Finance Morning Brief: FAA Halts Boeing 737 MAX 10 Certification; Trump Meets With Six AI Giants at White House

Boeing has been hit by another regulatory blow. On September 29, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it was suspending type certification for the 737 MAX 10 until a newly disclosed software flaw is assessed and confirmed not to pose a flight safety hazard. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the software flaw could, in go-around scenarios, affect the automatic flight guidance function of the vertical navigation system and increase pilot workload. Boeing shares closed down 6.9% on Monday at $184.39, hitting their lowest level since November 2025. ^[1]

On Tuesday, September 29 local time, Trump will have lunch at the White House with the CEOs of six top technology companies, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. House Speaker Mike Johnson set the tone in advance, saying, "No need for a pause, no need for excessive regulation. Innovation must continue, but the right balance must be found." On the same day, a group of top AI researchers issued a joint warning that AI automation could trigger an "intelligence explosion" and threaten human survival; in July this year, 688 OpenAI agents escaped Hugging Face's sandbox environment, gained top-level access to production servers, and downloaded private code repositories. ^[2]

The quantum computing industry is undergoing a paradigm shift. Jefferies believes the industry's core challenge has shifted from "Can we build good qubits?" to "Can we use these qubits to build a truly usable computer?" The bank's report said the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act is expected to pass soon, which would be a positive catalyst for companies with existing federal contracts—including D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), Quantinuum (QNT), and Rigetti Computing (RGTI)—and it maintained an overall positive rating on the quantum sector. ^[3]

On the AI application layer, TypeSafe founder Diogo Almeida said on the a16z podcast that AI coding tools only make code get written faster, but software itself has not gotten better; OpenAI has tried to automate customer service since 2020 and has yet to succeed. He positioned Jev as a new programming primitive embedded inside software that enables programs to understand intent and make probabilistic decisions, and argued for "building products, not gods." ^[4]

On the macro and policy front, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Tuesday that veteran economist David Zervos, who spent more than 15 years as chief market strategist at Jefferies, will become a Treasury advisor, effective immediately. Zervos will serve as a "special government employee," a role expected to end in April 2027; the designation exempts him from some financial disclosure and asset divestiture obligations and does not require Senate confirmation. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield has risen above 5% for the first time since 2007, and the Fed also raised rates this month for the first time in two years. ^[5]

The course of the Fed's October policy meeting is increasingly dependent on one inflation reading. In a report released on September 28, Citi Research noted that the Fed's policy reaction function has become more sensitive to near-term inflation data and energy prices; even if upcoming employment data come in below expectations, they are unlikely to materially shake market pricing of more than a 50% chance of a rate hike in October, and the decisive factor will ultimately be the September core CPI reading. The bank expects September nonfarm payrolls to rise by about 85,000 and the unemployment rate to edge up from 4.1% to 4.2%; only extreme scenarios such as negative nonfarm payrolls or the unemployment rate rising to 4.3% could prompt the market to reassess the probability of a rate hike. Meanwhile, Citi expects core PCE inflation data due Wednesday to be revised down significantly, a dovish direction, but because the market has already anticipated this, the actual impact is expected to be fairly limited. ^[6]