Mega rail news to start our week, as Canadian Pacific will joined forces with Kansas City Southern in a $25 billion deal, “creating the first railroad to traverse Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.” Industry watchers suggest that the deal, if finalized, “may very well be the last chapter in the rail merger saga that was kicked off by deregulation in the 1980s and was credited with saving a dying industry” - Bloomberg and NYTimes and WSJ
DOJ officials have opened an antitrust probe into Visa’s debit-card market practices—specifically, whether the payment card giant “has limited merchants’ ability to route debit-card transactions over card networks that are often less expensive” - WSJ and Law360
The Fed is letting a temporary exemption “of a rule that dictates the amount of capital banks must keep in reserve” lapse but is also indicating a willingness to consider “future tweaks to the regulation if changes are deemed necessary to keeping essential markets functioning smoothly” - NYTimes and WSJ
We tracked VW’s big bet on electric last week. This piece suggests that the carmaker’s diesel-scandal induced dark-night-of-the-soul may have actually “helped pave the way for its reversal of fortune” - NYTimes
Some rare good news for the AstraZeneca vaccine today, which researchers have found to be 79% effective in preventing symptomatic infections, “higher than observed in previous clinical trials,” while causing “no serious side effects.” AZ said that is likely to seek FDA emergency authorization “in the coming weeks” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
Looking to stay on the good side of the world’s two superpowers (and on the heels of Chinese military concerns about Tesla cameras relaying images of Chinese materials and personnel to the U.S.), technoking Elon Musk has promised his company would “never provide the U.S government with data collected by its vehicles in China or other countries” - WSJ
Crypto-exchange operator Coinbase Inc. is paying $6.5 million to resolve CFTC claims that it inflated its trading volume in a way that could “deceive others into believing there is more liquidity than there really is” - WSJ and Law360
Meet Pinduoduo, the five-year-old e-commerce app that “turned discount shopping into an online game” and, in the process, disrupted Alibaba and JD.com’s “stranglehold” on China’s online shopping market - WSJ
Eye-popping IPOs and the rise of SPACs means that a start-ups slightest interest in going public is likely to kick off a flood of offers now that blank-check companies are chasing “a limited pool of potential targets” - NYTimes
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan surprised the finance world on Friday by unexpectedly ousting the governor of Turkey’s central bank in a “move that risks plunging the country into further economic turbulence” - WSJ and Bloomberg
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is going out of his way to let it be known that he opposes the recent Covid stimulus package, calling the approach the “’least responsible’ macroeconomic policy in four decades.” Thanks, Larry - Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s getting in on the Greensill post-mortem game - Bloomberg
To go library silent or to rock out—the Journal offers some advice from psychology researchers on striking the right sonic balance when working at home - WSJ
Stay safe.
