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SBF guilty — A jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of all seven criminal charges he faced for stealing billions of dollars from customers at his crypto exchange FTX.

What’s next — The speedy verdict closed a chapter of one crypto mogul’s epic fall from grace, but a host of legal and political woes are dogging other major players in the industry.

Our Declan Harty reports that cases involving Binance, Coinbase and Gemini could have huge ramifications for the market.

Jobs day preview — It’s one of those moments when a “meh” economic reading is what the Federal Reserve and Wall Street really want to see.

This morning’s release of October employment data is a big test of whether the Fed made the right call this week. The FOMC on Wednesday decided to extend the pause in its rate-hike campaign to see whether rising borrowing costs are doing the job of taming inflation.

But even if the data shows a surprise surge in employment, the Fed just got another big reason to think twice about hiking. Let’s get into it:

What economists expect today

Economists are forecasting that nonfarm payrolls rose by 180,000 jobs in October, down from the September surprise of 336,000. It would amount to a solid, if less-than-spectacular, month of growth.

A jobs report that shows signs of cooling – in line with expectations — would nudge the Fed to hold steady.

What if they’re wrong?

A surprise to the upside, on the heels of a blowout GDP number for the third quarter, could push the Fed to tighten further — a possibility that Chair Jerome Powell left on the table this week even as he sounded slightly more doveish.

But everything may be OK. That’s because the Fed got a great piece of news Thursday that shows the labor market may still be trending in its favor.

Nonfarm productivity — a measure of worker output per hour — rose by 4.7 percent in the third quarter, its highest rate in three years, after increasing by 3.6 percent in the second quarter. Unit labor costs, a measure of how much a business pays its workers, fell.

Why does productivity matter?

The productivity trend is encouraging because it signals that inflationary pressures are receding even as the economy continues to show resilience, EY-Parthenon senior economist Lydia Boussour wrote Thursday. Companies will be less inclined to pass their elevated costs onto consumers by raising prices.

Anecdotal evidence from executives, according to Boussour, indicates that businesses are investing in technologies such as generative AI and finding other ways to boost labor efficiency by focusing on retention and long-term training.

“The continued slowdown in unit labor costs is a piece of good news for the Fed, pointing to an environment where labor cost pressures are easing,” she said.

As Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee told our Victoria Guida earlier this year, the productivity growth rate in the eyes of the Fed is “the absolutely most critical piece of information that we need to glean.”

Happy Friday — Thanks to everyone who wrote in this week. Please keep it coming: [email protected].

BLS releases October employment data at 8:30 a.m. … Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr discusses the Community Reinvestment Act at 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. … FSOC meets at 1:50 p.m. …

Janet Yellen on China — The Treasury secretary tried to reassure Asian countries in a speech that the U.S. approach to China will not lead to a “disastrous” division of the global economy, Reuters reports.

Realtors shakeup continues — The CEO of the National Association of Realtors resigned, two days after a jury ruled that the group conspired to inflate home commissions, the NYT reports.

First in MM: Warren presses Yellen to scrutinize lenders — Sen. Elizabeth Warren is urging Yellen to subject non-bank financial giants to Federal Reserve oversight when regulators later today undo Trump administration rollbacks that made it harder to designate such firms as “systemically important.”

Warren wrote to Yellen ahead of this afternoon’s Financial Stability Oversight Council meeting, where the Treasury secretary and other top regulators are expected to revive the rules. Yellen chairs the FSOC.

Warren told Yellen that the council must “fully exercise its designation authority.” She cited the growing footprint of nonbanks in providing credit to consumers and businesses, and called out nonbank mortgage lenders in particular.

“[F]inalizing the proposed interpretive guidance is not enough,” she said. “FSOC must also exercise its designation authority to effectively carry out its responsibility of addressing potential risks to the U.S. financial system before they destabilize the system.”

Investment Company Institute CEO Eric Pan, who represents asset managers that could be FSOC targets, told MM: “We can only hope that FSOC will resist the temptation to employ its SIFI designation authority without sufficient analysis of all relevant factors or consideration of alternatives.

SEC probes PayPal — The payments giant received a subpoena from the SEC’s enforcement division related to the company’s work on a dollar-linked stablecoin, Bloomberg reports.

Sherrod Brown skeptical of stablecoin talks — Sen. Cynthia Lummis told Eleanor Mueller Thursday that she and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand are planning to huddle soon with House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry and the White House about attaching stablecoin legislation to the NDAA. But key Democrats are still looking like a hard sell.

House Financial Services in July approved a bill to set up new stablecoin regulations. Ranking member Maxine Waters opposed it, and the White House did, too, according to lawmakers at the time.

Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown is now also pushing back.

“I’m always willing to talk about this stuff, but we’re not going to do an industry bill in crypto,” Brown said Thursday. “They’re going to want to jam us on industry’s bill — and if that’s what’s happened, we’re not going to pass a crypto bill written by the industry.”

Lummis said there were “multiple meetings scheduled” with the White House before McHenry was pulled away to serve as temporary speaker.

“Now that he’s back in his role as chair of Financial Services, I think we’ll be pulling those discussions back together — hopefully even before Thanksgiving,” she said, adding that she’s hopeful Waters joins the discussion.

People moves — Sen. Warren announced staff promotions: Beth Pearson as chief of staff, Laura Gerrard as deputy chief of staff and Gabrielle Elul as legislative director … Elisabeth Donahue, former chief of staff at the White House CEA, will be the Brookings Institution’s vice president of communications and public affairs effective Jan. 1 … Keegan Zimprich, a former aide to Sen. Kevin Cramer, is manager of federal government relations at U.S. Bank