Canberra decides who can buy Chinese-held rare earths

Two of the six China-linked shareholders ordered by treasurer Jim Chalmers to exit Northern Minerals in May now need government approval before they can sell at all, after Canberra froze some holdings in July when the pair simply refused to comply, as Bloomberg reports. That is the giveaway: this isn't really about ownership caps anymore, it's about preventing a sale to a related buyer who quietly keeps the stake in the same hands. The six investors, including Hong Kong Ying Tak and Qogir Trading & Service, still control close to 17.58% of Australia's largest heavy rare earths developer months after their deadline passed. Perth-based Northern Minerals has total assets of just A$53.3 million, small enough that a handful of stubborn shareholders can tie up a strategically important supply chain in legal limbo. Policy experts called the continued refusal to sell "extraordinary," and the next test is whether Canberra can actually force a sale through the courts rather than just freezing the register.

Sunrise Energy Metals shares jumped as much as 29% after the US Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital offered up to $400 million in conditional debt financing for the Syerston project in New South Wales, according to Bloomberg. Lockheed Martin already has a deal locked in for 25% of the mine's output over its first five years, which tells you the Pentagon isn't funding a speculative junior miner, it's securing a defense input it currently can't get outside China. The loan is non-binding and gated behind equity raises and binding offtake agreements, with first production targeted for the second half of 2028. This is the fourth critical-minerals commitment from the same office in recent weeks, following a $1.4 billion loan to Sila Nanotechnologies and $150 million to Niron Magnetics, as S&P Global has detailed, and it confirms Washington is now running an industrial policy for allied mineral supply rather than a series of one-off deals.

SEBI's 20-minute Closing Auction Session, live since 3 August for stocks with derivatives contracts, was built to fix a $5.2 trillion market's messy old close. High-frequency traders have largely stayed out of it, according to Bloomberg, because they can't borrow shares to short into the auction window. That leaves a two-sided market missing one side. The old close, based on the last 30 minutes of continuous trading, supported a profitable arbitrage trade that Bloomberg flagged as under threat back on 3 August. Index funds are meant to be the winners here, with lower tracking error against a cleaner reference price, but that only holds if enough liquidity providers show up. Right now the auction runs thinner than SEBI planned, and the September 7 rollout of pre-open auction changes will test whether the regulator adjusts short-borrow rules before wider stocks join the scheme.

Texas Pacific Land, LandBridge and EagleRock are pitching remote Permian Basin acreage to AI developers as an escape route from a backlash that has already killed a $1.5 billion project in San Marcos, the first Texas city to effectively zone out data centres entirely. Only 29% of Texans support a data centre in their community, versus 56% opposed, according to the June UT/Texas Politics Project poll, and rural support drops to 22%. Governor Greg Abbott has frozen new grid-connected approvals pending an audit, which is forcing developers to hunt for sites where nobody's watching and the gas is already flowing. The Permian offers exactly that: cheap land, abundant natural gas for on-site power, and a population sparse enough to avoid the noise and water fights playing out in East Texas. California Resources Corporation is running the same playbook at its Elk Hills oil field, a 600,000 square-foot campus that suggests this siting model travels well beyond Texas.

Home loan applications at Westpac dropped from roughly 33,000 a month to about 27,000 after Australia's federal budget floated changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, a 20% fall that Reuters confirmed from the bank's own disclosures. Investor housing credit growth is now expected to halve next year. The stock fell 2.57% to A$34.50, pushing Westpac into bear market territory and down 11.42% year to date, and Citi has already cut profit forecasts across the big four banks on the same read-through. Consumer banking head Carolyn McCann blamed rates, policy uncertainty and the tax proposals together, not any single factor, which is the more worrying version of this story for shareholders because it means there's no single lever to fix.

SB 903 would bar companies from advertising chatbots as therapy, stop AI making independent therapeutic decisions or diagnoses, and require written consent before any AI records or transcribes a session, according to the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. It passed the state Senate 39-0 in May and is now in Assembly fiscal review. Violations could cost up to $10,000 each. This builds on AB 489, already in force since January, which bans AI tools from using titles or credentials that imply a licensed clinician is on the other end of the chat. The distinction the bill draws matters commercially: scheduling, billing and transcription support stay legal, but anything resembling clinical judgement, including detecting a user's emotional state, does not. Illinois has already passed comparable rules, and any AI mental-health startup still marketing itself as a therapist replacement needs a new pitch before this becomes law elsewhere.

US nonfarm payrolls fell by 23,000 in July, reversing a downwardly revised 20,000 gain in June, and spot gold jumped 2.3% to $4,336.11 an ounce on the release, hitting a seven-week high according to CNBC. The metal is up more than 7% on the week. The mechanism is simple: a weaker labour market lowers the odds the Fed needs to hike again, which drops real yields and the dollar, and gold's appeal rises precisely because it pays no yield to compete with. Kitco flagged the next resistance zone as tough going even after this breakout, so the rally now depends on whether upcoming inflation data confirms the slowdown or the Fed pushes back on rate-cut pricing.

