Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your end-of-day read on what matters.
Big Tech's golden handcuffs are getting complicated. Restricted stock units have long kept engineers and product managers locked into their seats, but a wave of layoffs is severing those ties before workers ever see the payout — and the AI boom is creating rival opportunities that make the wait feel less worth it.
That talent pressure connects directly to what's happening inside professional services. At KPMG, forward-deployed engineers are no longer writing code line by line — they're embedding AI into client workflows and teaching organizations how to actually use the tools. It's a signal that the highest-value technical work is shifting from building to translating, and firms are repricing that skill accordingly.
And on the human cost side of the debt economy, consider this: a sixty-year-old woman in retirement's shadow is carrying one hundred fifty-six thousand dollars in federal parent PLUS loans she took out to put her children through college. She won't clear the balance until she's seventy-five — a quiet crisis playing out across millions of households that no rate cut will easily fix.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
