Tata Sons has no chairman and $120bn to deploy

N. Chandrasekaran told Tata Sons on August 12 he will not seek a third term when it ends in February 2027, and the announcement landed six days before Tuesday's annual general meeting where board renewal was already the only item anyone cared about. The timing is brutal: Tata is mid-flight on a $120 billion push into semiconductors, batteries and advanced manufacturing, and as Bloomberg reported, that spending plan now sits in limbo with no confirmed successor. Behind the resignation is a boardroom deadlock, with at least one director withholding support for extending his tenure. Layered on top is an unresolved fight with the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, which holds 18.4% of Tata Sons and wants an IPO to unlock value against roughly ₹60,000 crore of group debt, a push the Tata Trusts, holders of 66%, have resisted. The Reserve Bank of India still lists Tata Sons as an upper-layer NBFC, meaning regulators, not just family trusts, could ultimately force the listing question. Whoever takes the chair next inherits a $120 billion capital allocation decision with no mandate and a shareholder register that does not agree on the company's basic structure.

Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life, the insurance arms feeding Dodgers owner Mark Walter's financing empire, have reclassified roughly $21 billion in loans as related-party transactions after internal review, according to the Los Angeles Times. That's a long way from what regulators were originally told: one insurer reported only 3% of its investments, about $1.4 billion, as tied to Walter-connected companies, when the real figure was reportedly north of 39%, more than $17 billion. Federal prosecutors and the SEC opened the probe after a whistleblower complaint and grand jury subpoenas issued in February, and agents seized Walter's phone and laptop at Chicago's Midway airport back in September. No charges have been filed. But the mechanics matter here: when one person controls both the insurer writing the loan and the business receiving it, mislabeling that as an arm's-length deal is exactly what solvency regulators exist to catch, and Walter's companies manage roughly $85 billion tied largely to retirement annuities and life policies.

The long bond hit 5.31% on Monday, its highest since before the financial crisis, extending a selloff that already forced last week's $25 billion 30-year auction to price at 5.216%, the worst auction result for that maturity since 2001. Bloomberg's framing is blunt: investors are pricing in surging government spending, a wall of long-dated issuance, and inflation that has sat above the Fed's target for five straight years. A Bank of America survey found 62% of global hedge fund managers now expect 30-year yields to hit 6%. That's not a rounding error for anyone with duration exposure. Mortgage pricing, infrastructure financing, and every discounted cash flow model in the City just got repriced against a higher cost of long-term capital, and the next test is whether upcoming auctions still clear without further concession.

OpenAI has finalised a 20-year lease on a 10-gigawatt data centre campus in Pike County, Ohio, built and owned by SoftBank's SB Energy, and Nvidia is backstopping the deal with credit guarantees capped at $105 billion, according to regulatory filings reported by Axios and TechCrunch. That's down from the roughly $250 billion figure floated in July, suggesting Nvidia negotiated its exposure lower once the structure firmed up. Nvidia is also putting in $1.5 billion of equity into SB Energy and becomes the exclusive chip supplier for the site, which sits on Department of Energy land and targets first operations around 2028. The arrangement means Nvidia isn't just selling GPUs into the AI buildout, it's financing the real estate those GPUs sit in, which ties its balance sheet to data centre completion risk in a way chip sales alone never did. Total build cost for the full 10GW campus is estimated north of $500 billion.

Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate passed $65 billion by the end of July, up from the $47 billion it disclosed publicly at its May Series H, which itself valued the company near $965 billion. That's roughly $18 billion of incremental annualised revenue added in eight weeks, and Reuters reports the company is guiding investors toward $190 to $200 billion in revenue by 2028 as it heads toward an IPO later this year. Anthropic is also projecting its first quarterly operating profit, around $559 million in Q2, a signal that enterprise Claude deployments are converting into cash, not just contracted commitments. The catch is that run rate is a projection built off recent bookings, not audited trailing revenue, and a company this size hitting these multiples in this little time gives public market investors almost no historical comparable to value it against.

The Boy and the Heron premiered in 2023 and Studio Ghibli has not confirmed a theatrical follow-up since, a silence Bloomberg's feature treats as the studio's real strategic question. Underneath it, the ownership has already shifted: Nippon Television became top shareholder with a 42.3% stake back in 2023 as part of a succession plan for Miyazaki and Suzuki, then 82 and 75. In May, Ghibli named Kenichi Yoda as president from June, with Suzuki moving to chair and Miyazaki to chair emeritus, keeping the founders visible while handing operational control to a broadcaster executive. Ghibli's brand still sells at full strength, through Ghibli Park and merchandising, regardless of whether a new film ever gets greenlit. That gives Nippon TV every incentive to keep monetising the catalogue even if the animation pipeline stays empty.

Cursor Origin, the code-hosting platform Cursor launched to compete directly with GitHub, went down alongside its rival during Monday's GitHub degradation, an awkward coincidence for a product built to poach GitHub's users. Any startup pitching itself as the alternative to an incumbent inherits scrutiny the moment it shares the incumbent's bad day.

M&G is buying South Korean government bonds on the view that markets have priced in more Bank of Korea rate hikes than will actually happen, a call it frames as one of the cheapest trades left in Asian fixed income. Korean swap curves are pricing multiple 25 basis point hikes through mid-2027, but the BOK's own dot plot in February had most projections holding at 2.50% for six months, and domestic research house KCMI puts the neutral rate around the same level. NH Amundi made a similar call in May, calling one and two year Korean government bonds cheap for the same reason. If M&G is right and the BOK delivers fewer hikes than priced, Korean bond prices rise as yields fall back toward that mispricing gap, a straightforward bet on the central bank being more boring than the market expects.

