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• Target starts a new endeavor.
• A plastic ban? Never say never.
• Apollo may be too clever.
• Housing costs go on forever.

Normally, after an internship, you expect to walk away with a few things: a new list of bullet points to add to your resume, some cool swag with the company logo on it and — if you’re lucky — a few friends that you met in the trenches. But the title of CEO? That’s not in the cards, no matter how much Kool-Aid you drink.

Of course, there are exceptions: Nike’s Elliott Hill, Xerox’s Ursula Burns and GM’s Mary Barra all started their careers doing coffee runs and making photocopies for their respective companies, but it takes years and years to climb the ladder. The newest person to make the list is Michael Fiddelke, who will soon succeed Brian Cornell as Target’s new chief executive officer. He started out as a finance intern back in 2003:

To go from the copy room to the board room!? That’s gotta be the dream! But for Fiddelke, it could easily turn into a nightmare. As Andrea Felsted says, the retail giant is hurting after a series of missteps made by his predecessor involving bloated inventories, pulled Pride Month products and DEI boycotts.

There’s a reason the intern-to-CEO-dream is elusive — and it’s not just because of the dedication required to stick with the same company that long. The reality is that it’s a choice, not only for the worker, but for the business electing its leadership. Going internal can work, but sometimes the best person for the job is an outsider who isn’t afraid to disrupt. And judging by this chart, it sure looks as though Target needs disruption:

That’s not to say the former finance intern is destined to fail. “While an outsider would have brought a fresh pair of eyes to Target’s challenges, Fiddelke should know how Target can connect with customers,” Andrea argues. “He has been with the company for over 20 years and held roles in finance, store operations and merchandising. He’s seen the good times and the not-so-good. Indeed, while the retailer looks to the future with its values, it should go back in time in other ways.”

For a successful turnaround, Andrea says Fiddelke not only needs to get the right products in front of customers at the right time, he needs to rethink the store’s entire ethos. “Revitalizing Target involves deciding what the retailer stands for, and imbuing this identity into every aspect of its business, to win back disillusioned customers and make the ‘Target run’ relevant once more.” Read the whole thing.

I have a bit of a confession to make: I’ve been unknowingly harboring a bunch of contraband soy sauce fishies in my apartment for months.

Okay, fine, maybe contraband is a bit much. We just don’t have this kind of soy sauce packaging in the US. And David Fickling says South Australia is about to ban the cute little containers, so I’m basically one sushi dinner away from being an ecoterrorist.

The backstory behind my mini collection is that my Aussie colleague Christine Vanden Byllaardt — who works out of our NYC office — introduced me to them and I was immediately enchanted. They are SO cute and SO squishy and weirdly reminded me of those Kool-Aid bottles I used to twist off as a kid. Naturally, I asked her to bring me some when she returned to the states after her next trip home.

But after reading David’s column, I completely understand why we want them to go extinct: They’re made of single-use plastic, which means they can’t be recycled and take decades, if not centuries, to break down, all while probably killing a ton of actual fish.

“You’ll save a huge amount of polymers just by handing out soy sauce in flexible sachets rather than squeezy containers,” David notes, which is exactly what we do here in the states (although I hate it when the soy sauce gets all over my hands … user error, probably). Beyond resource preservation, David says “there’s a more important reason to welcome such local initiatives … Outsourcing our environmental problems to a United Nations bureaucracy might feel like a fittingly worldwide solution for a worldwide issue, but it’s clearly not working. We’re going to have to try a different tack.”

If you recall, the UN was cooking up a plan to end plastic pollution earlier this month, but the deal was foiled once again — largely because the US is wayy too cozy with oil exporters. Depressing! But we shouldn’t get bogged down by bad news.

“President Donald Trump’s executive order in February ‘ending procurement and forced use of paper straws’ might have been an eye-catching example of reactionary backlash,” says David, “but there’s plenty of movement in the opposite direction in places as diverse as Pennsylvania, Montana, Oregon and Maine. Amazon.com Inc. is less likely to boast of its environmental credentials these days, but still managed to reduce its use of single-use plastics by 16.4% last year, a saving of 14,561 metric tons.”

Next year, who knows! Maybe Amazon will stop selling plastic fish bottles on their website. A girl can dream.

