Roundup: Ford Motor / Early voting / Labor costs


    Halt: Ford Motor is pausing production of its electric F-150 Lightning truck for several weeks as the outlook for electric vehicles remains downbeat, with car companies confronting slumping demand. Ford said Thursday that it would idle the assembly factory that makes the battery-powered truck from mid-November to Jan. 6. Read more from The Wall Street Journal.

    Breaking records: Louisiana eclipsed the in-person early voting record from the presidential election in 2020 by more than 30,000 votes. Republicans accounted for almost half of the roughly 960,000 early voters. Read more from WAFB-TV.

    Downward trend: U.S. labor costs recorded their smallest increase in more than three years in the third quarter, indicating that inflation was firmly on a downward trend. The employment cost index, the broadest measure of labor costs, rose 0.8% last quarter, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Thursday. That was the smallest gain since the second quarter of 2021. Read more from Reuters.