Well done on making it to Friday! It has probably been a difficult (albeit short) week for our US readers after Independence Day. If you are struggling to get to the finish line and do start nodding off to sleep in a meeting, just know that it probably just looks like you're emphatically agreeing with everything being said and you might even get a promotion.

The lowdown

• 🛟 Employment numbers remain buoyant leading to falls on Wall Street over fears of further rate rises.

• 💊 FDA grants approval to first drug to slow Alzheimer’s jointly developed by Biogen and Eisai.

• 🪡 Meta’s ‘Twitter clone’ Threads hits 30 million downloads only a day after launch.

Featured story

CAB payments shares fall on debut

Europe’s IPO market has been suffering, with London in particular hurt by companies opting to list elsewhere ($). The conditional debut of CAB Payments on the LSE yesterday was therefore important.

CAB Payments priced its shares at £3.35 ($4.28) in the IPO, expecting to raise up to £335 million. Shares in the fintech group slipped, ending the day at £3.03. Unconditional trading will take place on 11 July.

In a departure from the usual process, CAB Payments did not give a price range for its IPO. It polled institutions to gauge demand at various points to find consensus. While finding a price using this method can lead to higher-quality demand, some observers note it might also reduce liquidity ($) leading to larger swings in the share price. Unfortunately, the swing went the wrong way for CAB and (more importantly?) for the LSE yesterday.

The content we're consuming today

• The Economist: “Greedflation” is a nonsense idea ($).

• The Nation: Lessons From the Catastrophic Failure of the Metaverse.

• FT: Between hope and hype for Toyota’s ‘solid-state’ EV batteries ($).

Off-balance sheet items

• You’ve laughed guiltily at the memes, now check out this epic account of the Titanic submersible disaster ($). The quotes from Stockton Rush do not hold up so well.

The bottom line