Adani's DOJ dismissal comes with a judge's cold shoulder

Judge Nicholas Garaufis dismissed three of five counts against Gautam Adani but called the Justice Department's handling of it highly unusual and singled out Trent McCotter, a senior political appointee, for allegedly overriding the FBI, the SEC, and career prosecutors on his own judgment. The judge went further: he ordered Adani to answer under oath whether anything was promised, offered, sought, received, agreed to, or accepted in exchange for the dismissal, a demand aimed squarely at reports of a proposed $10 billion US investment tied to the case, as detailed in the underlying court filings. Adani's lawyers had spent months building their case with what one report described as roughly 600 pages of submissions and expert testimony. None of that answers the judge's real question: whether prosecutorial discretion and political convenience have become impossible to tell apart. Two counts remain unresolved. For anyone underwriting Adani Group risk, the exoneration is procedural, not reputational.

More than 1 trillion yuan of Chinese non-residential property now carries leases of 20 years or less, meaning a huge slice of commercial real estate is already past the halfway mark on deals signed decades ago, according to Andrew Chan at Cushman & Wakefield Greater China. Bloomberg puts the exposure at $148 billion. When those leases shorten toward expiry, refinancing gets harder and valuations fall, which matters enormously in a market where prime office capital values in Beijing and Shanghai are already down roughly 40% since 2019 and vacancy sits between 20% and 40% in major cities. The residential developer crisis has dominated headlines for five years. This is the commercial side finally catching up, and it hits a different set of lenders, landlords, and foreign investors who thought office towers were the safer bet.

Blackstone and Quebec's La Caisse are paying C$2.5 billion for a 25% stake in Aeroplan, alongside PSP Investments and BCI, in a deal that values the points programme alone at C$10 billion, according to Air Canada's own disclosure. The airline keeps 75% and full operational control, and plans to use the cash to retire a $1.2 billion bond maturity while pushing toward an investment-grade credit rating. That valuation is roughly the size of Air Canada's entire market cap not long ago, which tells you how much investors now think loyalty data is worth relative to the planes themselves. Settlement is expected around 17 August. Blackstone framed it as a vote of confidence in Canada; bondholders will read it as balance-sheet triage.

Gross margin came in at 17.5%, against guidance of 8.2% to 8.4%, on revenue of $11.12 billion that actually missed some analyst estimates. Profit hit $1.17 billion, up from $195.2 million a year earlier, and the company disclosed more than $60 billion in new orders for AI server hardware. Shares jumped as much as 17% on the numbers. The company blamed the margin jump on a better mix of customers and products, which is corporate-speak for selling more expensive systems to fewer, richer buyers. JPMorgan flagged the obvious follow-up question: is 17% margin the new normal, or a one-quarter fluke that resets lower once competitors catch up on pricing.

Only around a quarter of Chinese export license applications for rare earth magnets have been approved since Beijing tightened controls, according to CLEPA, and European auto suppliers have already reported production line shutdowns as a result. This is squeezing a sector that's simultaneously losing ground to Chinese-built cars: Chinese brands took roughly 6% of EU vehicle registrations in the first four months of the year, double their share twelve months prior, while China exported more than a million vehicles in a single month for the first time in June, up 71% year on year. Brussels' response so far is tariffs of up to 35% on some Chinese EVs. Tariffs don't fix a magnet shortage. China controls roughly 60% of global rare earth mining and over 85% of processing capacity, which means Europe's leverage over its own supply chain is close to zero, and Chinese firms are responding to the tariff wall by buying into European parts makers instead of just shipping around it.

Foreign investors bought $1.7 billion of Taiwan stocks this month while dumping $6.2 billion of Korean ones, ending a six-week Taiwan selling streak, according to Bloomberg data. Both markets got hammered in the summer AI selloff, with Korea's Kospi falling more than 40% from its June peak and Taiwan's Taiex down a comparatively gentle 17%. The gap comes down to concentration risk: Korea's index leans on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, memory chipmakers whose fortunes swing hard with AI sentiment, while Taiwan's exposure runs through TSMC, seen as tied more directly to durable leading-edge chip demand than to speculative capex cycles. That is a bet on earnings quality over earnings beta, and it is only a week old.

