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|  |  | Thursday, October 9, 2025 | |  | | Timothy A. Clary/AFP | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today,
Washington has lost control of the skies, the Fed is losing control of the jobs narrative, China is in control of the chip loopholes, and KFC is in control of the lunch rush. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | The IRS is “out of office.” The shutdown’s second week leaves taxpayer-help hotlines silent, audits suspended, and refunds frozen as
workers are furloughed — but tax revenue will still be collected. | The people’s Tesla finally showed up — at a luxury price. Analysts say the $5,000 price cut barely offsets lost subsidies and fading
demand, marking a pivot from mass-market ambition to brand maintenance. | xAI just raised $20 billion without admitting it did. Musk’s company is using a leaseback structure that lets investors buy Nvidia chips
and rent them to xAI, keeping the debt (and the semantics) off its own books. | China found a $38 billion workaround to U.S. chip controls. A new House probe says suppliers in Japan and the Netherlands legally sold
advanced tools that American firms were banned from shipping. | | | Sponsored |  | The key to job security? Durable skills. | DeVry University’s new research
found that 78% of employers say durable skills are the new job security amidst constant change. Simply put, durable skills development is the fast track to future-proofing a career. | |
| | HIRE ANXIETY | With the lights still off at the Bureau of Labor Statistics amid the government shutdown, Wall Street’s mood ring is starting to turn beige. Investors are turning to shadow stats, and the private-sector crystal balls
aren’t offering much comfort. Carlyle Group’s proprietary dashboard estimates just 17,000 payroll gains in September, ADP shows private payrolls actually shrinking by 32,000, and the Institute for Supply Management says services employment has now contracted for four straight months. ISM chair Steve Miller says: “It’s not a good trajectory.”
If the Fed needed proof that the labor market’s losing heat, this is it. The New York Fed’s latest survey shows
more Americans expecting job loss, while Goldman Sachs’ labor-tightness index has slipped back to 2015 territory. Consumers seem to sense the drag. Even the Conference Board’s long-running “jobs are plentiful” metric is thinning out. The job market might not be falling apart — but it’s definitely fraying at the edges.
And yet, the markets have decided to treat this quiet as calm. The S&P keeps flirting with record highs while gold smashes milestones, mortgage demand craters, and
personal bankruptcies climb. Investors are choosing the storyline they like best: that a sleepy job market means inflation’s under control, that flat data equals stability, that maybe this time the soft landing will actually stick. It’s the kind of selective optimism that keeps bubbles from realizing they’re bubbles — a collective shrug disguised as confidence, a party that never ends because no one is willing to turn on the lights. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on the job market that’s gone quiet enough to hear the Fed’s teeth chatter. | | THE SKY IS FALLING (AGAIN) | The government shutdown is officially boarding passengers for Week 2, and Washington still can’t agree on who’s flying the plane. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle remain dug into their corners, but the
next few days might bring turbulence that shakes them loose. Why? Because nothing unites America like collective airport misery.
Flight delays and cancellations are spiking as air traffic controllers — considered essential but remain unpaid during the shutdown — are starting to call in sick. The result: 70 canceled and nearly 4,000 delayed flights on Tuesday, two-hour delays out of Nashville, bottlenecks in Dallas and Chicago, and a growing sense that
the only thing still taking off is frustration. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is already warning that the system is “weakened” and that workers are stretched to 10-hour shifts, six days a week. If this flight path sounds familiar, that’s because it is: The 2019 shutdown ended only after a handful of controllers skipped work, grounding planes and politicians alike.
We’re not there yet — paychecks are still technically on their way — but the memory of 2019 looms
large. Controllers can’t strike legally, but fatigue and empty bank accounts have a way of enforcing their own labor laws. And with President Donald Trump threatening that not everyone will get back pay, the incentives to show up are evaporating faster than the patience of anyone standing in a TSA line. In the end, it might not be Congress that reopens the government; it might be the airport loudspeaker announcing that your flight’s been canceled… again. Quartz’s Chris Morris has more on why history is circling the runway. | | | Sponsored | | The key to job security? Durable skills. | DeVry University’s new research found that 78% of employers say durable skills are the new job security amidst constant change. Simply put, durable skills development is the fast track to future-proofing a career. | |
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