CNBC Business News Update - Market Close: Stocks Lower, Value Meals Help Boost Quarter For McDonalds, More Jobs Created In Janaury Than Expected 2/11/26

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

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I'm Jessica Eddinger, CNBC. Wall Street opens Thursday morning after a down and flatish day of trading on Wednesday for the major averages. The Dow fell 66 points, led lower by shares of IBM, which tanked 6.5%. Sales Force down 4%. Boeing retreated on Wednesday, down 2.5%. The S&P 500 index was flat. The NASDAQ down 36 points. Shares of Nvidia were in the green, up 8 tenths of a percent. Wednesday. Companies who shares at fresh all-time highs Wednesday include Hilton and Marriott, Exxon, Caterpillar, Delta Airlines, FedEx, Corning and Texas instruments, to name a few. McDonald's shares were popping higher and after hours trading Wednesday on strong quarterly results, value is working. As consumers hit the golden arches for cheaper meals and investors going to like that higher dividend. Same store sales beating across the board. It did see traffic rise, which is key for momentum.

CEO Chris Kempschinsky saying in a statement, quote, seeing both improved traffic and strengthen value and affordability scores. It's also announcing a 5% increase in its quarterly dividend to $1.86 cents. CNBC's Kate Rogers. The U.S. added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs in January in the delayed employment report from the Labor Department. The unemployment rate went down to 4.3%, where the U.S. was last summer in August. Non-farm payrolls for January coming in twice expectations had 130,000. That would be the juiciest going back to April of last year.

CNBC's Rick Santelli, but the number of jobs created in 2025 was much lower than first thought in the annual revisions that are just out. Here's Jeffrey's chief economist Thomas Simons on CNBC. Essentially, I think what happened is a combination of things, but businesses didn't seem to hire quite as many people. during the pre-holiday season. So the way the seasonal adjustments work and the modeling, when there are fewer layoffs in January, it ends up with this sort of perversely strong number on payrolls, right? And all the revisions that we saw, you know,

back throughout last year really tells the bigger story, which is that hiring has slowed very significantly. I would bet that when all of a sudden done, this January number is actually going to end up looking a little bit lower. So where was the hiring last month? Here's CNBC's Mike Santoli. Where the net job growth is coming from is health care and education service. Almost entirely.

Tech jobs, not really growing. They're actually down as a percentage of overall employment. This after Heineken announced it's cutting 6,000 jobs amid falling beer sales, joining other big names with recent job cut announcements like Salesforce, Workday, UPS, Amazon, Dow Chemical, and the Washington Post. Shares of generator maker Generac soared almost 20% Wednesday on a strong out. look for this year, mostly because it's helping with data centers. Although a lot of Americans are thinking about getting generators after last month's ice storm. We're off to a much better start at the beginning of the year than we ended the last year. We just didn't get a landed hurricane last

year. So without the outages, you know, that business was was slower in the back half of the year. You know, we're assuming normal outage environment comes back. You know, we see some of that activity. It was it was off 90% last year, year over year in terms of the outages. And that's just, again, And sometimes you get years like that where the weather doesn't cause outages, but for the most part, you know, we're assuming that's going to return to normal. Genaac's CEO Aaron Jagfeld on CNBC. On Thursday's watch list, we find out how many people applied for unemployment benefits last week. Earnings are coming from Budweiser-Parent Anheuser-Busch in Bev. We also get the latest on inflation at the wholesale level and we get existing home sales numbers for January.

Jessica Eddinger, CNBC. Live ambitiously.