The twin pillars of the bond market — the U.S. Treasury, which issues government debt, and the Fed, which heavily influences the interest rates Uncle Sam pays to borrow — are both set to make big announcements today, Matt writes.

Why it matters: They could cause waves in the market that'll ripple out to the real economy in the form of higher or lower borrowing costs for corporations and homebuyers, among others.

State of play: The Fed is due to announce its latest monetary policy decision at 2pm, with folks on Wall Street expecting the central bank to leave its rate target unchanged at a range of 5.25% to 5.5%. (Expectations for monetary policy are a key contributor to government bond yields.)

• But some think the details of the Treasury Department's planned "quarterly refunding" may be more important to the market when they're released at 8:30am.
• This refunding plan gets into the nitty-gritty specifics of how Treasury will distribute Q4's expected debt sales over different parts of the bond market — from short-term Treasury bills to 30-year bonds.
• Treasury needs to raise $776 billion this quarter, a record for the last three months of the year.

Flashback: The Treasury Department said in its last refunding announcement in August that it would have to sell more long-term bonds than expected, in order to cover deficits. That move, in turn, was blamed for adding momentum to the rise in long-term interest rates — like the 10-year note that most corporate and individual borrowing is benchmarked to.

• The yield on 10-year Treasury notes is hovering at 16-year highs of just under 5% — up by almost 1 percentage point since the August announcement.
• If the Treasury surprises the market by announcing that it plans to sell more long-term bonds than anticipated, that could push long-term bond yields up even further.
• That's especially true as demand for long-term bonds doesn't seem to be what it once was since some of the big buyers of U.S. government bonds over the last decade — China and the Fed — are no longer buying.

Context: Such changes are a concern, especially since the size of the Federal debt has exploded, growing by more than $9 trillion since the end of 2019, to over $26.5 trillion.

• That surge of debt is due to both declines in income and corporate tax revenues — as a share of GDP — following the Trump tax cuts of 2017, as well as large-scale deficit spending during the pandemic by both the Trump and Biden administrations to ensure the economy didn't suffer a COVID collapse.
• The amount the U.S. pays as interest expense on the Federal debt jumped nearly 40% in just-finished fiscal 2023 to more than $659 billion (see the chart above).

The bottom line: If we are in a higher-for-longer world, the challenge of managing debt gets trickier not just for consumers and companies, but for the government itself.

⬆️ CVS beats on strong revenue from health services. (CNBC)

💉 Ozempic upends markets, despite unknowns. (Axios)

🛢️ Oil is transforming Guyana from one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere into the world's fastest-growing economy. (WSJ)

The average child care payment is up 32% from 2019, according to new data from the Bank of America Institute.

• The price surge outpaced overall inflation; the Consumer Price Index was up 20% over the same period, Emily writes.

Why it matters: Rising costs pose a threat to the remarkable progress that women, particularly mothers, have made in the U.S. labor force.

• The report found that cost increases might be driving some parents out of the workforce to look after their children. (Typically, it's women who wind up dropping out for child care reasons, but the BofA data doesn't look at gender.)

Zoom in: The report looked at anonymized data from 68 million Bank of America accounts, and analyzed those where customers paid for child care.

• To understand if some parents left the workforce, researchers analyzed the number of paychecks those households receive — it's a way of finding dual-income households — and found fewer today compared with 2019.

Go deeper: The average family with child care costs spent more than $700 on it during September.

• That's cutting into other things. Since May 2023, families who pay for child care have been spending at a slower pace than other households — and dipping into savings at a higher rate.
• Still, households' overall savings are much higher than 2019 levels, notes Anna Zhou, an economist at BofA who worked on this report. "They're still financially OK."

What to watch: This data doesn't cover what's happened since the end of September, when pandemic-era federal child care funding ran out. Most observers expect costs to rise even further; and for some providers to go out of business.

• The Biden administration has asked Congress for $16 billion in new child care funding — part of an overall request for domestic spending.

"I just don't remember one way or another."

Why it matters: It seems there's a lot that Bankman-Fried doesn't remember from the years he spent running the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, based on his testimony over the last few days.

• As Axios' Dan Primack put it: "SBF's defense strategy has centered on ignorance."

Where it stands: Bankman-Fried's testimony concluded yesterday. Closing arguments begin today, and could be over by this afternoon.

• A jury will then decide whether he's criminally responsible for the billions of dollars of assets allegedly misappropriated from customers.

H/T to our own Brady Dale, co-author of Axios Crypto, who provided drawings from the courtroom — like the one above — as we at home suffered from a lack of photos of Bankman-Fried's new short haircut.

Chandler represented the office worker whose life was impenetrable to outsiders. Between nine and five, he spoke corporatese, complaining about "the WENUS . . . Weekly Estimated Net Usage Statistics." No one knew what he did...

In his best-known role as Chandler Bing on "Friends," actor Matthew Perry, who died at age 54 this past weekend, helped define a very specific type of Gen X office worker, Emily writes.

• Hyper-aware that his job was meaningless, Chandler punched the clock for a pretty tidy paycheck, seeing no need for the purpose or fulfillment at work that later generations would demand.

Chandler was a more cheerful and amusing version of Peter, the lead character in the 1999 film "Office Space," who is also hyper-aware that his job at Initech, in a relentless beige suburban office park, lacks bigger meaning.

• Chandler's job on "Friends" is an example of a "bullshit job," a communications professor tells the FT. Even the person doing the job can't justify its existence, "but they have to pretend that there's some reason for it to exist."

The bottom line: His fictional TV job might have lacked meaning, but Perry's on-screen work entertained millions. He will be missed.