Big Week of Jobs & Inflation Data, Micron Earnings
Monday, September 28th, 2026
We kick off a new week of trading on the quiet side, but expect things to get noisy quickly. A full slate of economic reports await us, including a fresh palette of “Jobs Week” data, beginning Tuesday morning. Mid-week, we’ll also see what had been known as the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge for September and a key AI play reporting earnings.
After an up-week among major indexes, pre-market futures are in the red currently: the Dow -288 points, the Nasdaq -153 and the S&P 500 -26 points. The small-cap Russell 2000 is presently -13 points at this hour. Oil prices are back up more than +2.5% this morning, to $94 per barrel (/bbl) on WTI and $106/bbl on Brent crude.
We’re also seeing the highest rate on the 10-year Treasury bond since 2007, before the financial collapse which led to the Great Recession: +5.21%. The 2-year bond has reached its highest level since May of 2024 — back when we were in the midst of a 15-month run of +5.25-5.50% interest rates, while the 30-year yield has presently climbed to +5.53%.
What to Expect from the Stock Market This Week
Beginning tomorrow morning, “Jobs Week” data begins with the August print of Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Expectations are for the headline to drift lower but remain within range, to 7.2 million job openings last month from 7.27 million reported the previous month. 12-month highs reached 7.58 million in April while the low came in December of last year: 6.55 million.
From there, we get a look at September labor force numbers, starting with Wednesday’s private-sector payrolls from Automatic Data Processing ADP and ending with Friday morning’s non-farm payrolls and Unemployment Rate from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In between, Thursday’s Weekly Jobless Claims appear. We also expect revisions from ADP’s +38K private-sector jobs in August and BLS’ 162K — a discrepancy of more than 3x.
Otherwise, we’ll see July Case-Shiller Home Price numbers and The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence results for September on Tuesday. S&P and ISM Manufacturing PMI for September and Construction Spending for August appear Thursday, and August Factory Orders come out Friday.
Biggest of all, arguably, will be Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) for August. Both headline and core (subtracting food and energy expenditures) figures, year over year, are expected to tick down 10 basis points (bps) to +3.6% and +3.2%, respectively. These would signal still-higher-than-optimal inflation levels, but within a reasonably controlled range where inflation does not appear to be spiraling out of control.
Further, after Wednesday’s close, AI memory storage chipmaker Micron MU posts fiscal Q4 results — expected to be among the best of any publicly traded stocks all year, AI or not: +937.95% earnings growth on +349.48% in higher revenues from a year ago. Shares of the stock are up +279% year to date and +590% over the past year. These numbers will be hard to beat, but Micron has not missed on earnings since fiscal Q2 of 2023.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
