Why raise money in euros?

Marketplace opens Jobs Week ahead of job openings data Tuesday, ADP payrolls Wednesday, jobless claims and productivity Thursday, and October’s unemployment report Friday. David Royal says revisions erased much of July and August’s apparent strength. Health care is still growing largely because of an aging population, while manufacturing and construction are benefiting from the AI boom and data centers. Indeed’s Sneha Puri says job openings are weak and advertised-salary growth trails inflation. Gusto’s Nick Tremper says small businesses are not competing aggressively on wages, while Glassdoor’s Daniel Zhao says poor job security is pushing long-term unemployment higher even as the economy grows.

Travel planner Sam Bishop-Hanna says she uses ChatGPT and Claude to build itineraries and recommend conveniently located hotels, illustrating the industry’s “discovery” phase. West Virginia University professor A.J. Allury says AI can turn a traveler’s preferences into a personalized shortlist and potentially complete the booking, though that requires trust. Bank of America analyst Sean Kelly compares adoption with the shift from fearing online credit-card payments to treating them as normal. Hotels are also using AI for repetitive front-desk calls—such as a room 237 request for extra towels—so human staff can focus on guests in person.

At K2 Space’s 180,000-square-foot Torrance factory, brothers Karan and Neil Kunjur explain why they rejected the traditional assumption that satellites should be as small and light as possible. Falling launch prices—about $350,000 to put a 50-kilogram satellite on a SpaceX rideshare—make larger designs viable because they can use simpler, cheaper materials. Their 20-kilowatt satellite has a roughly 50-meter solar array; a 200-kilowatt version would exceed 100 meters. K2 launched its first satellite, Gravitas, in March and wants to produce 100 annually as modular infrastructure for broadband, weather and national-security payloads.

K2 has about 400 employees, a valuation near $7 billion, a U.S. Space Force contract and a role in the Golden Dome missile-defense program, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $1.2 trillion. Karan Kunjur defends private companies’ national-security role by comparing satellites with infrastructure such as computers and the internet. K2 makes about 90% of its components in-house, including solar arrays and propulsion parts, and designs satellites to stack on launches, dividing launch costs by 10 or 20. Kunjur predicts space-based computing could compete with terrestrial data centers in five to ten years, while acknowledging AI may be cyclical.

Alphabet plans to issue nearly $7 billion in bonds in Europe, and Meta may make a similar euro-denominated sale. Wilmington Trust’s Randy Vogel says Big Tech has already sold heavily in the U.S.—including Microsoft’s $25 billion deal and Oracle’s $10 billion deal—so investors’ purchase limits and concern about mounting debt are pushing companies toward other markets. Northeastern professor John Bai says firms earning substantial euros can repay euro debt without converting currencies. Strategist Guy LeBas calls that a way to reduce exchange-rate volatility, while CreditSights’ Winnie Cisar says European corporate borrowing can be more than 1.5 percentage points cheaper than in the U.S.; rising rates make repayment risk more consequential.

San Francisco broker Cynthia Cummins compares house hunting to entering a candy store with only a quarter after prices rose to $3.50. National inventory was up 6% year over year, but San Francisco single-family inventory was down 33%. A 1,000-square-foot condo listed at $1.3 million drew 10 offers and sold for $1.8 million. Cummins blames AI-driven wealth and “golden handcuffs”: owners with mortgages below 3% do not want to move, while buyers are taking breaks. Marketplace closes by reporting that Anthropic had contracted for $895 billion in data centers, chips and computing power, with $70 billion due within a year, against $33 billion in revenue through September.