| The Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble is delayed again. China pushes to join a trade deal that was designed to exclude it. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin — with a catch. Here's what you need to know to start your day. An air travel bubble between Singapore and Hong Kong has been delayed for a second time, with Hong Kong labeling the city-state high risk. The highly transmissible strain of Covid-19 that surfaced in India has become more prominent among Singapore's unlinked cases, a sign that hidden chains of transmission have existed for some time. Elsewhere, the campaign to deliver Covid-19 vaccines to vast parts of the world, known as Covax, is grappling with a significant supply shortage. The initiative expects the shortfall to reach about 190 million doses next month. Overall it's shipped less than 40% of the doses it had intended to distribute by now. U.S. President Joe Biden plans to send an additional 20 million doses of vaccines abroad by the end of June as domestic supply begins to outstrip demand. New infections in the U.S. have reached the lowest level since early in the pandemic. Meanwhile entire families are being wiped out by Covid's carnage in rural India. Asian stocks look poised for a muted open as virus cases in the region pick up and concerns about the economic outlook weighed on their U.S. peers. The dollar weakened. Futures were little changed in Japan, Australia and Hong Kong. Technology and communication services stocks led the benchmark S&P 500 lower, while energy shares rose. Apple and Microsoft weighed on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100. Benchmark Treasuries retreated and the dollar dropped for a third consecutive day against its peers. Oil advanced to a two-year high. Meanwhile, a market cycle on steroids leaves Wall Street guessing what might come next. China is pushing ahead with behind-the-scenes talks to join a major trade deal that was originally conceived to exclude Beijing and cement U.S. ties in the Asia-Pacific region, until Trump pulled out of the deal. Officials from Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and possibly other nations have held technical talks with Chinese counterparts on details of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, according to people familiar with the discussions. Many of the nations involved are heavily dependent on trade with China, but the country's worsening image in some places may make it harder to agree on entry. Elon Musk helped legitimize cryptocurrencies in the eyes of Wall Street investors. Now, his tweets are scaring them off. About a quarter of Bitcoin's value has been wiped away in the span of a week, and the token is now worth about as much as it was when Tesla first disclosed in February its intention to buy some. There's something unprecedented and almost magical about Elon Musk's continuing ability and inclination to move crypto prices with his slightest whim, writes columnist Matt Levine. Meanwhile, you can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin. But is it worth the risk? That new hybrid office arrangement may not be quite as flexible as you were hoping. Data suggest 9.3% of U.K. workers — equivalent to 3 million people — would work fewer hours in exchange for a cut in pay, and employee demand for flexible working options is going unmet, according to the CIPD, the country's professional body for human resources and people development. While 63% of employers expect to implement hybrid work policies in 2021, fewer than half plan to expand "flexitime." For now, many employers are sanguine about the prospect of asking staff to come back to office two or three days a week. The question is how much permanent change bosses will encourage. Read more on the future of work here. What We've Been ReadingThis is what's caught our eye over the past 24 hours: And finally, here's what Tracy's interested in todayOne of the many things we're learning this year is that much of the modern global economy is still built on archaic rules of sea travel and that economics doesn't do a particularly good job of forecasting or incorporating the vagaries of transport costs. In other words there's a mismatch between the the old-fashioned structures that dictate how the world actually works and our modern impression of it. Take for instance the Ever Given, the container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal back in March. On the most recent episode of Odd Lots, we spoke to Ryan Peterson, the CEO of logistics company Flexport, which has customers who still have a total of more than 40 containers stuck on the Ever Given. He describes how even though the ship is now unstuck, it's probably going to take months to sort out the situation, and there are clients who potentially could end up paying billions of dollars to settle the matter — all because of a historical quirk in the way shipping works: "One of the little known facts about global shipping is under ancient maritime law the company shipping the cargo, not the owner of the ship, but the company that [owns the cargo], the products on there, is liable when something like this happens ... That's a law called general average, it's a fascinating Wikipedia article. And the reason that that's true, it goes back I think hundreds of years, the reason that that was true is that in a storm or an accident at sea, you don't want people to stop and argue about whose cargo they're going to throw overboard ... You don't want these arguments. You don't want the mariners worrying about that. Just throw the cargo over and save the ship is the principle. And you'll sort it out later. And the way you sort it out later is everybody agrees that we will share equally in whoever's cargo got thrown over — the rest of the people will make them whole, and that's a principle called general average. And the ocean carrier under the law has the right to invoke general average and declare it and say, okay. And so that's what Evergreen has done. They have declared general average, which means all of the customers who have cargo on that ship are going to be liable for the damages that come through. And it could be billions of dollars in aggregate and it gets divided, pro-rata based on the commercial invoice value of your goods." He also points to the sometimes arbitrary way in which ships are loaded — with space being awarded on the basis of personal relationships — as another example of potential inefficiencies (or as Peterson put it: "Traditionally it works by who has the best relationship with this person, probably named Lars sitting in Copenhagen or something, who is making these decisions.") Anyway, the whole thing is worth a listen to get a sense of how much supply shortages are currently compounding supply changes, but also to understand that a big part of the modern "globalized" economy is still connected to practices that can be traced back hundreds of years. You can follow Tracy Alloway on Twitter at @tracyalloway. | 
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