The airline story this morning is the one I keep rereading. Fewer people are flying, fares are way up, and the airlines say they aren’t worried. American says fares could stay high even if fuel falls. Axios calls it a new normal of higher fares and fewer flights, and NBC says carriers now prefer higher fares to fuller planes.

For about a century the airline business was a load-factor business. An empty seat is the only perishable inventory that matters, so you filled it at almost any price. Choosing to fly emptier is a statement about demand. Whoever is still buying a ticket is not very price-sensitive, and the airlines have decided that group is enough. Delta’s fuel bill was up 62% a couple of weeks ago, so some of this is plain arithmetic. It’s still odd to watch an industry quietly stop competing on volume.

The other thing on my screen is Moderna. A personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine cut the risk of recurrence by over 40% in a late-stage trial, and the stock extended its losses. The Journal’s headline says investors should “brace for more whiplash.” I can’t fully explain it. Maybe the result was priced in, maybe the market is doing the math on a bespoke, one-patient-at-a-time product. Maybe it just fell with everything else on a day the Dow dropped 600 points and oil hit a five-month high.

Yesterday yields fell and the haven trade came back. Today stocks fell anyway, and Bloomberg says investors “rediscovered” Treasuries, as though they’d misplaced them. Next week the Fed and Big Tech report on the same day. Do you think that’s a scheduling accident?

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