”—including Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, Logan Paul, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Donald Trump, and JD Vance—falsely claimed that Khelif is trans and characterized her win as a “man” beating up a woman.

To be clear: Despite what Joe Rogan might say, Khelif is a cisgender female, as the International Olympic Committee’s chief spokesperson repeated yesterday, denouncing the online vitriol. Many people still don’t believe it, in part because Khelif failed a widely questioned “gender eligibility test” last year administered by the International Boxing Association (IBA)…which the IOC banned from the Olympics in 2019 over concerns about the body’s ethics and ties to Russia.

Not again: Internet commenters are coming for the other female boxer who the IBA disqualified from the world championships last year, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who also won her preliminary round match yesterday.—ML

Sometimes it pays to be the new kid on the block. Last month’s fundraising totals for the presidential campaigns are in, and VP Kamala Harris raised $310 million, trouncing former President Donald Trump’s $138.7 million haul. But, much like the influx of coconut memes, a whole lot of that happened right at the beginning of Harris’s campaign, right after President Joe Biden left the race. The VP’s political operation took in more than $200 million the week after Biden stepped aside. Harris’s newly full war chest does appear to reflect a surge in enthusiasm among Democrats as her campaign raised nearly as much in July as Biden’s did in March, April, May, and June combined, according to the New York Times. And though Trump’s number looks small beside Harris’s, it’s still a lot of cash, and it probably would have surpassed the Democrat take if there’d been no candidate switch up.