JPMorgan and Wells Fargo kicked off reporting season this morning for U.S. banks and gave industry investors an early sigh of relief.
Between the lines: On top of mind was net interest income — the difference between what banks earn on loans and what they pay on deposits — which is expected to fall in a lower rate environment.
For JPMorgan, so far, it hasn't. The bank even raised its full-year forecast a smidge for the key revenue line, though CEO Jamie Dimon — rather testily — told analysts that their 2025 forecasts were still too high.
Not all self-driving vehicles look the same. The photos above are of Proteus, Amazon's first autonomous mobile robot.
👀 Axios got a tour of the Amazon fulfillment center in Nashville where they work.
Zoom in: Proteus machines are designed to roam around with humans as they lift and move carts with packages weighing up to 800 pounds.
The robot's "eyes" in the front "look" in the direction of someone in its path to increase confidence from workers that the machine is aware of their presence.
What we're watching: Amazon sees robotics as additive rather than destructive to its workforce, Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, told Axios in an interview earlier this week.
"We're adding robotics, [which] allows us to invest more in better machines, and in people — creating more jobs, and then that flywheel spins and grows," he said. "That's what's happened for a decade."
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has become deeply entangled with former President Trump in the homestretch of the presidential election.
Why it matters: The Telsa and SpaceX CEO and X owner's political activism is a hard pivot from originally claiming he wouldn't donate to campaigns to pouring tens of millions of dollars into Trump's campaign and saying he's "f---ed" if Trump loses.
It is a delicate time for the economy, with mixed signals as to whether the job market is chugging along fine — or faltering. Assessing what's going on is about to get harder.
The big picture: The triple whammy of Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton, and the Boeing strike are likely to distort economic data in the coming weeks, making the usual indicators of the economy's health more difficult to dissect.
Elon Musk last night did what he does best — put on a show.
Why it matters: The Tesla CEO needed to sell a flashy story about the company's future amid declining present-day demand for its EVs — but in the eyes of most investors after the literal smoke cleared, the unveil failed to live up to the hype.
Venture capital's lack of exits is restricting new deal activity, according to the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.
The big picture: Distributions to limited partners in VC funds haven't been this low since the Great Financial Crisis, sparking what PitchBook refers to as a "stalemate."
CoreWeave, a Roseland, N.J.-based cloud computing platform that rents out GPUs via data centers, secured a $650 million revolving credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.
Why it matters: Wall Street wants a piece of the AI revolution, even if that means lending big dollars to relatively young, VC-backed companies.