Wall Street ends muted after strong jobs data nibbles at Fed rate cut bets

Wall Street ends muted after strong jobs data nibbles at Fed rate cut bets

By Sinéad Carew and Twesha Dikshit

Wed February 11, 2026  

Today’s payrolls report came in stellar, much higher than expected, establishing that the labor market is in fine shape and is good news for the economy. You would think that everyone would be buying given the nerves over the past few days of this report disappointing. Instead, it was another case of good news taken as bad news since new rate cuts may not be needed after all. Plus the new concerns regarding AI hurting software developers continues as the chip index rose 2.3% but the corresponding software index fell 2.6%. For every dollar that went into AI, a dollar was taken away from the developers.  

It was also the case that for every bet made on the growing economy, an opposing bet was made on the Fed slowing rate cuts. But despite investor reaction, the employment picture is good news. As today’s expert put it, “This is constructive news in that the economy is not in dire need of rate cuts because the job market has been showing some new signs of life. It shows the economy is resilient.” CPI, a major inflation metric, comes Friday. Overall, the indexes played out pretty close to the vest today with all three closing with modest losses. At 20.86 billion, volume was right in line with the 20.79 average. 

DJ: 50,188.14  +52.27        NAS: 23,102.47  -136.20       S&P: 6,941.81  -23.01             2/10

DJ: 50,121.40  -66.74         NAS: 23,066.47  -36.01         S&P: 6,941.47  -0.34               2/11

Wed 2-11-26 4:40 pm Wall Street ends muted after str jobs data nibbles at Fed rate cut bets | Reuters