The Rebrew Intelligencer

The Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square, New York.

Photograph by ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stocks rose on Monday, with technology in front. The Nasdaq composite gained 214 points, or 0.82 per cent, to 26,169.38, the S&P 500 rose 0.70 per cent to 7,676.77, and the Dow added 146 points, or 0.28 per cent, to 52,361.58. Crude oil fell, with Brent settling at $115.81 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate at $101.76.

Tesla rose about 5 per cent after Barclays raised its rating to overweight and its price target to $450 from $370, pointing to possible ties with SpaceX, the growth of its robotaxi business and a recovery in its automobile sales. Lumentum, a maker of optical parts for data centers, rose about 8 per cent after StoneX began covering the stock with a favorable rating. Alphabet and Microsoft report their quarterly results after the close on Wednesday.

The 10-year Treasury yield, October 2025 to October 2026. The latest reading is 5.00 per cent, on Oct. 23, 2026.

Chart by the Intelligencer from figures by the Federal Reserve Board, via FRED

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26. The 5-year Treasury yield, the base on which many five-year fixed-rate commercial loans are priced, closed on Monday at 4.84 per cent, down from 4.94 per cent a week earlier, according to the Treasury Department's daily figures. The 10-year yield ended at 5.00 per cent, down from 5.15. Nearly all of the decline came on Thursday, when investors sold technology shares and bought government bonds for safety.

A fixed-rate commercial loan is priced as a spread over the Treasury yield of the same term, so a borrower fixing a five-year rate this week starts from a base about a tenth of a point lower than last Monday. On a $2 million loan for a small office building or a strip of shops, that is about $2,000 a year in interest.

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate in September to a range of 3.75 to 4 per cent, its first increase since 2023. Its two-day meeting begins today, markets widely expect no change when it announces its decision on Wednesday afternoon, and a majority of Fed officials projected in September that one more increase would come before the end of the year.

The completed Swift spacecraft in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2003, with Neil Gehrels pointing to its instruments.

NASA photograph

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23. NASA said on Friday that it had ended the science mission of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which made its last observation on Tuesday, Oct. 20. The spacecraft's orbit has sunk below 171 miles, where the drag of the upper atmosphere keeps its telescopes from holding steady on a target. Swift was launched on Nov. 20, 2004, for a primary mission of two years and worked more than ten times as long, recording more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions known, and more than 1,400 supernovae. Its data have contributed to about 7,000 scientific papers.

In 2005 Swift caught the first afterglow of a short gamma-ray burst, which supported the idea that such bursts come from merging neutron stars. NASA shut down most of its science work in February to slow the loss of altitude while a commercial spacecraft was readied to boost it higher, and that rescue was abandoned in August. The mission was renamed in 2018 for Neil Gehrels, its first principal investigator, after his death, and NASA expects the observatory to reenter the atmosphere within the next few weeks.

A page of Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, sent to the House of Representatives on Dec. 5, 1791.

Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures (1791), public domain

In 1785 Thomas Jefferson gave his young country some advice about factories. "While we have land to labour then," he wrote, "let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench." Americans should farm, and "for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe."

Six years later Alexander Hamilton answered him in a report to Congress, and a page of it is printed with this column. The objection of the day was that America had too few hands and too little money for factories, so that competing with Europe was "little less than desperate." Hamilton's answer was the machine. It is "an artificial force brought in aid of the natural force of man," he wrote, "an increase of hands," and it costs nothing to feed. To buy our goods abroad instead was to hand the advantages of the machine to foreign nations.

I read both men again this week, because the argument has hardly changed. On Monday Anthropic, a company that builds machines that read and write, filed to sell its stock to the public, and the old worries came along. The machines will take the work. And every town asked to host a data center hears some neighbor say, in effect, let it be built somewhere else.

Hamilton's remedy, duties on imported goods and bounties paid to American makers, is argued over to this day, and honest men land on both sides. On the machine itself he won the argument, though not in his lifetime; Congress set most of his report aside. The country kept its workshops anyway and became the richest on earth. The machines took a great deal of work, and the country found more work than it had ever had.

Jefferson went further. In the same book he wrote that "those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God." I love a farm as much as any man, but there I cannot follow him. When the Lord filled a man with His Spirit in the book of Exodus, it was not a priest or a king but Bezalel, a craftsman, given wisdom "in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works."

And when the Son of God lived among us, He spent most of His years at a work-bench. His neighbors in Nazareth knew Him by it: "Is not this the carpenter?"

So I am not afraid of the new machines. Whatever you take up at your own bench this week, take it up gladly. The Carpenter has gone ahead of us, and He told His friends what He was going to build: "I go to prepare a place for you."

Dear Editor: I see that the government has retired a telescope designed to serve for two years after it had served for twenty-two. I was designed by my employer to serve for thirty years and was retired after thirty, to the day, with a cake. I have begun to suspect that somebody's engineering was at fault, and I am no longer certain it was mine. [Or it was excellent engineering, sir, delivered exactly to specification. ED.]

A Retired Engineer, Earle Street.

You Can See Everything, A24's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and her failed blood-testing company, Theranos, took in $19.5 million at North American theaters over the weekend, up 25 per cent from its $15.6 million opening, as it widened from 855 theaters to 2,655. The film has taken in $45.1 million in two weeks, placing it among the highest-grossing documentaries ever released. It finished second only to Clayface, the new DC Studios picture from Warner Bros., which opened with about $24 million at home and $19 million abroad on a production budget of $44 million.

The National Weather Service forecasts a sunny Tuesday in Greenville, with a high near 74 and a calm wind turning east northeast in the afternoon, a mostly clear night falling to about 50, and a mostly sunny Wednesday near 72.