Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Markets and Fed: Stocks fluctuated between modest gains and losses Wednesday afternoon after the Federal Reserve opted to keep interest rates unchanged, in line with expectations. Investors were also chewing over the central bank’s updated economic projections, which are released on a quarterly basis. The central bank now sees median core PCE inflation coming at 3.1% in 2025, up from the 2.8% rate previously forecasted in March. Modest upward revisions to inflation expectations were also seen for 2026 and 2027, though, of course, it’s quite difficult to forecast that far into the future. The Fed committee also now sees median unemployment in 2025 coming in at 4.5%, up from the prior 4.4% forecast. Similarly to the inflation outlook, the Fed’s 2026 and 2027 unemployment forecasts were revised up slightly. As a result, the Fed now sees real GDP — meaning adjusted for inflation — coming in below prior expectations. 2025 is now expected to see real GDP growth of 1.4%, down from 1.7%. Meanwhile, 2026 growth is expected to come in at 1.6%, down from 1.8%. However, the growth estimate for 2027 was left unchanged at 1.8%. These revisions underscore the bind that the Fed finds itself in during President Donald Trump’s tariff war. The Fed’s dual mandate is to ensure price stability and low unemployment. When faced with higher inflation, the Fed usually seeks to tame it using rate hikes. When faced with increasing unemployment, the Fed usually turns to rate cuts to stimulate the economy. There’s tension now on both sides of that mandate. At his post-meeting press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell reiterated that the central bank is “well positioned to wait” before adjusting policy any further. On tariffs, specifically, Powell said: “”It takes some time for tariffs to work their way through the chain of distribution to the end consumer.” “Because the economy is still solid, we can take the time to actually see what’s going to happen,” Powell said. “We’ll make smarter and better decisions” if we wait a few months to get more data on tariffs, he said. Crude checkup: Oil prices were mostly flat Wednesday after Trump said Iran wants to negotiate following six days of Israeli airstrikes. “They want to negotiate,” Trump told reporters Wednesday morning, less than 24 hours after he had threatened Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “They even suggested that they come to the White House. That’s courageous. It’s like not easy for them to do.” Stock investors have been closely following the way that oil is reacting to Israel-Iran headlines, given the potential for the conflict in the oil-rich region to disrupt supply and dent global economic growth. Israel’s surprise attack on Iran’s military nuclear infrastructure Friday led to the initial jump in oil prices. Friday’s upswing was the biggest intraday move for the crude futures contract since 2022. Prices have seesawed in subsequent days, but remain trading near five month highs. Driverless news: Autonomous vehicles are back in the spotlight Wednesday. Club name Amazon is ramping up production of its Zoox robotaxis ahead of the launch of public rides in Las Vegas later this year, and Alphabet’s Waymo announced that it is looking enter New York City, albeit with a human behind the wheel to start. The news is just the latest indication of how fast the adoption of robotics is playing out — after all, that’s more or less what an autonomous vehicle is. For Amazon specifically, it speaks to the opportunity AI presents. We just heard from CEO Andy Jassy on this on Tuesday. In a note published on the company’s website, Jassy wrote that in the coming years, “we expect that [artificial intelligence] will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.” However, reading the tea leaves, we think it pretty clear that AI is going to impact far more than the corporate headquarters. Earlier this month, we learned that the company was looking into AI-powered humanoid robots to make deliveries. In total, analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that the overall Amazon is looking to automate roughly $200 billion in logistics costs, or about 35% of its online retail revenue. Between humanoid robots and self-driving cars, there is a massive opportunity at play for Amazon to not only open up new revenue streams via a robotaxi service, but also reduce it’s massively existing cost structure, boosting profits in the process. Of all the major tech players in the AI race, Amazon may prove to be the greatest beneficiary. Of course, its profit-engine Amazon Web Services is benefiting from software developer demand for cloud resources as AWS offers up multiple large language models for them to leverage. But given its massive logistics network — something the other American tech giants don’t really have —it likely has the biggest opportunity of all of them when it comes to margin expansion. Up next: The market will be closed on Thursday in observance of Juneteenth. On Friday, investors will return to a basket of corporate earnings. Accenture , Kroger and Darden Restaurants will all report quarterly results before the opening bell. Updates from supermarket giant Kroger and Olive Garden owner Darden, in particular, could offer fresh insights on the health of the U.S. consumer. On the economic data front, the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing survey will be released at 8:30 a.m. ET. 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