Good morning and welcome to Friday, September 8 — not only have you made it to the end of another traditional working week, you’ve also found yourself on the ABC’s markets and business blog. It’s great to see you!

Let’s deal with the elephant (or should I say Apple) in the room — the tech giant sent Wall Street lower over China’s decision to curb iPhones.

But that wasn’t the only reason Wall Street got cold feet on tech stocks. China’s decision on iPhones has investors nervous about what that could mean for other tech companies — especially chip manufacturers — and that saw a sell-off in chip stocks.

Apple itself finished 2.9% lower for the second straight day in response to China widening its curbs on iPhone use by state employees, with some staff at central government agencies required to stop using their mobiles at work altogether.

(It didn’t help either that Bloomberg reported that China is looking to broaden its iPhone ban to other state firms and agencies.)

The timing isn’t great for Apple, either — they are counting down the days to the release of the iPhone 15.

Tech stocks were only part of the events on Wall Street overnight, though. There was data from the US Labor Department showing there were fewer Americans filing for unemployment last week — falling to 216,000, which is the lowest level since February.

That result added some pressure to Wall Street, with investors nervous it might convince the Federal Reserve to continue with its tight monetary policy stance led by sticky inflation concerns.

Despite the nerves, bets still suggest the Fed will leave rates unchanged this month (that’s coming in at around 93%) but the possibility of another pause in November is much lower at 53.5%, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.

With all that anxiety, you’d be forgiven for expecting that to flow through to our local market — but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case.

Right now, futures are suggesting we will be edging up today, but it will be a quiet start. The ASX SPI is up by a slim 0.1% to 7,168 points as of 7:30am AEST.

Let’s keep this momentum rolling and see how the day unfolds, shall we?

(And if you’re one our dedicated readers who are anti-gifs in the blog, please accept my apology for the double whammy — it’s been a big week and I’m going to *

lean into it coming to an end.)