Good morning. Here’s what matters today.

Morrisons has announced it will close around 100 stores in the coming months, citing cost pressures it attributes directly to government policy choices — a pointed reference to the employer National Insurance rises and minimum wage increases from the spring Budget. It’s the most concrete sign yet that the retail sector is translating those cost increases into structural contraction rather than absorbing them. Worth watching for whether other large employers follow with similar announcements; the political optics for the Treasury are poor.

The SpaceX Starship V3 launch was scrubbed yesterday due to a ground systems issue, with another attempt possible as early as this evening. The timing matters because SpaceX’s IPO filing, which surfaced this week, explicitly describes the company’s strategy as “highly dependent” on Starship’s success. The filing also pitches orbital data centres as a core future revenue line, positioning SpaceX directly against hyperscalers. The IPO itself — alongside OpenAI and Anthropic — is being flagged by several sources as likely to trigger a significant passive fund rebalancing event, with index trackers needing to sell existing positions to absorb the new large-cap additions.

On the AI side, the FT reports that quantum computing has moved from a theoretical to a credible threat to the cryptographic foundations underpinning Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Industry figures are now treating it as a near-term operational risk rather than a distant one. For anyone with material crypto exposure or clients in digital assets, this is the kind of structural vulnerability that tends to get ignored until it isn’t.

The FT also has a piece worth reading on the geopolitical investment implications of governments hoarding strategic resources and turning inward — the argument being that markets haven’t yet priced the structural shift away from the efficiency-maximising globalisation of the past thirty years toward a scarcity-and-resilience model. It’s a framing piece rather than a hard news story, but the underlying dynamic — deglobalisation, friend-shoring, defence spending — is relevant to anyone thinking about sector allocation into the second half of the year.

On geopolitics, the US has deployed 5,000 additional troops to Poland while simultaneously raising the rhetorical temperature on Cuba, with Rubio describing Havana as a national security threat and declining to rule out military options. The Poland deployment is being read by European NATO partners as a mixed signal — presence without clarity on doctrine — which is adding to the strategic uncertainty European defence planners have been navigating since early 2025.

The next scheduled event to watch: US PCE inflation data drops later today, which will be the last major read on the Fed’s preferred inflation measure before the June FOMC meeting.

Sources

BBC News, Politico, Al Jazeera, Guardian, TechCrunch, FT, Ars Technica, The Economist — 2026-05-22