WSJ What’s News - Congress Receives Epstein’s 2003 Birthday Letter With Trump’s Signature

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

P.M. Edition for Sept. 8. Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s estate have given Congress a copy of the 2003 birthday book that includes a letter with Trump’s signature. Plus, lumber prices are falling, sounding an alarm on Wall Street about potential problems on Main Street. Ryan Dezember, who covers commodities for the Journal, discusses what’s going on and why. And the French government has collapsed, deepening the country’s political and fiscal mess. We hear from WSJ reporter Noemie Bisserbe about how this means for the French economy. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Amex Platinum, you have access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. So your experience before takeoff is a taste of what's to come. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Lawyers for Epstein's estate give Congress a copy of the 2003 birthday book that includes a letter bearing Donald Trump's signature. Plus, why falling lumber prices spell bad news for the U.S. economy. And France's political and fiscal mess has deepened after the French government collapsed. You have a national assembly which is divided in three blocks with views that are impossible to reconcile.

So how the new PM will manage to do that remains a big question. It's Monday, September 8th. I'm Alex Osloaf for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. We start with an exclusive report. Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein's estate have given Congress a copy of the birthday book put together for the financier's 50th birthday. The book includes a letter with Trump's signature, which he has said doesn't exist. House Oversight Committee members confirm today that they received a copy of the birthday book, including the letter bearing Trump's signature. The Wall Street Journal in July reported on the book and the letter bearing Trump's name, which contained typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman.

The letter concluded, quote, happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret. The signature was a squiggly Donald below the waist, mimicking pubic hair. Trump has denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, calling it, quote, a fake thing. He has also filed a lawsuit against the journal's reporters, journal publisher Dow Jones, parent company News Corp, and executives, alleging defamation and saying the letter was non-existent. A Dow Jones spokeswoman said, quote, we have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting. White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

We know by now that the labor market appears to be stalling. Friday's jobs report reinforced the trend, painting a picture of a sharply slowing labor market, and the latest reading of the Conference Board's Employment Trends Index, which is out today, hit its lowest point since early 2021. But the health services sector has so far been one of bright spots. Can that continue? WSJ economics reporter Justin Layhart is here now with more. Justin, why is the health services sector still going strong when everything else seems to be kind of slowing down? So health services, traditionally, has always just been the steady growing sector. Health services, it's health care jobs and it's also sort of social

assistant jobs. A lot of it is helping the seniors and the elderly. And these jobs are steady because we always go to the doctor. We just have this demand for health care. that doesn't fluctuate with the economy. So even during the financial crisis, these health services jobs just kept growing and growing, growing. That's part of the attraction of the sector for a lot of workers, that it is steady work. One big distortion I can think of was the pandemic. How did that affect the industry? Yeah, that was a real rarity.

We saw that the health services sector shed jobs, which almost never happened. That was the shutting down in doctors offices, people putting off care. All kinds of things happened. And we just saw these large job losses when the pandemic hit. And then what's more, it took a long time for the sector to come back, in part because some people were probably seeing greener pastures in other areas of the labor market where wages were going up. Can the sector keep adding jobs?

It tends to always grow. I would suspect that it keeps on adding jobs. We aren't getting any younger as a society, right? This is an aging population. We just have these naturally green jobs. growing health care demands. But the sector might not have as much oomph as it has had in the past. You also have to think about some of these cuts that are coming. Medicaid in particular is important for places like hospitals, nursing homes. There's a significant source of revenue

for them. So the picture that we have is one where health services hiring could keep on going, but just not at the same pace as before. And in the context of a labor market where everything else has been kind of weak, that's not great. Tomorrow, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is releasing a preliminary revision to the jobs data for the year that ended in March. What should we be looking for in that data? The expectation is that there's going to be a large downward revision. The supposition is that really there haven't been as many companies being formed, that there have been more businesses is going out of business, and that is going to lead to a significantly lower job count for

March that just suggests we're a little bit closer to a stall in the labor market than we would like. That was WSJ economics reporter, Justin Layhart. Thanks, Justin. Thank you. U.S. stocks rose today ahead of inflation and jobs data expected later this week that could influence how fast the Federal Reserve lowers interest. interest rates this year. Major indexes ended up. The NASDAQ added about half a percent,

the Dow gained about a quarter of a percent, and the S&P 500 rose roughly 0.2%. Mortgage rates dropped sharply on Friday after weaker than expected jobs data boosted expectations for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates this year. According to Mortgage News Daily, which tracks home lending rates, the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage fell to 6.29%. the lowest level since October and down 16 basis points from a day earlier. The housing market has been sluggish for years due to high home prices and elevated rates, and existing home sales are on track for one of their slowest years in decades. But real estate agents say rates under 6% would be low enough to attract some buyers

who have been priced out of the market. Coming up, lower mortgage rates may be a boon for the housing market, but falling lumber prices might signal the opposite. That's after the break. Did you lock the front door? Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision?

