Moderna's cancer vaccine burned shorts for $5 billion

Moderna's shares gained as much as 177% on Wednesday after a late-stage trial showed its personalised mRNA vaccine, paired with Merck's Keytruda, cut melanoma recurrence in Phase 3 patients. Short sellers, who held roughly 13.5% of the free float going into the print, took a mark-to-market hit of around $5 billion in a single session, according to data from S3 Partners cited by Bloomberg. Add prior 2026 losses and shorts are down close to $7.7 billion year to date. Moderna is still losing money, with analysts pencilling in a full-year loss near $6.20 a share, and Bank of America's response was to move from underperform to neutral, not to a buy. That gap between the stock price and the rating is the real disagreement here, over whether this is proof mRNA works against cancer or a trial away from being priced for a certainty it hasn't earned.

The 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.31% last week, its highest since 2007, before the Treasury Department stepped in and said it would double its buyback of longer-dated debt, from roughly $2 billion to $4 billion, running from September 9 to November 4. Yields eased to around 5.18% on the news. That's real relief, but it's a rounding error against total outstanding issuance, and a $25 billion 30-year auction on August 13 still cleared at 5.22%, the highest since 2001. Every basis point on the long end feeds straight into mortgage rates, infrastructure financing and corporate borrowing costs across the UK and Europe too, since Treasuries set the global risk-free benchmark. Canada's 30-year yields hit levels last seen in 2010 and Germany's touched 2011 highs in the same selloff, confirmation this is no longer a US-only fiscal story.

The Bundibugyo strain has now spread to 54 health zones across six Congolese provinces, up from a single health zone in Ituri when the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in May. North Kivu's treatment centres are running at 139% of capacity, and contact tracing, the backbone of any containment effort, is stuck at 75% against a WHO target of 95%. More than 80% of new infections are turning up outside known contact lists, evidence the outbreak is moving faster than the surveillance built to catch it. Uganda has already reported one imported case, prompting Africa CDC to convene regional coordination with South Sudan as well. The US CDC now advises against all travel to Ituri and North Kivu, a call with direct consequences for mining and logistics operators running supply chains through eastern Congo.

The PBOC set Thursday's yuan fixing at 6.7808 per dollar, 598 pips weaker than what Bloomberg's survey of traders expected, the widest gap since February. The currency had just touched its strongest level in more than three years, and this is Beijing applying the brakes without reversing the trend outright. It's the same playbook the central bank ran in January, when it briefly let the fixing move stronger than 7 for the first time since 2023, then leaned the other way once momentum built. For UK exporters and importers pricing contracts in yuan, the message is that Beijing wants gradual appreciation, not a rapid revaluation that could squeeze its own exporters or invite speculative one-way bets. Dollar weakness and fading Fed tightening expectations are doing part of this work already, exactly what makes the PBOC nervous about losing control of the pace.

The US and Canada have reached a preliminary draft capping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium at around 25% and cutting auto duties to roughly 15%, according to Bloomberg. Those numbers are close to what Mexican negotiators have been asking for in their own, separate talks with Washington, and Mexican officials were reportedly caught off guard by how fast Ottawa got there. The US is running two bilateral tracks instead of one trilateral negotiation, which strips Canada and Mexico of the leverage they had when they coordinated during the original NAFTA talks. Washington is simultaneously pushing Mexico to accept a rule requiring 50% US content in North American-built vehicles, a demand nowhere near the Canadian deal. For any UK manufacturer with supply chains threading through Mexican plants, the risk is no longer just tariff levels. It's whether USMCA survives its 2026 review intact at all.

Google agreed to pay just $10 million for a dataset that includes roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages and 17 million OneDrive files pulled from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, all earmarked for AI model training. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA objected in bankruptcy court, and the approval hearing has been pushed from mid-August to September 9. The union's problem isn't the customer data, which is excluded. It's that payroll records, tax forms and disciplinary files tied to roughly 17,000 former staff are reportedly still in scope, protected only by deidentification that keeps referential integrity across records intact, the exact linkage privacy advocates say makes re-identification possible. Google says it will strip any personal information it finds, but the case now sits as a live test of whether US consumer privacy law has anything to say about employee data once a company goes bust.

Bloomberg reported SpaceX approached the AI coding startup about a takeover, with talks now cold but a compute partnership still on the table. Cognition CEO Scott Wu shot back on X the same day: the company is not for sale and there were no talks at all. The denial lands a week after SpaceX closed its Cursor acquisition, so whatever actually happened, Musk is clearly shopping for AI coding assets faster than the market can confirm any single deal. Cognition was valued at $26 billion in a May funding round and is reportedly in early talks for fresh financing at $40 billion or more, numbers that make it a plausible target regardless of who called whom first.

