Coke is buying British coffee-shop chain Costa for $5.1 billion, as the coffee wars just keep on chugging. Costa has 3800 stores in 32 countries and “a foothold in China,” making Coke an instant player in the field – Bloomberg and CNN and NYTimes and WSJ

The EU announced on Thursday that it was willing to consider dropping all tariffs on cars and other industrial products as part of a “limited trade deal” with the US if America “dropped its own similar tariffs.” The stakes, by the way, are high for everybody – NYTimes and Law360

Speaking of high stakes, another $200 billion in China-focused tariffs are coming down the pike – Bloomberg

Oh yeah, and the White House is threatening to pull out of the World Trade Organization – Bloomberg and MarketWatch

SEC chair Jay Clayton has revealed that his agency is working on overhauling rules (intended to “protect mom-and-pop investors”) in order to “make it easier for individuals to invest in private companies, including some of the world’s hottest startups.” Private securities carry with them more risk and have, in the past, been “a major source of fraud afflicting small investors” – WSJ and Law360

Argentina finds itself in the middle of a spreading movement of “emerging market turbulence,” and its central bank raised its interest rates by 15% (bringing the benchmark lending rate to a whopping 60%) yesterday in an effort to combat a fall in the Argentinian peso – NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Marketplace

The latest drama at Wells Fargo is decidedly smaller potatoes (and steak and burgers and fries), but the firing, suspension, and investigation of dozens of employees for doctoring receipts to fit within the company’s expense policy regarding after-hours meals fits all too neatly within Wells’ years of questionable behavior – WSJ

Wells is also facing serious discontent from its female executives and from women in its wealth management group, some of whom have accused the bank of gender bias and discrimination – WSJ

The Fed appears to finally be making steady progress on its white whale: 2% inflation – WSJ

Bloomberg is reporting that Google and Mastercard cut a “secret deal” that has been giving Google (and some of its advertisers) access to a “stockpile of Mastercard transactions” for the past year to help the advertisers understand whether “the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S.”  The arrangement is likely to “raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb” – Bloomberg

An Illinois state appellate court affirmed a lower court ruling dismissing Thrivent Investment Management Inc.’s bid for an injunction against the state’s investigation into Thrivent’s alleged improper behavior in sales of variable annuities – Law360 (h/t to DWB)

Merrill Lynch will resume its practice of charging commissions on retirement accounts, a direct response to a federal circuit court’s June decision throwing out the Obama-era Labor Department’s fiduciary rule meant to protect retirement savers from conflicted financial advice – WSJ

Use the bit of extra time this holiday weekend to digest this Quanta piece on how computer vision scientists, in collaboration with MIT, are using algorithms aimed at detecting subtle color changes and motion to access hidden visual information—aka, to LITERALLY SEE AROUND CORNERS. Crazy stuff – QuantaMagazine

Have a great Labor Day.  We’ll see you back here on Tuesday.