Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money and markets.
Amazon's AI ambitions are starting to show up in a place investors watch closely — free cash flow. Heavy capital spending on data centers and infrastructure for AWS is compressing margins even as cloud revenue climbs. The question on the street is whether the long-term payoff justifies the near-term squeeze, and analysts remain divided.
Turning to the labor market, a new survey reveals that companies which cut workers in favor of automation are now trying to rehire — and finding the terms have shifted. Former employees are demanding higher wages, job-security guarantees, and more transparency before coming back. The lesson is proving costly: replacing human judgment with bots is easier than rebuilding the trust you burned doing it.
And on the tax front, the IRS has quietly adjusted federal income tax brackets upward for two thousand twenty seven to account for inflation. This is not a cut — it's a structural recalibration that prevents workers from being pushed into higher brackets simply because wages kept pace with rising prices. For middle-income earners especially, it's a modest but meaningful buffer.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
