The next leg of the billionaire space race commences this weekend, with Sir Richard Branson journeying to the edge of space in Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spaceplane. The flight on Sunday will come just nine days before Jeff Bezos is scheduled to blast into the thermosphere and the rivalry is quickly turning into a cold war. Branson has denied the scheduling was a contest to see who would go up first, while Blue Origin has said the two companies aren't even after the same prize.

President Biden will sign a wide-ranging executive order today targeting the power of big companies. It’s the latest move intended to promote competition that, his administration argues, is hampered by corporate giants and deal-making. The order itself will not create immediate change — that will largely be left to the regulators — but it sets activity in motion across a host of industries.

A surge in green coffee prices may soon begin percolating into costs paid by consumers for their daily caffeine fix, in the latest sign of how hot commodity markets are affecting the broader global economy. Coffee bean prices on international markets have surged as crops in top producer Brazil have been damaged by the worst drought in almost a century.  At the start of June, the futures benchmark in New York for arabica, the high-end coffee bean, hit $1.70 a pound, up almost 70 per cent from a year before.