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Welcome to The Morning Sixpack, where Washington is buying bonds, Trump is postponing tariffs and sanctioning international judges, Pennsylvania is telling AI developers to cool it, and Moderna may have just demonstrated one of the most important uses yet for mRNA technology. Here’s your Sixpack.
The Treasury Department is more than doubling its long-term government debt buybacks as yields hover near levels not seen in almost two decades. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is targeting the stressed 10-to-30-year portion of the market, increasing maximum buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion. Yields fell quickly after the announcement, but don’t confuse a buyback with a debt reduction. Treasury can improve liquidity and rearrange maturities, but America’s enormous borrowing requirements remain right where we left them.
Donald Trump’s threatened 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian imports got the TACO treatment less than two hours before they were scheduled to begin. Trump announced a three-day pause after claiming the United States and Canada had reached a deal, although Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was more restrained, saying “substantial progress” had been made. If Canada actually made meaningful concessions, Trump can claim his tariff threat worked. If everybody spends the next three days figuring out what the deal actually is, somebody warm up the tortillas.
Trump has roughly 4,500 National Guard troops deployed in Washington, but a Reuters investigation found them mentioned in only about 1.3% of D.C. criminal cases since their arrival. The troops now outnumber the city’s roughly 3,200 police officers, yet Reuters found little evidence of Guard involvement in the neighborhoods responsible for most of Washington’s murders. The administration argues their visibility deters crime. Critics see an extremely expensive show of force. Either way, when six soldiers are detaining somebody over an unpaid root beer, it’s reasonable to check the return on investment.
Moderna and Merck’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in a late-stage melanoma trial—and this one could be a genuinely consequential medical development. The treatment is created using mutations from an individual patient’s tumor and is designed to train the immune system to recognize and attack that cancer. Combined with Merck’s Keytruda, it prevented recurrence or spread well enough to meet the Phase 3 trial’s main goals. We still need the detailed results, but Moderna shares more than doubled on the news, and the company hopes to bring the treatment to market in 2027.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is slamming the brakes on his state’s AI data center gold rush after residents pushed back against speculative developments. New projects will need local approval, developers must pay their own power costs and meet water-conservation and local-hiring requirements, and data centers are being kicked out of Pennsylvania’s fast-track permitting program. The AI revolution may happen in “the cloud,” but those clouds require enormous buildings, electricity, water and somebody’s backyard. Politicians in both parties are discovering that voters noticed.
The Trump administration is escalating its confrontation with the International Criminal Court, sanctioning ICC President Tomoko Akane and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye. Washington argues that a court the United States never joined has no legitimate authority to prosecute Americans or officials from other nonmember countries without their governments’ consent. ICC defenders counter that sanctioning judges and prosecutors threatens international accountability itself. That’s the real fight now—not simply whether America recognizes the ICC, but whether Washington should use American economic power against the people running it.
That’s today’s Morning Sixpack: Treasury is trying to settle the bond market, Trump is simultaneously backing away from one international confrontation and escalating another, AI infrastructure is running into local politics, thousands of troops are still walking Washington, and mRNA technology may be moving from pandemic history into cancer treatment. Not bad for six stories before the second cup of coffee.
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