Good evening, you're listening to Markets Desk.
Bank of America moved decisively on capital return today, lifting its dividend by fourteen percent, but the real headline is the buyback program sitting behind it. The bank is committing far more firepower to share repurchases than to the dividend itself, a signal that management sees the stock as undervalued and has the balance sheet strength to act on that conviction.
Shifting to the courts, a federal appeals court in Boston has blocked the Trump administration's one hundred thousand dollar H-1B visa fee, upholding a lower court ruling that the charge amounts to a tax and therefore requires congressional authorization rather than executive action. Employer demand for the visa had already dropped sharply in anticipation of the fee, so the ruling offers some relief to the tech sector's hiring pipeline.
And in the autonomous vehicle space, Waymo and Uber appear to be heading for a split, with their partnership souring amid an intensifying lobbying battle over how and where robotaxis can operate. The friction reflects just how much is at stake commercially and regulatorily as both companies vie to define the terms of self-driving deployment across American cities.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