Tencent reports Wednesday, JD.com Thursday, and SMIC's outlook will show whether chip demand is holding up, three results that together test whether the recent move out of AI infrastructure stocks into internet platforms has legs. HSBC expects JD.com's non-GAAP net profit to rise 18% year on year to 8.7 billion yuan, helped by narrowing food-delivery losses. The Hang Seng Tech Index has just posted its best six-week winning streak since 2020, and Alibaba jumped as much as 14.6% on reports its instant-commerce losses were shrinking. Goldman Sachs says it is watching the rotation but still prefers A-shares and hard tech, a sign this could be a valuation catch-up trade as much as a fundamentals story.

A regulatory filing shows Uber held zero Serve Robotics shares last quarter, down from more than 2 million shares worth $17.5 million the quarter before, and Serve says it only found out when the disclosure went public. The split traces back to a dispute over deployment strategy, with Uber reportedly sending fewer delivery orders in the second quarter than the first and raising concerns about Serve's reliability as it expanded into new markets. The commercial agreement between the two, which allows for up to 2,000 robots and runs through February 2027, technically survives. But Uber pulling a board seat and its entire equity position in the same quarter looks less like a disagreement and more like a divorce with the paperwork still pending.

FlightAware filed suit in the Southern District of New York on August 10, alleging Kalshi used its data and trademark without permission to settle prediction-market contracts on flight cancellations launched July 14. Kalshi listed the markets and filed with the CFTC on the same day, which suggests it moved fast and asked forgiveness later. FlightAware says it did not find out until reporters called for comment, and it is now seeking an emergency injunction plus damages, arguing the contracts could even incentivise interference with flights to manipulate outcomes. Kalshi, valued at $22 billion after a May funding round, is calling its use of FlightAware's brand nominative fair use. Whoever wins sets the rule for every prediction market that leans on someone else's real-world data feed to settle a bet.

Shanghai Electric Global Capital just raised roughly 1.5 billion yuan through a Shanghai free-trade-zone bond, the first from a nonfinancial issuer in nearly three years, since Beijing shut the market down in 2023 after local-government financing vehicles exploited it for cheap domestic funding disguised as offshore debt. The relaunch comes with a new rule from PBoC governor Pan Gongsheng: both issuer and buyer must now be based outside mainland China, a two ends outside condition designed to stop the exact abuse that killed the market last time. The scheme remains tiny, just 4% of China's $16.5 billion offshore renminbi bond stock, against a pre-crackdown record of 36 billion yuan issued in 2022 alone. Beijing wants a controlled channel for Belt and Road-linked companies to raise yuan funding abroad. It does not want a repeat of local governments treating it as a backdoor.

BNY Mellon strategist Geoff Yu has built a Katsu Curry Index to track yen weakness, arguing a Japanese pork-and-rice staple reflects domestic purchasing power better than The Economist's Big Mac, an imported product Japanese consumers barely notice moving. The timing is deliberate: Japan's currency intervention from earlier this year is fading, and Yu wants a benchmark that captures what a soft yen actually feels like at the till rather than what it implies for dollar traders in London. The Big Mac Index still dominates as the global shorthand, with Switzerland's franc showing as roughly 48% overvalued and Taiwan's dollar as 60% undervalued in the latest reading. A local dish will not replace that. It will, however, tell Tokyo commuters something a burger price never could: whether their own government's intervention actually reached their wallets.

A California federal lawsuit filed by Julia Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria alleges StubHub sold World Cup tickets it never had and then leaned on refunds instead of replacements, even after buyers had already paid for flights and hotels. One plaintiff spent $19,000 on tickets that never arrived; another case cites a buyer out $4,600. StubHub's FanProtect Guarantee promises resolution within five business days, but CBC's reporting found legions of customers stuck in weeks-long disputes, and a Vancouver customer has filed a proposed Canadian class action alleging thousands were affected. StubHub's regulatory headaches are not confined to North America: the UK's markets watchdog already ordered its British arm to refund more than 50,000 customers and pay a £900,000 fine over pricing disclosures. Marketplaces that rely on third-party inventory carry a hidden liability line, and StubHub is now finding out what it costs when that inventory does not show up.

