Good evening, this is Markets Desk with the stories moving the needle right now.
Office real estate investment trusts are quietly staging a comeback that the market hasn't fully priced in. Names like SL Green, BXP, and Hudson Pacific are seeing strong leasing demand meet a near-empty construction pipeline, yet they trade at a fraction of the valuations commanded by data-center REITs like Equinix and Digital Realty. That valuation gap looks increasingly hard to justify.
Shifting to defense and geopolitics, Latvia's defense minister is pushing NATO allies to fundamentally rethink how weapons are manufactured, drawing directly from Ukraine's wartime playbook of dispersed, underground production spread across multiple sites. The warning is pointed — NATO's industrial base was built for peacetime, and that architecture becomes a liability the moment conflict arrives.
And in entertainment, new box office data tells a sobering story for Disney's Avatar franchise. The original film generated more profit on its own than the second and third installments combined, raising real questions about the economics of sequels and whether audiences are willing to return to a world that cost billions to rebuild on screen.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
