Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Royal Bank of Canada moved to reward shareholders today, declaring a seven percent increase to its quarterly dividend, bringing the payout to one dollar and seventy-six cents per share, payable in August of two thousand twenty-six. The hike signals confidence in earnings momentum and puts pressure on peers to follow suit.
Shifting to tech and cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services is in talks to add xAI's Grok models to its Bedrock platform, deepening the race among cloud providers to offer the broadest possible AI model catalog. For AWS, more model choice means stickier enterprise customers. For Grok, it means access to Amazon's vast corporate client base — a distribution advantage that money alone cannot easily replicate.
And on the policy front, New York has officially enacted its pied-à-terre tax, levying annual charges on second homes valued above five million dollars, with the state targeting roughly five hundred million in new revenue. Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani framed it as equity policy, but the real market question is whether it accelerates high-end inventory listings or simply drives wealthy buyers toward other markets entirely.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
