Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your close on the stories moving money and policy today.
California is taking direct aim at Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of a price-fixing scheme that effectively forces wholesale vendors to raise prices at competing retailers including Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. The state says it now has documentary evidence, including email exchanges with brands like Levi's and Hanes, backing those claims after discovery.
Shifting to fixed income, high-yield credit markets are sending a cautious signal. Junk bond spreads have widened meaningfully, and while that headline number gets attention, analysts warn the underlying composition of that spread movement tells a more complicated story about credit stress beneath the surface.
And in the chip space, Nvidia's head of corporate communications, Anna Soellner, has departed after roughly four months on the job. She joined from Reddit back in June, and her brief tenure overlapped with Nvidia's high-profile partnership with Hugging Face. No successor has been named, and the timing raises questions about internal communications strategy at one of the market's most watched companies.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