Here’s a Bloomberg News story about how Apollo Global Management is taking “financial wizardry” to a new level by engineering a trade for Athene, its insurance arm. “The deal, named Fox Hedge LP, has repackaged $5 billion of loans and other debts that were already owned by Apollo’s funds and, through clever financial origami, turned them into bonds mainly for Athene to own,” writes Paul J. Davies.

Now, normally I’d leave the task of explaining a highly complex financial machination to Matt Levine, but he’s on vacation (hopefully) until the end of this week. So you’re stuck with me, a person who majored in English in college and didn’t know what a synthetic risk transfer was until five hours ago.

So I’ll start with what I do know: wizardry.

When someone calls you a “wizard” or a “magician” at your job — something that happened quite frequently back when I helped manage Bloomberg Opinion’s social channels for five (!) years — it almost always means that while this person may admire your work ethic and dedication, they really have absolutely zero clue what it is you actually do, or how you do it.

And that kinda tracks with what’s going on with Apollo! While Paul is impressed by such “a fascinating trade” — his words — he says nobody really knows how Apollo did it: “Apollo is very reluctant to discuss its details, which may be because the asset manager doesn’t want competitors to easily copy it, although imitators are very likely to sprout quickly. Regardless, the lack of disclosure makes it hard to assess the risks involved. The obvious worry is that this trade could be too clever by half.”

If Matt were here, he’d probably end this with some equally-clever-yet-painfully-obvious (in hindsight) observation, but I’m no financial wizard. And honestly? I’m totally fine with that.

In President Donald Trump’s eyes, the housing crisis has a simple solution: lower interest rates. But the country’s lack of supply can’t be solved by taking a tour of the Federal Reserve. If Trump really wanted to put his hard hat to good use, he could be out there building homes, Jimmy Carter-style! Or at the very least, he could “be pressing Republicans in Congress to pass a new piece of bipartisan legislation that would do more to address the problem,” writes the Bloomberg Editorial Board. “A slowdown in housing construction after the 2008 global financial crisis produced a shortfall of nearly four million homes, according to one estimate, which has only recently started to improve.” Only Congress has the power to truly fix it.

Serious question: Was Javier Blas possessed by Nathan Fielder, or merely separated from him at birth? Because they share a rather strange hobby: “Tracking flights and reading crash-investigation reports are some of my guilty pleasures,” he writes. For those familiar with Fielder’s HBO show, The Rehearsal, that’s pretty much a dead ringer for the origin story of the second season. “Perhaps because of my enthusiasm for planes, perhaps because I fly a fair bit for work, I’m typically upbeat about the future of aviation. No matter how much I hear about staycations, heat waves or anti-tourist protests, I’m convinced people will continue to take to the air for holidays.” His theory is backed up by the data on jet fuel: “From 2026 onward, demand should be setting new all-time highs every year,” he writes. “Until when? We have good visibility at least until 2030, when the need is likely to top 8.5 million barrels a day.”

Gavin Newsom is taking a page from Bill Clinton’s 1992 centrist playbook. — Ronald Brownstein

Trump's summitry makes for great visuals, but it’s done little to change the on-the-ground reality. — Andreas Kluth

With India, the White House expects the same level of trade loyalty as it got from the Germans in 1967. — Andy Mukherjee

The new political battle over data centers is not split along partisan lines, it’s between locals and Big Tech. — Mary Ellen Klas

Don’t be fooled by Beijing’s icy reception to the return of Nvidia's H20 chips; China is merely buying time. — Catherine Thorbecke

The Trump administration seems determined to dismantle the crown jewel of US scientific research. — Lisa Jarvis

Bolivia has a shot at change after the general election — even if it’s a long one. — Juan Pablo Spinetto

The risks are skewed toward a hawkish surprise from Jerome Powell’s last stand at Jackson Hole. — John Authers

The White House’s new TikTok account is getting dragged.

SpaceX’s Starship explosions are starting to add up.

Oracle is betting big on the cloud computing boom.

The MAGA meat craze has a deportation problem.

French dips are taking over New York City.

Dog survives harrowing cheese ball catastrophe.

Watch out for Listeria in the Pepper Jack.

Researchers discovered a new class of origami.

Notes: Please send roast beef sammies and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net.

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