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Falling lumber prices are sounding an alarm on Wall Street about potential problems on Main Street. Wood markets have been whipsod of late by trade uncertainty and a deteriorating housing market. Futures have dropped more than 20% since hitting a three-year high at the beginning of August. Ryan DeZember covers commodities for the journal and joins me now. Ryan, what do crashing prices show us? Why should we be concerned about this? Lumber prices have traditionally been a really good leading indicator of not only construction, but of the economy broadly. It's not just building new houses, but building a new fence, a new deck, doing a lot of repair and renovation. And they're a really good indicator when things are slowing down.

And that's what it's suggesting right now. I mentioned in my intro that trade uncertainty helped to send prices lower, how vulnerable. is lumber two tariffs? Well, we don't know yet, and that's sort of the problem. Canada supplies, call it roughly 25% of the softwood lumber, meaning the wood from conifers, pine trees, and spruce trees that we used to build homes and decks and things like that. Now, the U.S. sawmills have long argued that it's an unfair trade.

There's dumping going on, meaning that Canadian sawmills are selling wood in the U.S. for cheaper than they sell it at home, that they're subsubstable. with power, cheaper logs from the provincial governments. And they've been successful over the years in making that case. And so there are duties charged on Canadian lumber. Now, people think those duties will come down again next year a little bit. But they've made the price really high. Now, the wildcard out there is what Trump will do in addition, if he does anything. He's threatened tariffs on Canada broadly. He's launched a national security investigation in imported wood. And we don't know what happen of those, but those would be in addition to the duties charge on Canadian lumber,

raising the prices further. Sounds like there's some stuff still up in the air, but where does lumber go from here? Well, right now, inventories were really piled high in the U.S. to get ahead of the higher prices that everyone knew were coming in August as a result of the duties. There wasn't as much building activity as people had thought, and now we've got a lot of wood in the U.S., more than enough to last for a while, probably through the year in some situation. so no one's buying. So sawmills are starting to cut back hours, reduce shifts, idle some mills, both in Canada and the U.S., and it's all looking like a big wood glut from here on out. That was WS.J reporter, Ryan DeSember. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court loosened restrictions on immigration raids in Los Angeles. A judge had put those limits in place after finding that federal authorities were likely using illegal racial profiling tactics. In a brief unsigned order, the court granted an emergency request by the Trump administration to remove the limits while litigation continues. The majority didn't explain its reasoning, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence saying that the decision was consistent with court precedent for federal officers to conduct immigration checks in parts of Los Angeles where violations were most likely, such as where day laborers gather looking for work. The court's three liberal justices dissented.

The French government has collapsed for the second time in less than a year. A no-confidence motion against the government of Prime Minister Francois Bayru won the support of 364 lawmakers in the 577-seat National Assembly, forcing him to tender his resignation. Naomi Biserab covers French politics and foreign policy for WSJ and is here to tell us more. Noami, the budget deficit was the big issue here. France's borrowing costs are rising. passing those of Greece and entering the territory of Italy.

What will this latest development mean for the French economy? The French Prime Minister called this confidence vote to try to really force lawmakers to acknowledge the dire state of France's finances and engage in a real discussion on how to, well, address this issue. His gamble went spectacularly wrong because opposition lawmakers instead united against him and his government and he's now forced to resign. The economy has resisted well so far in France, considering its fiscal situation, but obviously its growing costs are rising. It's now represents like the biggest budget item for the French government.

And there is an urgent need to show investors that the government is working on this problem. Because if it doesn't, then borrowing costs are going to continue to rise and it's going to affect France's economy in a big way. Given how this went for Bayru, what can the next prime minister do about this issue? Macron has very limited options here because if he picks someone from the left, he risks seeing some of the pro-business overhaul he has implemented in recent years getting undone. And if he picks someone from his ranks, it will be very difficult for this person to build the support to pass a new budget before the end of the year. You mentioned French President Emmanuel Macron. This is his second government to fall in less than a year.

What is the appetite among the electorate to do this dance again? Well, there is appetite for new parliamentary elections, which is what the far right is calling for today, hoping that it will give them a clear majority. But if you look at polls, chances are that if we do this again, we'll end up with the same divided National Assembly and stuck in the same situation, where basically there's no clear majority

with no clear path out of this crisis. That was WSJ reporter, Noemi B. Serb. Thanks, Noemi. Thanks. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Pierre Biennameh and Rodney Davis with supervising producer Michael Cosmites. I'm Alex Osloaf for the Wall Street Journal.

We'll be back with the news show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. You know,