Up to 80% of Spirit’s merchandise is imported by the company, mostly from Asia, and it moves on a tight schedule through 63 third-party logistics sites before reaching more than 1,550 stores, a process Silverstein says runs all year.

“Every day is critical to us,” he said. Spirit had to stop the ships. A group of executives set up a war room. “You start burning the furniture,” he said. “You have to preserve your cash.”

MORE FROM FORTUNE

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Anthropic spent $2.75 million guarding Dario Amodei last year—more than 4 times his salary, but a fraction of Mark Zuckerberg’s security bill - Catherina Gioino

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Women astronauts outnumber men in NASA’s new class—they’re now halfway through training and set to earn around $150K with no overtime or hazard pay - Orianna Rosa Royle

Can Southeast Asia pitch itself as an ‘all-in-one’ chip hub? - Sam Beltran

Soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé is the latest global name to find himself on the wrong side of Chinese patriotism - Jay Ganglani

HOW BAD COULD IT GET?

France is “walking a tightrope” toward a debt crisis that could force the ECB to prop up the euro

The European Central Bank is unlikely to make emergency purchases of French government debt if the country cannot get its fiscal house in order. But it could be forced to, according to Oxford Economics, because French debt is widely held and a “market panic” might compel the ECB to prop up the euro in order to restore confidence in the E.U.’s single currency.

In the estimation of Oxford’s lead economist Leo Barincou, “Our baseline sees France walking a tightrope over the next six months. Financing needs will reach record highs in 2027, and fiscal slippage, political instability, and election-related uncertainty will all add to market pressure. We expect these factors to push spreads [the premium demanded to hold French bonds over safer bonds such as those from Germany] towards 200 basis points, but that shouldn't trigger a full-blown crisis.”

Nonetheless, if the market can’t see a solution coming after the election—neither Marine Le Pen nor Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the likely runoff candidates, have put forward proposals that the bond market will take seriously—“a more severe market panic, fuelled by self-reinforcing dynamics, can’t be ruled out,” Barincou said in a note.

In that scenario, “the sheer urgency of the situation” would mean “the ECB would probably be forced to act because of the wider systemic risks tied to the amount of French debt held within the European financial system, as well as the risk that a French crisis would undermine confidence in the bloc's single currency.”

THE MARKETS

Samsung and Google ruin the party: Earnings misses drive tech futures lower

Stocks were mixed in Asia and Europe this morning, but U.S. futures are pointing lower before the open in New York. The U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates yesterday but signaled that interest rate hikes were likely in the future.

“My blunt take is that there should have been a rate hike,” SoFi’s Liz Thomas told Fortune in an email. “Oil prices are likely to stay high as long as the war in Iran continues. That means inflation is likely to stay high too. … So it’s very possible we start hearing chatter about a 50 basis point hike in December if the Fed needs to play catch-up.”

Fed chair Kevin Warsh also said he will hold fewer rate-setting meetings next year. UBS’s Paul Donovan—a Warsh critic—raised an eyebrow at that this morning: “Less policy flexibility at a time of economic and political turmoil is an interesting choice,” he told clients.

Nasdaq futures were off by more than 1% this morning after Samsung and Alphabet reported Q3 earnings and both missed expectations. Samsung shares declined 4% in South Korea and Alphabet lost 10% in overnight trading. Samsung’s chipmaking division posted lower operating profit than expected. 

At Alphabet, cloud revenue beat expectations, but search ad revenue came in below forecasts, fueling investor worries that AI overlays are cannibalizing the company’s core business. David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Fortune that Google Cloud did what it was supposed to this quarter: “The problem is everything else.”

Microsoft, by contrast, beat expectations on revenue and lowered its guidance on capex, and the stock rose 3.39% overnight.

• S&P 500 futures were down by 0.3% this morning. The index rose 0.28% yesterday.
• In Europe, the Stoxx 600 rose 0.4% in early trading, and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 rose 0.31% before lunch.
• Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI was down 1.24%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 1.1%. India’s Nifty 50 was up 1.08%. China’s CSI 300 was down 1.03%.
• Brent crude fell to $114 per barrel.
• Bitcoin was at $80,029.

Stocks don’t care about the Fed as much as traders think they do

The Fed held interest rates yesterday, but is likely in a cycle of hiking interest rates for the foreseeable future. Traders don’t tend to like higher rates, because they make money more expensive to borrow for companies and consumers alike. 

Don't fret too much, though, Goldman Sachs’ Vickie Chang says. “Equities tend to struggle after the first hike but recover quickly. In the median of both modest and larger tightening cycles, they trough within 2 months and recover within 4 months.”

CHART OF THE DAY

AI is raising prices across all types of consumer electronics

“Increased demand for memory from data centers has led to outsized increases in memory prices. This is directly boosting consumer prices for memory cards,” according to Megan Peters and Joseph Briggs of Goldman Sachs. AI is probably boosting U.S. personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation by 23 basis points, they estimate.

NUMBER OF THE DAY 

25 years

The length of time that Poland’s economy has been growing without a recession, according to ING’s Marieke Blom. “GDP growth has averaged more than 3.5%” annually over that time, she wrote. (The U.S. average over that period is 2.1%.)

THE FRONT PAGES TODAY

How Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil - FT

Hegseth reportedly fires U.S. top military planner as Trump downplays Iran peace talks - CNBC

Vance tells top Iranian official negotiations must address nuclear program - Axios

The beleaguered chip sellers getting their revenge on Apple - WSJ

Weil Gotshal, once a legal powerhouse, plans to dissolve - NYT

Billionaire author Amy Griffin has completely lost the plot — if she ever had a real one - NY Post

ONE MORE THING

Quentin Tarantino refuses to give a penny of his $150 million fortune to his mother: "No house, no Cadillac"

When Quentin Tarantino was 12 years old, his mom mocked his writing ambitions. Connie Zastoupil was at her wits’ end after teachers told her he wasn’t concentrating at school—and so she told him off. At that moment, Tarantino vowed never to share any of his success from writing with her.

Speaking on The Moment podcast with Brian Koppelman, Tarantino said: “My mom always had a hard time about my scholastic non-ability,” adding that she “was b–ching at me” about writing screenplays. 

“And then in the middle of her little tirade, she said, ‘Oh, and by the way, this little ‘writing career,’ with the finger quotes and everything. This little ‘writing career’ that you’re doing? That s–t is over.'”

He’s still punishing her decades later. “When she said that to me in that sarcastic way, I was in my head and I go, ‘OK lady, when I become a successful writer, you will never see one penny from my success. There will be no house for you. There’s no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for mommy. You get nothing because you said that.’”

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