AUD/JPY has recovered to around 111.52 after Tokyo's currency intervention briefly knocked it down more than 4% toward 109, and strategist Sean Callow at InTouch Capital Markets sees resistance at 113.38 and then 114.80, near the year's high, as Bloomberg reports. Back in April the pair touched 114.112, its strongest since 1990. The driver is unglamorous but persistent: a hawkish Reserve Bank of Australia against an ultra-loose Bank of Japan, a rate gap that keeps rewarding anyone borrowing cheap yen to hold Aussie dollars. NAB's Ray Attrill called February's level the strongest since 1986. For UK firms with yen costs and Australian dollar revenue, the hedge you priced six months ago is now wrong in your favour, but Tokyo has shown it will intervene again if the yen keeps sliding.

ABARES now expects 26.7 million tonnes of wheat for 2026-27, down 26% year on year but well above the roughly 21.3 million tonne figure some private forecasters were pricing in earlier this season. Rainfall across New South Wales and Queensland added an estimated 500,000 hectares of plantable area, and Rabobank's Vitor Pistoia told Reuters that could lift regional output by several million tonnes. USDA's own forecast moved the other way for the better, up to 31.0 million tonnes from 29.0 million previously. Western Australia, the country's biggest grain exporter, is still tracking down sharply at 9.5 million tonnes versus 13.3 million last year, so the national recovery is real but lopsided, and a dry finish in the east could still erase the gain before harvest.

DatVietVAC is selling 11.15 million shares at VND 54,800 each, raising about VND 611 billion, roughly $23 million, ahead of a planned HOSE listing later this year. The implied valuation, about 13 times projected 2026 earnings on a forecast VND 420 billion net profit, sits at a reported 28% discount to Asian entertainment-sector peers, according to company disclosures cited by Vietstock. The pitch is explicitly the Korean entertainment model: turn hit content, in this case shows like Anh Trai Say Hi, into durable, licensable IP rather than one-off ratings wins. DatVietVAC claims 27% of Vietnam's domestic TV advertising consulting market in the first half of 2026, per Kantar data cited in local reporting. At $23 million gross, this is a small deal, but it's the first real test of whether Vietnamese public markets will pay up for a consumer media story instead of the usual bank or property listing.

The government reckons a crackdown on inflated was prices and invented RRPs could save consumers £400 million a year, with the rules to be set through an autumn consultation and passed via secondary legislation rather than a full parliamentary bill, according to the Guardian. Subscription-trap protections are being pulled forward from spring 2027 to January 2027, and will require a 14-day cooling-off period after any free trial or long-term contract renews automatically. That's a real compliance headache for retailers running promo calendars built around inflated baseline prices, and for subscription businesses whose growth model depends on customers forgetting to cancel. The scope of misleading pricing won't be defined until the autumn consultation lands, which leaves retailers guessing at redesign costs for months before the rules are actually written.

Jobseeker numbers have risen for 41 consecutive months while vacancies fell for 22 straight, according to KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, and official ONS data puts vacancies at 712,000, almost half the 2022 level. Business groups are pressing Andy Burnham, John Healey and Jonathan Reynolds for relief before year end, blaming Rachel Reeves' tax rises for the squeeze. Burnham's own response has focused narrowly on youth hiring, including a suggestion that employers ditch Zoom interviews for face-to-face ones to help close a gap where nearly a million young people are not in employment, education or training. One MP has put the aggregate cost of the Employment Rights Bill to business at around £5 billion, a figure ministers haven't seriously contested yet. The politics here are awkward for Burnham: he built his platform on stronger worker protections, and now has to explain why hiring keeps falling anyway.

The alleged Kinahan crime group leader was handed over by the UAE on Sunday under a bilateral extradition treaty that only entered force in May 2025, and he now faces the Special Criminal Court on charges of directing organised crime, as Reuters confirmed.

Suppliers check records against benefit status as of 23 August for this cycle, and around six million households qualify, but anyone not named as billpayer needs to update their supplier's records manually before the deadline.

£50 million goes directly to carmakers and research partners to scale production, matched by industry cash, sitting inside the wider £4 billion Drive35 programme meant to hit the 2030 petrol and diesel ban, according to City AM.

MNB governor Mihaly Varga wants Hungary in the euro area as a competitive, well prepared economy, with the bank's own modelling pointing to 0.6 to 0.9 percentage points of extra annual GDP growth and real interest rate cuts of up to 200 basis points once inside.

Farage took the seat in 2024 with 46.2% and an 8,405-vote majority, and pre-vote polling put Reform at 73% this time, but Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are all sitting the contest out, so a landslide proves less than it looks.