Elliott takes aim at the T-Mobile deal

Elliott Management has taken a position in Deutsche Telekom and is publicly opposing the group's merger plans with T-Mobile US. Activist funds don't build stakes to make friendly suggestions. Elliott's usual playbook means a public letter, a board seat demand, or both, and Deutsche Telekom's share price becomes the battleground for how much control the German state and existing management retain over the US business. Expect the fight to centre on valuation and who captures the upside from T-Mobile's US growth, not on whether the deal happens at all.

HDFC Bank risks losing its position as India's largest listed bank by weighting to ICICI Bank, following the departure of its chief executive. India's banking index has been a two-horse race for years, and leadership uncertainty at the top rarely goes unpunished by index-tracking flows. ICICI has spent the last two years closing the valuation gap. A vacant HDFC boardroom hands it the opening. For passive funds tracking Nifty weightings, a reshuffle at the top moves real allocation, not just sentiment.

Uber is cutting roughly 10% of its global workforce, more than 3,000 roles, while shutting operations entirely in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect. Uber's core US and European rides business is cash generative, but African markets with thin margins and heavy subsidy requirements don't fit a leaner cost structure. Drivers and riders in Lagos and Kampala lose the service overnight. Investors get a company that looks more like a mature cash machine and less like a growth story chasing every geography.

Delivery Hero's board has recommended Uber's $15 billion offer to shareholders, clearing the biggest hurdle in a deal that would hand Uber control of a food delivery empire spanning Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Uber already dominates ride-hailing in most of those markets. Adding Delivery Hero's logistics network turns overlapping delivery fleets into a single asset instead of two competing ones. Regulators in Brussels and Riyadh will have views on market concentration long before this closes.

De Nederlandsche Bank is relocating gold reserves away from New York, citing geopolitical unrest. Central banks don't move bullion for optics. It costs money and logistics risk to shift metal across the Atlantic. The Dutch join a quiet trend of European reserve managers reducing reliance on US-based custody, a hedge against the dollar system itself rather than against any single Fed policy decision.

The US government has filed in support of OpenAI in its copyright dispute with publishers, a significant tilt in a fight that will decide whether training large language models on copyrighted text counts as fair use. If Washington's position holds in court, every AI lab training on scraped content gets legal cover that publishers spent two years trying to close off. Publishers lose their strongest leverage: the threat of an injunction that forces licensing deals. This changes the negotiating table for every publisher currently suing Anthropic, Meta or Google over the same question.

Uber has begun operating autonomous vehicles on UK roads, though a safety driver remains behind the wheel for now. The UK's regulatory framework for driverless cars still requires human oversight, so this is a pilot testing public reaction and technical reliability, not a genuine driverless launch. London's insurers and the Department for Transport will be watching accident data closely before any rule change removes the safety driver.

The yen's surge has traders on high alert for another round of Bank of Japan intervention, with a Japanese public holiday raising the odds officials move when liquidity is thinnest. Tokyo has form here. Thin holiday trading is exactly when a few large sell orders move the yen furthest per yen spent, which is why intervention desks favour those windows. Anyone running dollar-yen exposure into the long weekend is paying for optionality they didn't have last week.

Analysts point to Singapore's currency as a beneficiary of investors rotating out of dollar exposure, given the Monetary Authority of Singapore's managed float against a basket of trading partners rather than a peg to any single currency. That structure makes SGD a natural landing spot for capital fleeing pure dollar risk without taking on emerging-market volatility. It's a small, liquid alternative, and it's absorbing flows that used to default to Treasuries.

Global investors are holding more dollar-denominated assets relative to history, a concentration that raises the odds of an outsized move if sentiment turns. Concentrated positioning cuts both ways. It means any dollar downturn gets amplified as funds rush the exit at the same time, rather than a gradual unwind. Central banks diversifying reserves, as the Dutch gold move illustrates, are one hedge against exactly this scenario.

A Singapore court decision on a bankrupt Indonesian company is being read as a template other creditors could use to recover money across Southeast Asian jurisdictions. Cross-border insolvency in the region has long been a mess of conflicting national laws. A Singapore precedent matters because so much regional corporate debt is structured through Singapore holding vehicles precisely to avoid this problem. Creditors sitting on distressed Indonesian exposure now have a clearer legal route rather than years of jurisdictional arguments.

The sale price for MLB's Los Angeles Angels sets a new benchmark for the league, well above prior franchise valuations even for teams with stronger recent on-field records. Sports franchise prices keep climbing regardless of performance because scarcity, not silverware, drives the multiple. There are only 30 MLB teams and none are coming to market often. Private capital chasing trophy assets with predictable media revenue keeps bidding these numbers up.

Aurora Cannabis's board has told shareholders to reject Curaleaf's bid, calling the price inadequate. A rejection this explicit usually means the board expects a higher offer, either from Curaleaf itself or a rival consolidator, given how fragmented and undervalued the cannabis sector remains relative to underlying revenue growth. Curaleaf now has to decide whether to walk away or come back with a number Aurora's board can defend to its own shareholders.

BP has appointed a new chair as the company tries to move past the departure of Albert Manifold. Chair changes at oil majors are rarely about strategy detail and almost always about signalling to institutional shareholders that governance friction is resolved. BP's investors have spent the past year pushing for clearer capital discipline after its renewables pivot underdelivered. A new chair gives activist shareholders someone fresh to hold to that commitment.

A prospective nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia reportedly leaves room for uranium enrichment up to 20%, a level well beyond what's needed for civilian power generation but still short of weapons-grade material. Any enrichment concession to Riyadh resets the regional benchmark that Iran, the UAE and others will point to in their own negotiations with Washington. The Gulf's nuclear ambitions have quietly shifted from power diversification to strategic hedging against Iran.

Both companies appear on the government's latest list of employers found to have paid staff below the National Minimum Wage. These lists typically catch companies out on technicalities: unpaid trial shifts, deductions for uniforms, failure to pay for travel between sites. The reputational hit lands the same either way for household names. Enforcement has stepped up, and more high street names should expect to appear on future lists as HMRC widens its net.

The NBA has handed former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer a one-year suspension following an investigation into Kawhi Leonard's compensation arrangements. Salary cap circumvention rulings matter beyond one franchise because every team owner now knows the league will investigate sponsorship and endorsement deals that look like disguised player payments. Ballmer keeps ownership of the Clippers but loses direct involvement in team operations for a full season.

Formula 1's leadership has dismissed talk of expanding the grid beyond current teams. Cadillac's entry already tested the appetite for expansion costs, and existing teams have little incentive to split prize money further.

The discount retailer lifted guidance and is explicitly targeting younger shoppers as its next growth lever. A cheap-goods retailer betting its future on a demographic that hasn't hit spending age yet is really a bet on parents' wallets.

A new report finds that headline GDP growth isn't translating into felt income gains for close to half of households surveyed. That gap between aggregate growth and household experience is exactly the argument the Treasury will have to counter at the Budget.

Health workers fighting the DRC's Ebola outbreak are reportedly caught up in disputes over unpaid or ghost salaries, slowing containment efforts. Every week of delayed pay is a week of reduced contact tracing.

Reports of £74 million spent on branded condoms as part of UK aid programmes have reignited calls to overhaul the aid budget. Aid budget rows tend to resurface every time the Treasury looks for savings elsewhere.