BIG day for equities yesterday. Particularly on the tech-heavy Nasdaq which saw the largest gains. But it wasn’t all good news for tech workers. Elon musk used his first company-wide email to inform employees that they could no longer work from home. Still marginally better than the emails sent to some last week which said they could no longer work for Twitter.

The lowdown

• 📈 US stocks had their best day in more than two and a half years as inflation numbers came in lower than expected.

• 📦 Amazon looks to cut costs as markets shift to prioritize cash flow over growth.

• 🚬 E-cigarette maker Juul reaches bailout agreement and cuts workforce.

Featured stories

The Vatican’s failed London property investment

The Vatican has been hit with a $9.25 million claim from its former chief auditor, Libero Milone, who claims that he was accused of misconduct after requesting further information on Vatican investments, including a London property.

Libero was the former head of Deloitte Italy before working for the Vatican. (If they wanted someone that wouldn’t look too deeply into offshore bank accounts, perhaps they should have got an auditor from EY ($).)

The London property investment, investigations into which may have acted as the trigger for Milone’s removal, was made from funds raised through ‘Peter’s Pence’ – essentially donations made directly to the church.

To effect the deal, a fund management company was set up, and the property was purchased and held in a special situations fund. From there, the Vatican held the interest through a network of Jersey and Luxembourg companies. The building had been bought for $129.5 million in 2012 but had been revalued to $200 million just before the Vatican made its investment in 2014. The deal resulted in a roughly $100 million loss of donations.

We can’t be sure whether there was any foul play, due in part to the removal of the Vatican’s auditor. The good news for those cardinals accused of wrongdoing is that, although not great, pocketing Peter’s Pence is not exactly the worst thing the church has been accused of lately, not even the worst thing starting with ‘P’.

For more on this story, check out this short film.

The content we're consuming today

• The Economist: A Sleuth’s guide to corporate fraud ($).

Off-balance sheet items

• This second part in a new lecture series from Aswath Damodaran: Facebook (Meta) Lesson 2: Accounting Inconsistencies and Consequences.

The bottom line

Twitter’s new verification process is not going well.