Good morning. Earlier in the week Unhedged wrote about a weird tension in the ISM manufacturing survey: the new orders component is on a strengthening trend, but the employment component is weak. The two generally travel together, so the divergence suggests the labour market is not sending us a reliable signal about economic activity — or vice versa. Yesterday the ISM services survey for August landed, and the same tension was visible: new orders expanding smartly, employment sluggish. Got a theory? Email it to us: unhedged@ft.com.

AI and the US economy

A morbid parlour game that finance journalists like to play is “what is going to crack this richly valued risk asset market” (I played it with my colleague Katie Martin on the Unhedged podcast this week). Very expensive markets get cheap eventually, not in a slow, force-of-gravity way but in a fast, wow-something-important-just-broke kind of way.