Vaccines don’t come for free, though, and providing a booster shot for current regimens is likely to be the first indicator of how much drug companies can earn from their Covid-19 vaccines in the long term. Moderna’s forecast for sales of the first two doses of the vaccine was $18.4 billion for 2021, so the booster shot could add about $9 billion to that. Governments in rich countries will continue to pay for the vaccine for as long as it is recommended, as it happens with all vaccines, and certainly to expand the existing coverage through the booster shot. While it can’t be said for sure it will also cover the booster shot, it very likely will do so—the advantage to keeping immunity high and the country going far overweights the cost of the vaccine.

New Zealand is granting Amazon a NZ$160 million ($114 million) taxpayer-funded subsidy to film the first season of the company’s Lord of the Rings series there, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported yesterday. The subsidy is part of a broad agreement between New Zealand and Amazon designed to leverage the fantasy production to boost New Zealand’s economy over the span of a decade. As part of the deal, Amazon agreed to train New Zealand workers, launch an “innovation program,” and partner with New Zealand businesses on projects ranging from healthcare to drones, according to Stuff, a New Zealand online publication, which obtained the document under the country’s Official Information Act. Stuff reported that New Zealand officials are hoping the TV show, due to hit Amazon’s streaming service later this year, gives them backdoor access to Amazon’s other areas of strength like technology.

Dreaming about making a fortune on the stock market?Retail trade—non-professionals buying and selling securities like stocks, options, and ETFs—is booming. From January to early February this year, the largest retail trading apps were downloaded more than 10 million times. This enthusiasm culminated in the GameStop trading frenzy, which captured headlines, eyeballs, and dollars.

In the wake of Brexit, at least 440 banks and financial services companies are moving some part of their operations and managed assets from London to cities in Europe, according to an analysis by New Financial, a London think-tank. But even as London’s status as Europe’s capital of finance is dimming, no other European city as yet stands to replace it, said William Wright, the founder of New Financial.I don’t say that often about our own research.” Andrea Enria, the chair of the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) supervisory board, stated earlier this year that banks are preparing to move 1.2 trillion Euros ($1.44 trillion) from London to European cities. To be sure, there are financial services firms moving in to London as well.

Our analysis of emoji used in over 68,000 transactions from March 2020 and March 2021 suggests there are fewer transactions related to paying for haircuts, rent, and toilet paper, but more related to celebrations, recreation, and sending love. The figures here are based only on the transactions Venmo displays on the public feed inside its app, which represent a subset of all of Venmo’s public transactions. This sample contains the messages and other metadata for over 13,600 transactions from March 2020 and over 54,700 from March 2021. Emoji usage is calculated relative to the total number of messages that contained emoji in each month, rather than the total number of transactions we collected each month.