A Trump Promise, Restored Confidence in AI, and Some Worrisome September Price Data
October 9, 2026
The Trump torrent of attention-getting comments has left a lot of disinformation in its wake particularly regarding the war in Iran. Nevertheless, his promise the other day not to attack Iran again before the U.S. midterm elections is carrying a lot a reassuring weight with investors, who also for the time being are disregarding recent concerns about AI development.
Led by chipmakers and other AI infrastructure, Nasdaq futures are up 0.8% and the DOW, Russell 2000 and SPX futures are showing gains of about half that size. Share prices climbed 1.2% in India, 1.8% in Hong Kong and about 0.5% in Australia and New Zealand. The German, French and Spanish stock markets are currently up slightly more than 1.0%. Ten-year sovereign debt yields have settled back nine basis points in France, eight bps in Japan and Italy, 7 bps in the U.K., 6 bps in Australia and Spain but only 3 basis points in Germany. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, up a basis point, has been an outlier, and so has its Canadian counterpart.
The dollar has experienced no significant movements over night, holding flat against the euro, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar and sterling, edging 0.2% higher against the yen but dipping 0.1% relative to the peso, won and rupiah.
Treating Trump’s promise as fact, West Texas Intermediate and Brent oil prices have retreated 1.0% and 1.5% but remain above $90 and $100 per barrel thresholds. A pause in dollar strength has lifted gold, silver and Bitcoin by 1.2%, 2.1% and 1.8%, respectively.
Data released this Friday have mostly involved inflation measures and industrial production.
Moldovan consumer price inflation jumped to an 18-month high of 8.6% last month from 7.0% in August4.9% in January and a cyclical low of 3.3% in May 2024.
A 27-month high 2.1% monthly increase in Ukraine‘s consumer price index in September lifted the year-on-year inflation rate in that war-torn nation to a double-digit 10.0% from 8.1% in August and a low of 3.2% touched in March and April of 2024.
Russian consumer price inflation matched August’s nine-month high of 6.3%.
Greek CPI inflation of 5.0% in September, a 4-month high, was 1.2 percentage points above August’s reading.
Norwegian producer price inflation, which had printed at negative 9.4% as recently as February 2026, accelerated to 30.1% by August and then shot up to 48.8% last month. Consumer price inflation in Norway of 3.4% in September marked a 5-month high.
Lithuanian producer price inflation had printed below zero percent for 31 of 35 months from April 2023 through March of this year. In dramatic contrast, such has been in double-digit positive territory for five o the past six reported months and mostly so at +17.5% in September.
In August, industrial production fell 1.0% on month and 1.9% on year in Turkey; dropped 1.3% on month and showed no change from a year earlier in Italy; climbed 2.0% on month and 5.8% in Greece; fell 0.6% on month and 0.2% on year in Slovakia; advanced 5.4% on month and 4.8% on year in Sweden; increased 0.5% on month and 5.0% on year in Malaysia; declined 0.9% on month and 0.5% on year in Austria; and increased 0.7% on month but dropped 5.4% year-on-year in Bulgaria.
The Swiss September consumer confidence index its most pessimistic in three months with a reading of -36 versus -33 in August.
Japanese household spending edged up only 0.1% in August and was 3.1% lower than in the same month a year earlier. A 60.4% year-on-year jump in Japanese machine tool orders during September was not quite as much as August’s 64.7% advance but was in positive territory for a fourteenth consecutive time.
Denmark’s August current account surplus of DKK 34.5 billion was larger than the DKK monthly average of DKK 30 billion in the first seven months of this year.
A 0.1 percentage point rise in Canadian unemployment to 6.5% had been expected and left the level below the 2026 high of 6.9%. A bigger surprise was a 68.3k drop in jobs when forecasts were anticipating a marginal rebound from August’s 41.7k decline. In these last two months, 60% of impressive employment growth during May-July has been reversed.
Postscript: With just 3-1/2 weeks to go before U.S. midterm elections, the U. Michigan preliminary October index of consumer sentiment weakened by a sharper-than-predicted 1.8 points to a 5-month low and the second worst ever reading of 46.3. That’s down from 55.2 just three months ago.
Copyright 2026, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
Tags: Canadian labor statistics, Ukraine consumer price inflation, University of Michigan index of U.S. consumer confidence
ShareThis