A Chinese humanoid robotics leader soared on its market debut this week despite sitting under US export restrictions, the kind of listing pop usually reserved for companies Washington isn't actively trying to contain. The debut signals Chinese investors are pricing robotics as a domestic growth story insulated from American sanctions, not one dependent on them. For UK and European industrial firms watching China's manufacturing automation build-out, capital markets there aren't waiting for a resolution to trade tension before backing the sector.

Australia's jobless rate rose in the latest reading, prompting traders to trim bets on further Reserve Bank of Australia tightening. The move comes as the RBA already faces a housing credit market in retreat, with new home loans down 5.4% and investor lending down 8.6% in the June quarter. A softer labour market gives the RBA more room to hold rather than hike, the opposite problem to a year ago, when investor credit was growing at its fastest pace since 2015.

Australia's prudential regulator is stepping up scrutiny of bank lending just as credit growth collapses: NAB now forecasts investor housing credit will contract 1.4% in the year to September 2027, the first contraction since 2020, down from growth above 8% in 2026. Commonwealth Bank says home loan applications are down 15% overall and investor applications down 28% since the May federal budget scrapped property tax breaks. APRA's debt-to-income caps, activated in February to cool a lending boom, are now the tool it's using to stop banks chasing volume as demand dries up. The regulator's worry isn't excess anymore. It's that banks respond to a shrinking market by cutting corners on who they lend to.

Chery, the Chinese parent of Omoda and Jaecoo, will open an R&D centre at UTAC Millbrook in Bedfordshire this autumn, starting with chassis tuning and driver-assistance calibration for British roads before expanding into autonomous driving. Chinese brands accounted for around 15% of new UK registrations in the first half of 2026, according to Finimize, and this marks the shift from selling into that market to engineering for it. Chery hasn't disclosed investment size or headcount, a gap that suggests this is still a foothold rather than a factory commitment. UTAC's Kirsty Andrew called it a significant commitment to engineering and vehicle development in the UK, the kind of local validation Chinese automakers need if they want to be judged on more than price.

Atul Temurnikar, who built Global Schools Group, has launched Academic Capital Partners to raise up to $300 million for a debut fund buying school assets across Asia and the Middle East, targeting a 5% distribution yield with the general partner putting in 5% of the capital, according to Bloomberg. This is an income play on private education demand from families in fast-urbanising markets who treat school fees as non-discretionary spending, not a growth bet dressed up as private equity. Having an operator rather than a pure financier at the helm gives the fund a credibility edge on execution, since Temurnikar has actually run the schools he's now proposing to consolidate.

Hawaii's 18 certified high-tech businesses generated $233.4 million in revenue in 2024 and paid an average research wage of $117,972, the kind of number state planners hope stops STEM graduates leaving for California. The push comes as tourism delivers six straight months of year-on-year visitor declines through October 2025, exposing how thin the state's economic base really is. Normal Corp., a Honolulu engineering startup building industrial climate-control hardware, is the case study officials are pointing to. The bigger problem is timing: the R&D tax credit that's supposed to anchor this strategy sunsets in 2029, well before capital-intensive hardware startups launching now will have reached commercial scale.

The Competition and Markets Authority opened three separate drip-pricing investigations this week: Trainline over whether booking fees are shown upfront, Virgin Atlantic over resort fees and local taxes on package holidays, and RED Driving School over a £7-plus mandatory booking fee. None of the three has been found to have broken the law, but the CMA can fine offenders up to 10% of global turnover, the same enforcement muscle it used in June to force StubHub UK to refund customers over undisclosed ticket fees. Trainline says it has been proactively engaging with the regulator for months and is already changing how it displays fees, a sign it saw this coming. The pattern now spans driving schools, ticketing platforms and airlines in under a year, and Ryanair is still under a separate CMA probe over its £8 family seat fee.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch says CCTV from a train that passed the site at 14:04 BST, nearly two hours before the 15:54 derailment near Lewes, already shows a track geometry irregularity. Passengers had reported rough riding over that stretch before the crash, and RAIB found evidence of prior maintenance work in the exact location. The train was doing 65mph, within the 70mph limit, so speed isn't the explanation. RAIB flags the clay embankment's sensitivity to moisture as a contributing factor worth investigating further, given the site sat through 33C heat in the days before three carriages left the rails and injured 30 people. Network Rail and Govia Thameslink have apologised and are cooperating, but the finding puts inspection frequency on stretches with known rough-ride complaints squarely in the frame.

The Hong Kong conglomerate is taking Panama to arbitration, seeking $1.5 billion in damages tied to the loss of its port concessions there.

Canberra is formally protesting Israel's decision not to pursue criminal charges over the 2024 killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and six World Central Kitchen colleagues, with Foreign Minister Penny Wong calling the outcome insufficient.

Mark Carney's government ordered its broadcast regulator to revise a decision that would have forced Netflix and domestic broadcasters into tougher Canadian-content spending quotas, after the Trudeau-era digital services tax was already dropped to unblock US trade talks.