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Friday, July 18, 2025 | |
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| Good morning, Quartz readers! |
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HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW |
| A bond
villain? A key GOP senator is warning that Trump could set off a bond-market meltdown if he ousts Jerome Powell before the Fed chair’s term ends. |
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| Shop till we
drop. Consumer spending rose in June (totaling $720 billion), despite continued concerns over rising prices from inflation, taxes, and the president’s latest tariff threats. |
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| Watch
this space. Netflix beat Wall Street’s expectations in its Q2 earnings and upped its full-year outlook, but it wasn’t enough for investors, as the stock slipped. |
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| Fab and
furious. Chipmaker TSMC’s profit jumped 61% in the second quarter on the back of the AI boom — and the company’s Q3 outlook surpassed investors’ expectations, too. |
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| Fizz the season. PepsiCo beat Wall Street’s expectations — reporting Q2 EPS of $2.12 on $22.73 billion in revenue — even as its snacks and drinks business declines in North America. |
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| Ride or AI. Uber is looking to the future, planning to deploy more than 20,000 robotaxis over the next six years, powered by Lucid EVs and AV startup Nuro’s software. |
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A MESSAGE FROM THE EARLY BIRD |
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THE MORNING FINANCIAL NEWSLETTER |
The Early Bird is a 7:00 a.m. newsletter that covers stories that will affect the stock market each day. Give it a try. You'll be pheasantly surprised. |
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GAME OF LOANS |
Wall Street has been cashing in on Trump-era unpredictability — tariffs via tweets, surprise policy pivots, and a governing style that might best be described as “executive roulette.” But this week, the chaos threatened to boomerang as President Donald Trump once again floated firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Bond yields shot up, trading volume surged, and even The Wall Street Journal editorial board begged: Please don’t.
Trump reportedly told GOP lawmakers that he’d drafted a Powell pink slip, only to walk it back the next day (“no plans,” he said). But traders have seen this show before, and this sequel isn’t playing well. Markets have started repositioning as if the firing is already happening — a signal that faith in Fed independence (a core market tenet) is cracking. Add in some eerily timed currency trades, and whispers of insider knowledge are growing louder than the bond yield chart.
This isn’t the first Powell-related market panic, but it’s the first time markets didn’t rebound on cue. Chaos may be lucrative, but if investors stop believing in rules — or at least boundaries — the whole game changes. As Goldman and Citi both warned: undermine the Fed, and you risk unraveling the very volatility that made you money in the first place. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on what happens when credibility gets marked to market. |
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CODE BLUE FOR PRIVATE EQUITY |
For years, private equity firms have quietly stitched themselves into the fabric of American health care — buying up hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics with a $1 trillion appetite and all the bedside manner of a tax attorney. By 2024, PE firms owned nearly 500 hospitals and thousands of physician practices,
operating largely in the shadows. But now, after a pair of catastrophic collapses left communities without access to basic care, the regulatory sun is finally rising.
June was a legislative fever dream: Maine hit pause on all PE health care takeovers, Oregon banned non-physicians from owning medical practices, and Pennsylvania armed its AG to block deals that put profits over patients. There’s a bipartisan realization that turning hospitals into high-yield assets might come at a cost
— one measured in ER wait times and shuttered maternity wards.
Driving the shift is Steward Health Care’s collapse, a financial faceplant of biblical proportions. Created by Cerberus Capital, Steward went from scrappy startup to $9 billion in debt and multiple hospital closures… all while its former PE owner made off with nearly $800 million in dividends. The model wasn’t medicine. It was Monopoly. And now lawmakers are wondering whether “fiduciary duty” should extend to actual
patients. Quartz’s Catherine Arnst has more on the private equity playbook — and why states are scrubbing in. |
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A MESSAGE FROM THE EARLY BIRD |
|
THE MORNING FINANCIAL NEWSLETTER |
The Early Bird is a 7:00 a.m. newsletter that covers stories that will affect the stock market each day. Give it a try. You'll be pheasantly surprised. |
|
|
MORE FROM QUARTZ |
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