You know when you really want to do something, but you don’t want to let on that you want to do it? Like maybe eat the last piece of food at a dinner where you are sharing and so you lightly gaslight everyone and say something like, “fine, I’ll eat it” but in reality, you REALLY want to eat it. Well, I think UBS did this without anyone noticing. UBS did so much complaining when they were ‘forced’ to acquire Credit Suisse at a lowball price and now they announce a record $28.9 billion profit. They wanted to eat it all along!

The lowdown

• 🔝 UBS posts record $28.9 billion profit due to Credit Suisse acquisition and will now cut 3,000 jobs.

• 🕵️‍♂️ Offshore financial records indicate that Adani insiders may have been involved in stock manipulation.

• 🛒 China has reduced the minimum down payment required to buy a home, in an attempt to stimulate purchases.

Featured story

Klarna will return to quarterly profit very soon

Buy now, pay later firm Klarna says that it achieved its first monthly profit in three years. Even so, Klarna recorded an operating loss of $71 million in Q2. The company is again talking about an IPO – hopefully it doesn’t jinx itself this time.

Klarna began incurring losses after 2018 when it invested heavily in its US expansion, aiming for an IPO. Its valuation once reached $46 billion, but the company faced the dual challenges of higher interest rates and reduced consumer spending. Last year, its valuation was slashed by 85% to $6.7 billion.

Another factor is that the BNPL sector has fallen out of favor due to increased regulatory scrutiny over concerns about consumers accumulating unmanageable debt. Some evidence of this might be people using BNPL to pay for groceries ($)?

The content we're consuming today

• NY Times: How Ozempic and Weight Loss Drugs Are Reshaping Denmark’s Economy ($).

• The Economist: The rise of the Asian activist investor ($).

• The Guardian: Burning tires and bridges: US residents ‘shocked’ by firm’s bitcoin-mining plan.

Off-balance sheet items

• I’m a bit of a yoga skeptic but September is national yoga month (in the US) so now feels like a good time to give it another go. This article from the NY Times ($) may do a little to allay the concerns of fellow skeptics.

The bottom line