| A nuclear plant near Hong Kong has a problem. Covid vaccines are keeping delta-variant patients out of hospital. Big banks are split on the return to office. Here's what you need to know to start your day. Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca are highly effective after two doses at preventing hospitalization of those infected with the delta variant, underscoring the urgency in getting people fully protected. The Pfizer and BioNTech shot is 96% effective against hospitalization after two doses, while the AstraZeneca inoculation is 92% effective, according to an analysis announced by Public Health England. Meanwhile taking a third shot could help beef up protection for some transplant patients, observational studies suggest. Elsewhere authorities in Singapore are planning to reopen schools in stages from the end of June as the pace of vaccinations picks up; Indonesia will impose stricter limits on people's movement due to a resurgence in new coronavirus cases, and the much-vaunted end of lockdown in England has been pushed back by four weeks. Asia stocks looked set for a steady start after their U.S. peers closed at a record and a bond rally stalled ahead of a key Federal Reserve meeting. U.S. stocks turned higher in the last hour of trading as gains in technology shares pushed the S&P 500 to an all-time high even as three stocks fell for every one that rose. Futures in Japan advanced. Markets will reopen in Australia, Hong Kong and China after holidays. The 10-year Treasury yield rose to 1.49% after hitting three-month lows on Thursday. The dollar edged higher. Bitcoin once again surpassed $40,000, reaching its highest level in more than two weeks. Electricite de France SA asked its Chinese partner in a nuclear plant near Hong Kong to discuss how it plans to continue operating the facility safely as a gas buildup points to a technical issue with its fuel. EDF, which owns 30% of the Taishan nuclear plant in Guangdong, said in a statement that Unit 1 has experienced increased concentration of some noble gases in its reactor, and the company has requested an extraordinary board meeting to present all data and make necessary decisions. Framatome, a subsidiary of EDF which designed the plant's two reactors and supplied their atomic fuel, earlier warned the U.S. government of an "imminent radiological threat" at the plant, CNN reported Monday, citing unnamed U.S. officials and documents the news network says it has reviewed. U.S. officials do not believe the situation poses a severe safety threat to the public or workers at the plant, CNN said. Read the full Bloomberg News report here. Goldman Sachs is requiring almost all employees at its perch over the Hudson River to report to their desks, marking one of Wall Street's most ambitious returns to the workplace since Covid-19 besieged the city more than a year ago. Meanwhile, Citigroup won't recall any more of its staff to its mostly empty Tribeca tower in downtown Manhattan until July. Even then, the firm has told most workers that they can adopt a so-called hybrid schedule between home and the office longer term. Such divergences are popping up across Manhattan's mighty financial industry, creating pockets of optimism within the city's economy, but widespread anxiety inside workplaces. The same divide is expected to soon play out in other industries and cities across the U.S. Meanwhile Wall Street's pandemic-era trading boom could be drawing to a close, with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon signaling a 38% decline in trading revenue from a year ago. Cheng Wei, the co-founder of Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi, is poised to shoot up the ranks of the super-wealthy when his firm lists shares in the U.S. The company filed last week for an initial public offering under the business name Xiaoju Kuaizhi Inc., revealing that the Chinese entrepreneur has a 7% stake. With Didi reportedly trading at a valuation of about $95 billion in the secondary market in recent months, that shareholding could be worth as much as $6.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Jean Liu, a co-founder and Didi's president, owns a 1.7% slice that could be worth $1.6 billion. 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 todayJust how bad is the gridlock in global shipping? In January of this year I started planning to send a shipping container filled with a single teddy bear, from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. The idea was to see how long the journey would take, given ports at both ends of the journey were massively overcrowded, with cargo ships anchored off the coast waiting weeks to unload. But I couldn't even get that far. I never got space on a ship. Instead, I kept getting bumped from successive vessels and prices for the project kept rising — to the point where it no longer made sense to send a container for the purposes of journalistic curiosity. By late May, I was forced to give up the whole idea thanks to skyrocketing costs. In the latest episode of Odd Lots, my co-host Joe Weisenthal and I discuss the whole experience of trying to ship a teddy bear with Anton Posner and Margo Brock of Mercury Group, the logistics company helping me organize the shipment. It's a beautifully detailed look at the difficulties of global transport at the moment, with plenty of examples about the lengths that businesses are going to in order to move stuff.  But one thing that stands out to me is the knee-jerk reaction among shipping companies now rushing to expand capacity, with Posner mentioning that the number of new container ships ordered in the first five months of 2021 is more than double the entire number of container ships ordered for all of 2019 and 2020. That extra capacity is going to take months, if not years, to come online. And when it does there's no guarantee that the notoriously-cyclical shipping industry won't have overshot demand and will now be plagued by overcapacity instead of shortages, leading to a (ahem) bear market for container shipping rates. Maybe that's when I'll try to send the teddy again. You can follow Tracy Alloway on Twitter at @tracyalloway. | 
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