Andrew here. The government is now shut down. That means furloughs, potential firings — and most likely no important economic data like the jobs numbers that the government was scheduled to release on Friday. We dive into all of the implications and how this fight could play out.
And President Trump is now planning a new website where Americans will be able to buy drugs directly from manufacturers at discounted rates. What’s it being called? TrumpRx. (We’re still not sure if that’s a placeholder, a joke or the actual name.) More below.
The shutdown lowdown
The federal government shut down hours ago. Judging by the markets on Wednesday, the impasse could be costly.
Usually, the stock and bond markets hold up fine during such funding crises. But there’s been widespread selling on Wednesday, with the dollar and S&P 500 futures falling as investors brace for a lengthy disruption. The price of gold hit a record, while the yields on 10-year and 30-year Treasury notes and bonds rose. (Bond yields go up when prices drop.)
The status quo: Republicans and Democrats remain far apart. The Trump administration has signaled that it will seek drastic layoffs of federal workers, continuing cost-cutting efforts favored by President Trump and his budget director, Russell Vought.
“The last thing we want to do is shut it down, but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump said on Tuesday. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want.” (Some trivia: There have been eight shutdowns since 1990; Trump has now presided over four.)
Who and what could be affected:
Beginning Wednesday, about 750,000 federal workers are set to be furloughed each day, costing roughly $400 million daily, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Affected federal workers will see their pay frozen, including those, like air traffic controllers, who must stay on the job.
Federal courts could be disrupted beyond this week, and some government contractors are in limbo.
Companies filing to go public could see delays: The S.E.C. is operating with a skeleton staff and won’t prioritize processing I.P.O. paperwork.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t collect or release data, including the latest jobs report. Up in the air is whether it will publish the Consumer Price Index as scheduled on Oct. 15. (Separately, the White House on Tuesday withdrew its nomination of E.J. Antoni to lead the agency.)
The data blackout poses a challenge for the Fed. Policymakers remain divided about how much to cut interest rates, with signs of labor market weakness and inflation running above the central bank’s 2 percent target.
Could private data fill the void? Market watchers are divided. “Private data is like viewing the economy through a keyhole — clear, but with a narrow field of vision,” Paul Donovan, the chief economist for UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a research note on Wednesday. “Official data is like opening the door.”
Putting the shutdown in perspective: A C.B.O. analysis of the record-setting 34-day shutdown in 2018 and 2019 found it led to an economic hit of just $3 billion.
Economists say such losses are recouped in subsequent quarters. But that partly depends on how many furloughed workers ultimately keep their jobs.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
President Trump says a deal with Harvard is “very close.” The final details are still being worked out, but Trump said the school would pay about $500 million to end its standoff with the administration. (He also said Harvard would focus more on teaching students A.I. and “trade schools” training.) Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, a longtime Republican donor and Harvard Business School graduate, played a role in brokering the breakthrough with Trump, The Times reports.
Berkshire Hathaway is said to be near its biggest deal in years. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate is in talks to buy the OxyChem petrochemical business from Occidental Petroleum, in which it already holds a big stake, for about $10 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. It would be Berkshire’s largest takeover since 2022 — and perhaps the last the company strikes with Buffett as its C.E.O.
Investors cheer Nike’s latest results. Shares in the footwear brand are up nearly 4 percent in premarket trading after the company reported quarterly results that slightly outpaced Wall Street estimates. But Nike executives told analysts that tariffs would add $1.5 billion to costs this fiscal year, up from a previous estimate of $1 billion, and that revenue this quarter would grow only slightly.
Rating the disruption of TrumpRx
Analysts and investors regarded the Trump administration’s big health care announcement as a win — especially for Pfizer, which secured a three-year reprieve on tariffs by agreeing to cut drug costs and sell some treatments directly to the public.
But the big question is, will this disrupt the status quo, as the White House suggests?
What we know: Pfizer will lower the prices it charges to state Medicaid programs for many of its current drugs, the company’s C.E.O., Albert Bourla, announced with President Trump on Tuesday. It will also introduce new treatments in the U.S. at prices that are benchmarked against prices offered in countries including Britain, Canada, Germany and Japan.
Administration officials said they had reached similar agreements with other drug manufacturers, but didn’t name them.
Then there’s TrumpRx, a new website where Americans will be able to buy drugs directly from manufacturers at discounted rates, without involving health insurers. (The model is already used for popular obesity drugs from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.) Pfizer said that its direct-to-consumer sales would include both widely used primary care treatments and more expensive specialty medicines; the average discount is expected to be half off the sticker price.
Trump took a victory lap. “We’re ending the era of global price gouging at the expense of American families,” he said. Bourla added, “The big winner of this deal clearly will be the American patients.”
But it’s not clear things will change that much. Many patients on insurance already pay little out of pocket for these drugs. Moreover, consumer prices are largely set after opaque negotiations and rebates.
“For all the hype and commentary around delivering a transformative win for lower drug prices, it’s worth noting that Pfizer’s news release didn’t change a single financial metric or piece of guidance,” Carter Gould, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, wrote in a research note on Tuesday.
While direct-sales programs are meant in part to reduce the influence of the middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers, stocks in those companies were little changed Tuesday. Shares in CVS, which owns Caremark, fell slightly on Tuesday; those in Cigna, which owns Express Scripts, rose a bit.
The billionaire Mark Cuban, whose latest venture is the Cost Plus Drug Company direct-sales platform, wrote on X: “The stock prices of PBMs didn’t get crushed. Which means, so far, no one expects much change for them. Which they expect they will make up lost revenues from patients, companies and other payers elsewhere.”
“I thought that’s it. It’s over, it is over.”
— Jimmy Kimmel, recounting his reaction to being taken off the air by Disney on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” The suspension of Kimmel’s show, after criticism by the F.C.C.’s chair, Brendan Carr, prompted a national debate about free speech. Protesters disrupted an F.C.C. meeting on Tuesday, chanting “fire Carr, the censorship czar!”
Target faces a leadership challenge
When Target’s C.E.O., Brian Cornell, leaves that role in February, he’ll still be chair of the board. But a group of shareholder activists wants to block future C.E.O.s at the retailer from making the same move, Jordyn Holman is the first to report.
The group, the Accountability Board, filed a shareholder proposal on Wednesday that calls for Target to change its bylaws to require an independent chair — someone who hasn’t been an executive at the company in the past three years — instead of an executive chairman, the position Cornell will take once he leaves his C.E.O. role.
It may be too late to force Cornell out of the job, Matt Prescott, the president and chief operating officer of the Accountability Board, said in an interview. But, he added, if the proposal passes, “we hope that Brian Cornell would not continue to want to serve as an executive chair.”
The Accountability Board pointed to Target’s lagging performance. Target’s share price has fallen 44 percent in the past five years after a pandemic boom.
Tariffs are complicating the company’s supply chain as customers have become more cautious spending on discretionary goods, and it faces boycotts over changes leadership made this year to its diversity policies.
The Accountability Board sees an independent chair as a “crucial step” in making sure the board is “positioned to oversee management and represent shareholder interests free from executive entanglements,” according to the proposal.
Target currently has a lead independent director in Christine Leahy, the chief executive of the information technology firm CDW Corporation. But the Accountability Board argues that “this structure clearly hasn’t proven sufficient to protect shareholder interests.”