On today's episode of Asking for a Trend, Host Josh Lipton breaks down some of the top stories and key themes from the trading week.

Tens of thousands of dock workers could strike next week at cargo ports along the East and Gulf Coasts. The strike could have major implications for the US economy as it also adds to the mounting uncertainty around the 2024 presidential election. Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul breaks down how the Biden administration is handling the looming strike and how it could impact the election.

Meanwhile, consumers may be wondering if holiday shopping could be impacted by the strike. Naveen Jaggi, JLL Americas president of retail, tells Yahoo Finance, “In terms of holiday product, [retailers] have their product in the States, they have their distribution centers or at the stores… Most of the items that are being sold, the toys, the electronics and the soft goods, clothings, that are pretty predominant when it comes to holiday sales, those come from Asia,” meaning they would not be affected by the port workers on the East and Gulf Coasts going on strike.

Mercor CEO Brendan Foody joins the show to discuss how Mercor uses artificial intelligence to make the hiring process more efficient. Foody explains, “Mercor is able to automate all of those [HR] processes with [large language models (LLMs)] not only far more scalably but also far more effectively. We've processed over 300,000 candidates, conducted hundreds of thousands of verbal interviews asking nuanced questions about people's backgrounds, and matched thousands of people with jobs.” Mercor trains LLMs, predominantly OpenAI’s GPT series and Meta's (META) Llama models, on “all the proprietary data we have on candidates to best understand who's going to perform well at a given job, for what reasons,” Foody says.

The Federal Reserve has officially kicked off its rate-cutting cycle as it eyes a 2% inflation target. But some economists are skeptical about whether a soft landing can actually be achieved. Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman analyzes whether the US economy has the right conditions for a soft landing.

Yahoo Finance Markets Reporter Josh Schafer also breaks down his top takeaways from the trading day, from easing inflation to the small-cap (^RUT) rally.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl