Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Thursday, October 30th.
This is your FT News Briefing.
Meta had tech earnings yesterday it probably wants to forget.
Microsoft not so much.
And the Federal Reserve is going to stop shrinking its balance sheet.
Plus the cable cowboy is saying howdy to retirement.
I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.
Meta and Microsoft left investors with mixed feelings when they reported earnings yesterday.
Let's start with Meta.
Revenues rose 26% last quarter, but its net income fell by a whopping 83%.
The company said that was because of a one-off income tax charge of nearly $15 billion.
That charge is related to U.S.
President Donald Trump's one big beautiful bill.
Meta's share price dropped more than 7% in after hours trading.
Then there was Microsoft,
and this one really comes down to investors having super high expectations.
Its cloud computing business, Azure, saw its revenue grow 39%.
That was higher than estimates, but it wasn't high enough.
Investors thought there would be even faster expansion because of Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI,