Meta pays up to $18bn for the addiction it built

Meta will pay a guaranteed $12.1 to $12.7 billion to 47 states plus DC and several territories, with the remaining $5 billion contingent on TikTok and YouTube adopting the same restrictions, according to the New York Attorney General's office. That structure turns Meta into the plaintiff's enforcement arm: it now has a financial incentive to lobby for TikTok and YouTube to accept two-hour daily caps and midnight-to-6am blackouts for under-18 users, the same terms Meta itself is adopting. The case only settled because a federal judge refused to dismiss it in June, letting internal documents on addictive design reach discovery, as Reuters reported. Every social platform with a teen user base now has a template for what a losing defense looks like, and a price tag on ignoring it.

India's central bank is now intervening in the rupee market on close to every single trading day, according to Reuters sources, keeping intraday moves pinned to a 5 to 10 paise band. That's not smoothing volatility, that's a peg in all but name, and it's funded by $692.9 billion in reserves built partly through a $36.7 billion FCNR deposit drive that closed at end-July, per Reuters. Oil above $100 a barrel is the trigger: India imports most of its crude, and every dollar of Brent widens the current account gap the rupee has to absorb. The RBI's official line is still that it doesn't defend a level. Traders stopped believing that months ago.

Flashlight Capital has offered five Samsung affiliates 116,000 won a share, a 45% premium and above S-1 Corp's all-time high, for their combined 20.6% stake, worth roughly $655 million, as Bloomberg reports. The boards have until September 23 to answer, and Korea's 2025 Commercial Act reform means they now owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders, not just the company, making a rejection without clear justification a legal liability rather than a governance footnote. Samsung SDI, Samsung Life, Samsung Fire & Marine, Samsung Securities and Samsung Card hold the stake for no obvious strategic reason. If they fold, every chaebol cross-holding in Korea becomes a target with a price on it.

TWG Global says there's been "no fraud" and no fire sale, but its own insurer, Delaware Life, was already moving to cut $6.5 billion of lending to Walter-linked businesses before the denial went out, as Bloomberg first reported. The DOJ and SEC are examining whether related-party investments at Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life were booked as unaffiliated to dodge insurance-regulatory limits on self-dealing, according to Reuters. Insurance regulators cap affiliated lending precisely because policyholders shouldn't be funding the parent company's other bets. Walter's statement insists there's no victim. The $6.5 billion wind-down suggests the insurer's own board thought otherwise.

Five-year fixed mortgage rates have climbed from under 4% in January to around 4.8%, and Zoopla's analysis puts the London deposit gap at £35,500 against just £10,200 in the North East. That gap is arithmetic, not sentiment: the same rate rise costs three and a half times more in cash terms where prices are higher, which is why this is a London and South East story wearing a national headline. Zoopla still sees an autumn bounce coming if rates hold near 4.8%, but London first-time buyer demand is already running 6% below last year. Estate agents banking on a September rebound are betting on a rate plateau nobody has confirmed yet.

Non-technical safety, ethics and policy teams are leaving Google DeepMind for Google's central corporate structure, reversing a 2024 decision that put them there specifically to sit closer to frontier model development, according to the Wall Street Journal. It's part of a broader reshuffle in which Demis Hassabis moves up to Alphabet Chief Scientist and Koray Kavukcuoglu takes direct control of Gemini development, reporting straight to Sundar Pichai, per Reuters. Staff worry the reporting-line change weakens their ability to flag risks in whatever Kavukcuoglu ships next, since they'll be reading about new capabilities from further away. Jeff Dean and three other longtime AI leads are leaving entirely to start a rival called Discovery Loop. Execution is winning the argument inside Google. Safety just lost its seat at the table where the models actually get made.

The regulator's own survey of over 5,000 consumers found 56% had used AI for financial advice in the past year, and roughly 44% wrongly believe that advice is FCA-regulated, according to Yahoo Finance's coverage of the findings. One in five adults would let a chatbot make debt, pension or investment decisions on their behalf. General-purpose tools like ChatGPT and Gemini sit entirely outside the FCA's perimeter, meaning there's no Financial Ombudsman route and no FSCS compensation if the advice is wrong, a gap the regulator's Mills Review flagged explicitly, per Reuters. Regulated advice still reaches only 9% of UK adults, which is exactly the gap chatbots are filling for free.

The gap between Thai 2-year and 10-year bonds sits at 98 basis points, one of the steepest curves in emerging Asia, and a Bloomberg economist survey expects it to narrow to 74 basis points by year-end. The move is driven almost entirely by falling long-end yields, not short-end cuts: Thailand has posted negative headline inflation for roughly ten straight months, and the Commerce Ministry now forecasts 0 to 1% inflation for the full year. That combination, weak growth near 2% and inflation pinned near zero, makes 10-year Thai debt look overpriced relative to where a low-growth economy should trade, which is why Bloomberg's reporting has funds already rotating into the long end. Thai bonds have outperformed regional peers over the past month on exactly this thesis.

The deal consolidates two active asset managers at a moment when passive flows keep eating their fee base, a pressure that's forced a wave of scale-driven M&A across the sector this year. Watch whether Victory can hold First Eagle's fee structure or whether integration forces the usual post-merger fee compression.

Both profit and sales rose in the latest quarter, and management lifted its full-year outlook rather than just meeting a lowered bar. That's a tell for the broader apparel sector heading into holiday planning: a brand that spent a decade being written off is now setting the pace other retailers get measured against.

Malaysia's Anti-Corruption Commission detained the former Tabung Haji chairman and a former Treasury secretary-general on August 26, both now facing a remand hearing in Putrajaya, according to Bloomberg. It follows a 211-page Royal Commission report released in July that alleged manipulated investment reports and concealed information at the fund, which manages Hajj savings for millions of Malaysian Muslims. This is the first time the probe has reached a former top Treasury official rather than fund executives, a jump from operational to policy-level accountability. At least seven other individuals have already been detained over linked cases, including one involving RM370 million in plantation shares.

From today, plug-in solar kits capped at 800W AC output can legally connect to a standard UK socket under new rules amending 1994 and 2002 electricity safety regulations, government guidance confirms. The government's own figure for savings is up to £110 a year, a fraction of the £480 rooftop solar can deliver, which tells you this is a product for renters without roof access rather than a genuine bill-cutting policy. No manufacturer had finished the required ENA type-testing as of mid-August, so shelves may stay empty even though the law changed. Currys, B&Q and Asda are named as likely stockists once compliant kits clear certification.

CrowdStrike raised its outlook and the stock rallied; HP beat estimates and raised guidance too, but investors sold anyway, a split that says more about hardware margins than either quarter's numbers.

The incorporation and cap-table paperwork tool becomes Stripe's latest bet on owning startups from day one, not just their payments.

The date is earlier than some recent years, giving Apple a fuller holiday quarter to sell whatever AI features finally ship.

The asking price survives even after the Panama Canal piece of the deal fell through, a sign CK Hutchison thinks buyers still need the rest of the portfolio badly enough to pay full freight.

The medical device maker confirmed a global operational disruption, and the stock fell on the news, another reminder that healthcare manufacturing runs on IT systems as brittle as anyone else's.