Bloomberg reports Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for the product features behind Phia's affiliate-attribution problem and knew about the practice since December, seven months before it became public, based on internal Slack messages. The startup's shopping app claimed commission credit for sales it never drove, a tactic known in affiliate marketing as cookie stuffing, and Impact.com suspended Phia and is now reprocessing every credited transaction between June 20 and July 29 to refund advertisers or reassign the commission. Phia has raised over $43 million and initially blamed a software bug. The shift from bug to founders knew and pushed for it changes this from a technical fix into a governance problem, and it is the kind of story that shows up in due diligence memos long after the headlines fade.

Chief executive Loh Boon Chye says Singapore Exchange is looking at single-stock and leveraged ETFs on top of its existing 53 funds, which already hold more than S$21 billion in assets. The exchange launched ten single-stock futures on names like DBS, UOB, and OCBC back in June, and the ETF push looks like the natural next step in giving investors more precise, packaged exposure to individual Singapore names rather than the blended Straits Times Index products that have dominated the shelf. Loh's framing, wanting representation across the region, asset classes, and sectors, suggests SGX sees product breadth as the lever for growth now that domestic listings have slowed. Leveraged single-stock ETFs are higher-risk instruments than the plain index trackers SGX has built its ETF business on.

Households within 500 metres of new or upgraded transmission infrastructure will get up to £250 a year for a decade, a maximum £2,500, across the first 43 approved projects, with payments starting in 2026, as confirmed in the government's official scheme design. The cost lands on everyone else: suppliers will pass it through, adding roughly 80p a year to the average national electricity bill, according to the BBC. That is a rounding error next to the real number, Ofgem's approved £28 billion five-year network investment package, which the regulator itself says could add £108 to bills by 2031 even as it argues consumers eventually save around £80 through lower wholesale costs. Between 120,000 and 160,000 households could eventually qualify as more pylon and substation projects get approved. The government is betting a small, visible discount buys enough local goodwill to stop planning objections from stalling clean-power targets it cannot hit without new pylons going up.

Delta Flight 591, carrying 199 passengers from Las Vegas to Atlanta the day after DEF CON 34 ended, had an unauthorised wireless network appear onboard that the airline says it did not provide or operate, according to Delta's own statement. Crew disabled the plane's Wi-Fi for about 30 minutes after detecting the rogue network, which reportedly appeared under a name mimicking Delta's real service, and one account cited by BleepingComputer claims the fake network ran a phishing page harvesting credentials, though that detail is unverified. Delta insists its own systems were never touched and no flight-safety system was affected. The FBI is looking into it. Airlines have spent years hardening cockpit and avionics security while treating the passenger Wi-Fi network as an afterthought, and a planeload of hackers just proved that is the weaker door.

New Zealand's prime minister told his National Party caucus he had its full support in a hastily convened Wellington vote, the second such test he has called on his own leadership this year after an earlier one in April. He will not say what the actual tally was, and neither vote count has been made public, which is standard for these ballots but does little to quiet speculation given National's weak polling ahead of the November 7 election. Reuters reports the party's coalition partners, particularly Winston Peters, criticised the earlier April vote as a very bad move, suggesting even allies see repeated internal drama as a liability rather than a display of strength. 1News has floated Erica Stanford and Mark Mitchell as potential successors if support ever cracks. Calling your own confidence vote twice in one election year is not what stability usually looks like.

Retailers are reporting stock shortages ahead of the next eclipse window, a reminder that niche demand spikes can still catch supply chains flat-footed.

Volatility gauges have dropped sharply even as regional tensions persist, suggesting traders have priced geopolitical risk out faster than the risk itself has faded.

Two chatbots hitting a billion users each turns AI assistants from a novelty into infrastructure most of the connected world now touches weekly.

The Endeavor chief's move into live theatre ownership puts a Hollywood dealmaker in charge of a sizeable chunk of London's stage economy.

More than ten trading and research outfits are paying premium fees for early access to presidential posts, treating social media as market-moving data infrastructure.