Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk.
The most consequential geopolitical tech story of the day centers on Starlink. President Trump called Elon Musk directly and asked him to restore military-grade Starlink access for Ukraine, and the system appeared to be functioning more normally within hours of that call. The episode underscores just how much battlefield communications infrastructure now runs through a single private company, and how quickly policy can shift with one phone call between two men.
Speaking of Musk, Tesla made headlines Wednesday when the chief executive went well beyond his usual autonomous driving rhetoric, declaring that Tesla would not merely participate in the global autonomy market but dominate it entirely. Musk framed the only real obstacle as regulatory, not technological, a signal to investors that the company sees its robotaxi ambitions as a matter of when, not if.
Turning to housing, Goldman Sachs is now flagging serious headwinds for the market extending into two thousand twenty seven. The average thirty-year mortgage rate has climbed from six point two seven percent in October of last year to seven point four zero percent by mid-October this year, and buyers are already retreating. With pandemic-era low-rate loans acting as a lock-in effect, inventory and transaction volume both remain deeply constrained.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
