Good morning, you're listening to Markets Desk.
Moderna is having one of the most remarkable single sessions in its history, with shares roughly doubling after the company reported the first successful late-stage trial for any mRNA-based cancer therapy. The vaccine candidate pairs Moderna's mRNA platform with Merck's Keytruda in treating melanoma, and that combination clearing a final-stage hurdle is a genuine clinical milestone, not a headline dressed up as one.
Shifting to retail, Home Depot's latest earnings carried an unusual line item — a seven hundred thirty million dollar tariff refund stemming from a February Supreme Court ruling that forced Customs and Border Protection to return duties collected under a law that has since been struck down. The catch is that rising costs largely offset that windfall, which tells you something important about how thin the margin relief actually is for big-box retailers navigating this tariff environment.
And in California, a quieter but consequential policy fight is building around the state's film tax credit program. That credit was designed to reward payroll and in-state spending, but AI-native studios are increasingly routing production costs into compute and smaller teams rather than traditional labor, meaning the incentive structure may be rewarding an industry that no longer exists in the form the law anticipated.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
