Axios

Panic and anxiety have proved to be more relatable themes than riding giant sand invertebrates, if movie attendance is any indication.

Zoom in: "Inside Out 2," the Disney and Pixar sequel to the 2015 animated hit, pulled in $100 million at the domestic box office in its second weekend, toppling "Dune 2" as the highest-grossing film so far this year.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) — basically, the Fed of Switzerland — will extend its experiment with wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to its private sector partner, an exchange.

Why it matters: If CBDCs keep advancing the way they are now, they could become both widely used and never used by people like you and me.

Novo Nordisk plans to build a $4.1 billion factory in North Carolina as it scrambles to boost supplies of weight-loss drug Wegovy and diabetes drug Ozempic.

Why it matters: Patients are experiencing widespread shortages of the newly popular GLP-1 class of injectable drugs made by the likes of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.

Target is teaming up with Shopify to expand the retail giant's third-party marketplace platform to better compete with Walmart, Amazon and other retailers.

Why it matters: Target's third-party marketplace, dubbed Target Plus, sells 2 million products from 1,200 brands.

Former President Trump is in talks to speak at the big Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville at the end of July, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Why it matters: Trump's embrace of crypto has contrasted with President Biden's coolness toward digital currency — and led some wealthy crypto investors to back the Republican's campaign.

Free money is cascading around all about us on the internet, and it's been... quite disappointing.

Why it matters: Cryptocurrency projects need a way to find users as fast as possible in order to have adequate liquidity for whatever their funky financial scheme is.

• Through the magic of blockchains, they can just spin up a bespoke kind of money specific to their project and give it to the people who actually use it. That's called an airdrop.

The latest: There have been (or there are — some are ongoing) some big airdrops lately: such as Layer-2 blockchains ZKsync and Blast and chain bridger LayerZero.

Trump ran up the national debt by about twice as much as Biden, according to a new analysis of their fiscal track records.

Why it matters: The winner of November's election faces a gloomy fiscal outlook, with rapidly rising debt levels at a time when interest rates are already high and demographic pressure on retirement programs is rising.

• Both candidates bear a share of the responsibility, as each added trillions to that tally while in office.

If economists are right, there will be more good news on inflation come Friday morning.

What to watch: The Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, is expected to be flat for the month of May.

• The core reading that excludes energy and food costs should be just as benign, rising 0.1%, economists estimate.
• That would bring both the PCE index and the core index to 2.6% in the 12 months through May — both slightly below that in April.

Why it matters: If the data comes in as economists expect, it would be the latest to confirm inflation's cooling trend after fears that progress was stalling.

Former users of the defunct cryptocurrency exchange, Mt. Gox, will begin getting billions of dollars worth of repayments starting in early July, according to the team in control of what's left of the company.

Why it matters: Mt. Gox's bankruptcy process has lasted for a decade, and its long-awaited resolution now threatens to unleash a massive supply of bitcoin on the market.

One of the biggest stories in crypto this year has been a surge in the market for meme coins — tokens designed around nothing but an image, phrase or idea, mostly designed to make money by catching traders' attention.

Why it matters: Meme coins have become a way for celebrities like Iggy Azalea to cash in fame. Also joining the fray is convicted felon Martin Shkreli, who claims he teamed up with Donald Trump's son, Barron, to create a "TrumpCoin" token, DJT.

Zoom is still in, but workers are zoning out in meetings. They're increasingly staying on mute through the whole ordeal and turning the camera off, according to new research published in Harvard Business Review.

Why it matters: A lack of participation in virtual meetings could be a sign that a worker is on her way out, or that there didn't need to be a meeting at all.

Former President Trump ran up the national debt by about twice as much as President Biden, according to a new analysis of their fiscal track records.

Why it matters: The winner of November's election faces a gloomy fiscal outlook, with rapidly rising debt levels at a time when interest rates are already high and demographic pressure on retirement programs is rising.