| Although I work at Bloomberg, I'll be honest: I'm not religiously reading the latest ISM Manufacturing reports every month. The thought of regularly keeping tabs on corrugated box prices and polypropylene resin inventories bores me to death! So the fact that I actually read it today should have you worried. Okay, fine, I didn't read the whole thing. I skimmed Bloomberg News' Joe Weisenthal's thoughts — he called it "one of the ugliest, most stagflationary" reports in recent memory — and did some Control + F-ing to see just how bad it was: "Weak" was mentioned seven times. "Slow" was mentioned 21 times. "Tariffs" were mentioned 18 times. "Contraction" was in there two dozen times. I understand that the quotes within this report — about "a potential crisis," "acute shortages," "price increases," "anxiety" and "slower-than-normal sales in Canada" — are purely anecdotal. But these people work in manufacturing, one of President Trump's most beloved pet projects, right behind crypto and Kid Rock. Shouldn't they be cheering with glee on Liberation Eve? Not if they're making auto parts, says Liam Denning: "A policy geared toward ensuring every nut and bolt be made on US soil is a recipe for pricing cars beyond consumers' reach — which is presumably why Trump has reportedly tried to strongarm manufacturers into eating the cost themselves." No wonder shoppers are rushing to car dealerships to make last-minute purchases. As for the broader economy, the MSCI US index — which John Authers says is practically identical to the S&P 500 — just completed its worst quarter in 23 years. Reader, that was back when I was still playing with American Girl Dolls. "The tide is flooding — in the wrong direction," he writes. Through its trio of terrible policies — tariffs, federal job cuts and deportations — Kathryn Edwards says the Trump administration could easily become the first in post-war history to directly cause a recession. At the rate things are going, we're gonna have to start wearing chicken-feed sack dresses and making Ambrosia salad like Kit Kittredge during the Great Depression. How bad might it get? "Consider the precedent of the US-Mexico-Canada trade talks," writes Jonathan Levin. Markets were a bundle of nerves during the president's first term: "Although tax reform had buoyed investor sentiment in 2017, the renewed NAFTA drama in 2018 collided with other Trump tariffs on the likes of China. The S&P 500 Index experienced a correction in February, went sideways for months and came within a whisker of a bear market by December." If that's the level of volatility we experienced during trade negotiations with just two other countries, Jonathan says "imagine running that gauntlet but with several times as many counterparties." Read the whole thing and just imagine how liberated you'll feel without any money left in your bank account!  Source: @hellicity_merriman on Instagram Today, US Attorney General Pam Bondi directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione. To me, it sounds like she's opening Pandora's box. Nothing about the alleged CEO killer has been normal, starting with the fact that New York Mayor Eric Adams used him as a photo op. People wear T-shirts with his mugshot! There are "Free Luigi" stickers plastered on lampposts in Brooklyn! Fans idolize the guy's loafers, for God's sake. Sentencing him to death just seems unwise purely from a public outrage standpoint. Mangione is hardly the first American to think health care is a scam, and Republicans aren't showing any signs of wanting to fix its less-than-stellar reputation. Case in point? The Trump administration's plan to cut federal expenditures by up to $1 trillion over a decade. Bloomberg's Editorial Board says "more than 15 million [Medicaid] enrollees could lose coverage — 5 million of them children — and many will go uninsured, leading to worsening health, costly emergency-room visits and loss of income to providers for uncompensated care." Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk will only make things worse. Lisa Jarvis says they've "taken a hatchet to our nation's public health agencies" while Big Pharma sits idly by. "Since November, biotech and pharma companies' strategy has been to say little to nothing in public, be solicitous in private, and, above all, avoid offense," she writes. Their concern is money (duh). They want to make sure all their fancy newfangled drugs get reviewed in a timely manner. Curious, then, to hear Mihir Sharma say most Americans can't even afford name-brand medicine anyway: "By some estimates, generic and biosimilar drugs account for 90% of prescriptions filled in the US, although they represent barely over a percentage point of total health care spending," he writes. Guess who makes about 40% of those drugs? India. "This is one of the few ways in which American patients get a good deal," he writes. "It's possible, therefore, that pharma might be excluded from the first batch of tariffs entirely." One can only hope! | 
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