Britain's culture secretary Lisa Nandy said yesterday the government is likely to intervene in Paramount Skydance's $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, warning the combined company — owner of Channel 5, CNN International, HBO Max and Paramount+ — could shrink media plurality for UK audiences. The companies have until 6 July to respond before regulators decide whether to investigate. It matters because this isn't really about one merger. It's a signal that governments, not just shareholders, now get a vote on who controls the channels people use to understand the world — and that vote is getting louder.

The yen slid past ¥162 to the dollar yesterday, its weakest since 1986, as strong US data fed expectations the Federal Reserve will keep rates higher for longer. Japanese officials have so far stuck to verbal warnings rather than stepping into currency markets, but speculation about intervention is growing louder by the day. A weaker yen is a gift to Japanese exporters, who suddenly look cheaper to the rest of the world, but it's squeezing households and import-reliant businesses with pricier everything. It's a reminder that interest rate decisions made in Washington ripple straight into supermarket aisles in Tokyo.

A US federal judge refused to throw out a lawsuit from 29 states accusing Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to hook children, ruling claims of addictive design and harm to young users' mental health can head to trial. The judge also found Meta may have broken children's privacy laws by collecting data without proper parental consent. Meta denies wrongdoing and says addiction isn't a recognised medical condition. Either way, the company is now closer to a trial that could force open its product design decisions — and set the tone for how regulators treat every platform built to keep us scrolling.

US job openings climbed to 7.59 million in May, the highest in two years, suggesting employers still want people. The catch: actual hiring stayed sluggish, and workers showed little appetite for switching jobs — the "slow-hire, slow-fire" pattern economists now use to describe the labour market's holding pattern. Businesses appear reluctant to commit to fresh hires while uncertainty lingers elsewhere in the economy. For job seekers, that means more listings but not necessarily more offers. For employers, it's a market where good people are out there — just harder to actually land.

More than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase, launched Open Standard yesterday, an initiative built around a new dollar-pegged digital currency called Open USD. Due later this year, it will let businesses mint and redeem tokens without fees or volume caps, while consortium members share reserve income. The project is a direct attempt to fix the cost and governance headaches that have kept stablecoins on the fringes of mainstream business, and it lands as US regulators grow noticeably friendlier toward the sector. If it works, moving money internationally could get a lot less painful for a lot of businesses.

Amazon Web Services is committing $1 billion to build a new team of "forward-deployed" engineers who embed directly with client businesses for weeks at a time, helping them turn AI experiments into actual production systems. AWS wants the unit to grow to thousands of people, a bet that the biggest bottleneck in AI adoption isn't ambition, it's execution. For businesses that have spent the last two years dabbling in AI without much to show for it, this is Amazon's way of saying: we'll come build it with you. Expect rivals to follow with similar offers of their own.

A daily score of business conditions (scored out of 100), with a breakdown of what’s driving it.

Today's Daily Business Index ticked up slightly to 52.7, a quiet number hiding a busy day. US job openings jumped to a two-year high even as actual hiring kept slowing, Wall Street closed out its best quarter in years on an AI-stock rally, and oil kept falling as US-Iran talks resumed in Doha. China's factories beat expectations too. But Nike beat earnings forecasts and still saw its shares drop — a sign markets are rewarding confidence about the future, not just good numbers today.

A year ago today, Fed chair Jerome Powell told a central banking forum in Sintra that the Fed would likely have cut interest rates further by now if not for the scale of Trump's tariffs, which had pushed inflation forecasts higher. Twelve months on, the same tension between trade policy and monetary policy is still shaping decisions everywhere from Washington to Tokyo. Different year, same standoff: tariffs make rate-setters nervous, and nervous rate-setters make currencies move.

What it means: A stablecoin is a digital currency designed to hold a steady value, usually by being pegged to something stable like the US dollar, so it doesn't swing wildly the way bitcoin does. Businesses like it because it can make moving money across borders faster and cheaper than traditional banking rails. Today's Visa and Mastercard-backed Open USD launch is exactly the kind of mainstream push trying to take stablecoins from crypto-niche to everyday business tool.