What moved
Asia is doing the heavy lifting this morning. The KOSPI is trading 5.9% higher as this note goes out, leading a regional bounce after Wednesday's semiconductor rout; the Nikkei 225 has added 1.4% and the Hang Seng 1.2%, while mainland China is becalmed (Shanghai Composite +0.02%).
Wall Street's Wednesday close was quietly firm — the S&P 500 finished up 0.2% at 7,708, the Nasdaq Composite up 0.2% and the Dow up 0.2% — and with US cash shut, futures are the only live read: S&P futures sit 0.1% higher and Nasdaq futures 0.5%. Europe was the laggard, the DAX slipping 0.1%, the CAC 40 0.1% and the Euro Stoxx 50 0.4%, though the FTSE 100 eked out a 0.1% gain to 10,743.
Why
The thread running through all of it is a bond-market intervention. On Wednesday the US Treasury said it would at least double the size of its long-dated buyback operations, to at least $4bn, to steady a market where the 30-year yield had pushed to what Bloomberg called its highest since 2007. It worked: the 30-year yield fell 9.1 basis points and the 10-year 5.3, and the dollar has stayed soft overnight — sterling is up 0.5% at 1.36 and the euro 0.9% at 1.17, leaving the dollar index down 2.3% over the month. Lower long yields and a weaker dollar are oxygen for risk: they trim the discount rate on future earnings and loosen financial conditions worldwide.
That relief gave Asia licence to reverse Wednesday's chip sell-off, but the specific spark was corporate. SK Hynix unveiled a 40 trillion won buyback and cancellation — the largest in Korean corporate history — and lifted its shareholder-payout target above half of free cash flow, with Samsung reported to be weighing its own programme. Korean memory names jumped and dragged the KOSPI with them.
The other genuine story is biotech. Moderna and Merck said their personalised mRNA cancer vaccine met its goals in a Phase 3 melanoma trial — the first such readout for the technology — and the read-through rippled outward: BioNTech closed up 22%, Tempus AI 24% and Twist Bioscience 23%.
Sentiment & risk appetite
Risk appetite is firmly switched on, but selective. The VIX dropped 6% to 14.89 and the MOVE gauge of rates volatility fell 5% to 71.3, both deep in calm territory. US breadth was positive — our listed universe ran about 1.4 advancers for every decliner — yet the tape was rotational rather than broad: health care led the S&P sectors, up 3.5%, while technology fell 1.1% and semiconductors were pointedly weak. The cash that left chips went into biotech, precious-metals miners and crypto, where bitcoin jumped 7.6% and ether 17.4%; gold's 1.4% rise to $4,550 rounds out a classic bid for everything that isn't the dollar.
Economic calendar
The UK's 07:00 slot was quiet: July inflation, which reaccelerated when it printed, was Wednesday's business, not this morning's, so there is no fresh domestic number to trade. The morning's European releases are second-order — final euro-area July inflation and German producer prices, both at 07:00 BST. The calendar thickens from here, with US weekly jobless claims due at 13:30 BST and, from Friday, the Jackson Hole symposium — the week's marquee event and the next real test of the rate-cut debate that the Treasury's intervention has only sharpened.
Earnings
The standout of the session was Estée Lauder, up 16.3% after a fiscal fourth-quarter beat and a raised margin outlook that gave its turnaround fresh credibility. Little of consequence has reported in London this morning; the day's heavyweight results — Walmart above all — land before the New York open, hours after this note.