MARKET WRAPS

STOCKS: U.S. stocks finished mixed as more AI infrastructure deals buoyed the tech sector.

TREASURYS: Treasury yields were mixed as Federal Reserve officials reiterated the message that a December cut was far from certain.

FOREX: The U.S. dollar ticked up against rivals as the government shutdown dragged on.

COMMODITIES: Oil futures ticked up after OPEC+ retreated from production-increase plans.

HEADLINES

Kimberly-Clark Strikes $40 Billion Deal for Tylenol Maker Kenvue

Kimberly-Clark has agreed to buy Kenvue for more than $40 billion, combining the maker of Huggies diapers with the owner of Tylenol in one of the biggest takeovers of the year.

In the cash-and-stock deal, Kimberly-Clark will pay $21.01 a share, compared with a closing price of $14.37 on Friday. Kimberly-Clark said the deal, including debt, has a total value of $48.7 billion.

The combination would create a global health-and-wellness company with annual revenues of approximately $32 billion and 10 billion-dollar brands, including Kimberly-Clark's household staples such as Kleenex tissues and Cottonelle toilet paper and Kenvue's products such as Tylenol and Listerine mouthwash.

Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia's Push to Export AI Chips to China

Shortly before President Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, an urgent issue emerged. Trump wanted to discuss a request by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang to allow sales of a new generation of artificial-intelligence chips to China, current and former administration officials said.

Greenlighting the export of Nvidia's Blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift potentially giving China, the U.S.'s biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Huang-who speaks to Trump often-has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market.

As they prepared to meet Xi, top officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Trump the sales would threaten national security, saying they would boost China's AI data-center capabilities and backfire on the U.S., the officials said.

Embattled Fed Governor Lisa Cook Voices Support for Recent Rate Cut

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook said she supported last week's decision to cut interest rates because she thought weaker-than-expected job-market conditions remained a greater risk than persistent inflation.

On Monday, Cook echoed central themes from Fed Chair Jerome Powell's press conference last week, including that interest rates remain modestly restrictive after the latest cut and that the Fed faces a challenging set of trade-offs ahead. Lowering rates too much could risk a period of higher inflation while keeping them too high raises the risks of a sharp economic deterioration, she said.

Cook didn't weigh in directly on whether the central bank should cut interest rates again at its next meeting in December. "Every meeting, including December's, is a live meeting," she said.

OpenAI, Amazon Sign $38 Billion Cloud Deal

OpenAI has agreed to pay Amazon.com $38 billion for computing power in a multiyear deal that marks the first partnership between the startup and the cloud company.

The deal, unveiled Monday, will help satisfy OpenAI's fast-growing computing needs. Amazon expects that all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement will be available to OpenAI by the end of next year, giving the ChatGPT maker quick access to powerful Nvidia chips housed inside its data centers.

Amazon is under pressure from investors to accelerate the growth of its Amazon Web Services cloud business. AWS is the industry's largest cloud provider, but rivals such as Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud-revenue growth in recent years after capturing new demand from artificial-intelligence customers.

U.S. Factory Activity Contracts at Faster Pacer as Production Lags

U.S. factory activity retreated at a slightly sharper pace this month, as production fell into contraction, according to a survey of manufacturing firms.

The Institute for Supply Management said Monday that its purchasing managers' index of manufacturing activity fell to 48.7 in October from 49.1 in September. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected the index to edge up to 49.3.

With the reading still below 50, it points to contraction in activity in the sector for the eighth month in a row, though a score above 42.3 on the index generally tallies with expansion in the wider U.S. economy.

Microsoft Secures AI Computing Power in $9.7 Billion Deal with IREN

Microsoft has secured new computing power capacity with a $9.7 billion deal with IREN as big tech races to expand data center capacity across the U.S.

Under the five-year agreement, Microsoft will gain access to IREN's Nvidia GB300 chips, giving it access to more data processing power as the tech giant scales its artificial intelligence services.

To support the new demand, IREN made a separate agreement with Dell Technologies to purchase new graphics processing units as well as related equipment for $5.8 billion. The hardware is expected to be rolled out in phases throughout the next year at IREN's Texas campus in Childress.

Former Honeywell CEO's Firm Strikes Deal for Machinery Maker Husky

The former leader of industrials conglomerate Honeywell International is going on a shopping spree in a bid to create Honeywell 2.0.

A firm backed by David Cote is set to acquire Husky Technologies, a provider of injection-molding equipment, from Platinum Equity for roughly $5 billion including debt.

U.S. to Pay Partial SNAP Benefits for November During Shutdown

The U.S. government said Monday that it will use emergency funds to pay partial benefits under the federal food-assistance program for November, but warned the process could result in delays in some states.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island had directed the administration to detail how it would comply with his order Friday requiring the government to use emergency funds to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, going during the government shutdown. The judge gave the government two options: Use billions of dollars in contingency funding to make only partial payments, or find other sources of funding to supplement that and pay the full amount.

The government said in a filing Monday there was about $4.65 billion in emergency funding to cover roughly 50% of monthly payments for eligible households. SNAP benefits typically total about $8 billion a month for approximately 42 million people. It doesn't plan to tap other funds to pay the full amount, it added.

TALKING POINT A Fight Over Credit Scores Turns Into All-Out War

For years, rival executives have been fighting behind the scenes over who controls the most important number in every American's financial life: their credit score.

Now, a $10 fee has tipped the sides into open warfare. To the victor will go the power to determine who gets mortgages, car loans and credit cards in the U.S. and how much they will pay for them.