Trump's threatened tariffs hit at 12:01am ET Wednesday, covering roughly $20 billion (C$28 billion) of Canadian goods across 554 tariff lines, stacked on top of existing steel, aluminium and auto duties that already push some effective rates past 50%. Canadian negotiators have been camped in Washington for a week, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has told reporters directly that some tariffs are now unavoidable, shifting Ottawa's goal from zero tariffs to limiting the damage. Carney says he expects to speak with Trump directly within 48 hours. Autos are the sector he has named explicitly as a red line, and he's said everything, presumably including retaliation, is on the table if the deadline passes without a deal.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto delivered a notably pragmatic address that markets read as a reassurance signal after a period of investor unease over fiscal and policy direction. The relief rally in Jakarta says as much about how low expectations had fallen as it does about the substance of what he said.

Hong Kong's new fund tax regime, gazetted on June 12, sets a 0% rate on carried interest and performance fees for hedge funds and other alternative managers, applied retroactively to April 2025. That retroactivity is the detail worth sitting with: it means fees already earned this year suddenly become tax-free, which is why Bloomberg reports investment banks are bracing for prop traders to defect to hedge fund structures to capture the windfall. One fund is reportedly considering reclassifying a receptionist as an investor relations official to help meet qualifying criteria, which tells you how aggressively the industry is testing the rules' edges. The threshold for qualifying vehicles, including single-investor funds-of-one, is HK$240 million in net asset value, and Hong Kong is now reportedly weighing extending similar breaks to trading firms outright. AIMA has called the reforms game-changing, and the retroactive design means the fiscal cost to Hong Kong's treasury is already locked in for income earned over a year before the law takes effect.

Kelso Group Holdings, which holds 10% of The Works and is pushing to install shareholder Graeme Coulthard as a director via a section 338 resolution at the September 7 AGM, has publicly asked chairman Steve Bellamy how many of the last seven board meetings he attended in person versus dialling in from New Zealand. The residency claim comes from Bellamy's own Companies House filing, which lists him as a New Zealand resident, filed months after 82% of shareholders voted to remove him from the board of Empresaria Group. The Works board has unanimously recommended shareholders vote against Coulthard's appointment, warning it would create governance imbalance and distract from the company's growth strategy. Kelso and Coulthard together control close to 18% of the register, enough to make this a genuine contest rather than a token protest vote.

AstraZeneca has stopped the Phase III eVOLVE-Lung02 trial of volrustomig after an independent monitoring committee concluded the combination, tested against Merck's Keytruda plus chemotherapy in 895 patients across 25 countries, was unlikely to beat it on either survival endpoint. The company says the safety profile was clean and other volrustomig trials in cervical, head and neck, and mesothelioma cancers continue. Shares barely moved, dipping 0.2% in US trading, which suggests investors had already discounted another pipeline miss. Keytruda remains the regimen to beat in first-line lung cancer, and this is the second AstraZeneca oncology setback in recent months to leave that franchise untouched.

JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon has warned the UK against raising taxes on banks ahead of the autumn Budget, adding his voice to a lobbying push that lands as house prices post their biggest August fall since 2018. The Chancellor is hunting for revenue in a tight fiscal position, and banks are an easy political target, but Dimon's intervention signals JPMorgan is prepared to make its UK footprint a bargaining chip in the debate.

Disabled bus pass holders in England will get free travel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ending the current national rule that only guarantees free travel from 9:30am to 11pm on weekdays, backed by £60 million in government funding. The change follows patchwork local pilots, Norfolk covered 14,500 pass holders, Greater Manchester's Bee Network about 400,000, while Hampshire went the other way and cut back to the statutory minimum last year over budget pressure. The national policy now sets a floor high enough to stop councils retreating the way Hampshire did.

CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott ordered a pause on border construction in Big Bend National Park on Monday, days after bulldozers had already begun clearing land and cutting roads through the protected wilderness. Scott says he's travelling to the site himself before deciding how to proceed, after the project drew bipartisan criticism and lawsuits over damage to wildlife and archaeological sites, and after officials had waived environmental and historic-preservation laws to allow the work in the first place. The administration appears to be retreating from an earlier plan for a 30-foot wall toward a lighter mix of access roads, vehicle barriers and detection technology, which changes the procurement picture for contractors bidding on the region's border work.

Paramount is arguing that states and writers challenging its Warner Bros deal should have to put up nearly $2 billion to cover the cost of delay if their case fails, an aggressive attempt to make opposition expensive rather than just legally risky.

Gary Hoffman is leaving months after a shareholder revolt over his position, ending a tenure that spanned Monzo's growth from challenger app to full-scale bank.

The deal pulls Stripe deeper into AI infrastructure, folding in the model-routing marketplace that lets developers switch between AI providers, a bet that payments and AI compute brokering increasingly sit on the same rail.

New planning rules make it harder to convert pubs into homes or offices without full planning permission, a change aimed at stopping the steady loss of local pubs to permitted development loopholes.

Kushner pushed Netanyahu to test Hamas's disarmament pledge with small reciprocal steps in Gaza, but Netanyahu held his line that no withdrawal happens before full disarmament, leaving Trump's ceasefire framework stalled with no breakthrough from the meeting.