The battle pits Fair Isaac, the creator of the dominant credit-scoring algorithm, against three companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Those three companies supply the credit files that go into Fair Isaac's score, or FICO score. They are eager to break Fair Isaac's grip on determining creditworthiness. And they think they can do it by offering an alternative, a credit score they created and named VantageScore.

The FICO score has had such a lock on the business for so long that many think of it as a government statistic. The FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., according to industry analyst estimates, and Chief Executive Will Lansing is one of the highest-paid executives in the country.

FICO dates back to 1956, when a Stanford University engineer, William Fair, and a mathematician, Earl Isaac, each put in $400 to start a company they called Fair Isaac. They invented the FICO score as a way to measure creditworthiness, or the risk that a borrower won't pay back a loan.

For banks and other lenders, the scores became a game changer. A score supplied a quick, easy way to evaluate a potential borrower. In the 1990s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made FICO the required score for their mortgages, cementing the American consumer dependency on FICO.

The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, lit a match to the long-simmering tensions this year when he suggested FICO was engaging in anticompetitive behavior. "FICO, and any other monopoly who has ripped off Americans for decades, should not be using improper efforts to threaten regulators," he wrote on X.

--AnnaMaria Andriotis and Gina Heeb

Expected Major Events for Tuesday

00:30/JPN: Oct Japan Manufacturing PMI

05:00/JPN: Oct Auto sales

13:30/CAN: Sep International merchandise trade (No data during U.S. govt shutdown)

13:30/US: Sep U.S. International Trade in Goods & Services (No data during govt shutdown)

13:55/US: 11/01 Johnson Redbook Retail Sales Index

15:00/US: Sep Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (No data during govt shutdown)

15:00/US: Sep Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories & Orders (M3) (No data during govt shutdown)

15:00/US: Nov RCM/TIPP Economic Optimism Index

21:30/US: API Weekly Statistical Bulletin

23:50/JPN: Oct Monetary Base

All times in GMT. Powered by Onclusive and Dow Jones.

Expected Earnings for Tuesday

ADT Inc $(ADT)$ is expected to report $0.20 for 3Q.

Ball Corp $(BALL)$ is expected to report $0.97 for 3Q.

CDW Corp $(CDW)$ is expected to report $2.21 for 3Q.

Cohen & Co Inc (COHN) is expected to report for 3Q.

Compass Inc $(COMP)$ is expected to report $-0.02 for 3Q.

Driven Brands Holdings Inc (DRVN) is expected to report $0.24 for 3Q.

Ecovyst Inc (ECVT) is expected to report $0.15 for 3Q.

Exelon Corp $(EXC)$ is expected to report $0.78 for 3Q.

Global Payments Inc $(GPN)$ is expected to report $1.62 for 3Q.

Graphic Packaging Holding Co (GPK) is expected to report $0.51 for 3Q.

Harley-Davidson Inc $(HOG)$ is expected to report $1.58 for 3Q.

Harmony Biosciences Holdings Inc (HRMY) is expected to report $0.81 for 3Q.

IPG Photonics Corp $(IPGP)$ is expected to report $0.13 for 3Q.

Knife River Corp (KNF) is expected to report $2.52 for 3Q.

Kymera Therapeutics Inc $(KYMR)$ is expected to report $-0.68 for 3Q.

LadRx Corp $(LADX)$ is expected to report for 2Q.

Leidos Holdings Inc (LDOS) is expected to report $2.57 for 3Q.

Life Time Group Holdings Inc (LTH) is expected to report $0.33 for 3Q.

LiveWire Group Inc (LVWR) is expected to report for 3Q.

Madrigal Pharmaceuticals Inc $(MDGL)$ is expected to report $-2.29 for 3Q.

Marriott International Inc $(MAR)$ is expected to report $2.38 for 3Q.

Martin Marietta Materials Inc (MLM) is expected to report $6.84 for 3Q.

Marzetti Co (MZTI) is expected to report $1.70 for 1Q.

NNN REIT Inc $(NNN)$ is expected to report $0.47 for 3Q.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd $(NCLH)$ is expected to report $1.12 for 3Q.

PJT Partners Inc $(PJT)$ is expected to report $1.02 for 3Q.

Pfizer Inc $(PFE)$ is expected to report $0.55 for 3Q.

Reservoir Media Inc $(RSVR)$ is expected to report $0.05 for 2Q.

Shutterstock $(SSTK)$ is expected to report $0.59 for 3Q.

Silicon Laboratories Inc $(SLAB)$ is expected to report $-0.36 for 3Q.

Stanley Black & Decker Inc $(SWK)$ is expected to report $1.01 for 3Q.

SunCoke Energy Inc (SXC) is expected to report $0.16 for 3Q.

TPG Inc $(TPG)$ is expected to report $0.63 for 3Q.

Uber Technologies Inc (UBER) is expected to report $0.69 for 3Q.

Uniti Group Inc (UNIT) is expected to report for 3Q.

Waters Corp $(WAT)$ is expected to report $3.07 for 3Q.

Willis Lease Finance Corp $(WLFC)$ is expected to report $2.86 for 3Q.

Wingstop Inc $(WING)$ is expected to report $0.91 for 3Q.

Yum China Holdings Inc (YUMC) is expected to report $0.58 for 3Q.

Zoetis Inc $(ZTS)$ is expected to report $1.56 for 3Q.

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This article is a text version of a Wall Street Journal newsletter published earlier today.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 03, 2025 16:39 ET (21:39 GMT)

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