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Politics
Elections, leadership, and the politics that move money.
The Antitrust Division That Stopped Going to Court
A deal-friendly Justice Department was supposed to be swapping tough divestitures for soft promises. Coding every formal merger settlement from its own court filings, the opposite is true: five structural divestitures, one mixed case, zero behavioral-only decrees. What thinned out was not the divestiture. It was the courtroom.
DOE Didn't Ban Your Appliances. It Raised the Bar for the Next Rule, by Two to Six Times
On July 2 the Department of Energy said it would 'permanently end' home-appliance efficiency mandates, but its proposal repeals no rule now in force. It rewrites the math for future rules, lifting the 'significant savings' floor from 0.3 to 2 quads. Correct for a change of energy units and for the fact that the test is an 'or,' and the real tightening is roughly two to six times, not a clean 6.7x, and it bites a specific middle band of products, not the whole program.
The 9-0 Loss That Came Back Deeper: CMS Now Proposes Paying 340B Drugs 37% Less, and the Survey Is Why
On 2 July 2026, CMS proposed paying 340B hospitals average sales price minus 33.4 percent for outpatient drugs, a deeper cut than the ASP minus 22.5 percent the Supreme Court struck 9-0 in 2022. The analysis finds CMS could cut deeper precisely because it ran the acquisition-cost survey the Court had demanded, and that budget neutrality recycles the entire cut back into other payments, so the real story is redistribution across hospitals and patients, not net savings for anyone.
A 'Forced-Labor' Tariff Whose Discounts Went to the Countries With More Forced Labor
On June 2, 2026, USTR proposed a forced-labor tariff on 60 economies, splitting them into a 10% and a 12.5% tier. Rank the major trading partners by how much forced labor they actually have and the rate does not follow: Pakistan, the highest-prevalence economy on the list, got the 10% discount, while India, the second-highest, pays 12.5%, and China is taxed at the same 12.5% as low-prevalence Norway. What the rate tracks is USTR's own stated test, whether a country has a forced-labor import-ban law or signed a reciprocal-trade deal, not the amount of forced labor. It reads like the struck-down IEEPA tariff wall being rebuilt on court-tested authority under a human-rights label.
The $73 Lottery Ticket: More Than Half of the TRUMP Coin's $3.81 Billion in Losses Were on the Books by Day 19
A Nansen analysis published July 4 counts 988,905 wallets down a combined $3.81 billion on the TRUMP memecoin, four days after the president's financial disclosure reported $636 million in coin-linked license income. The timing undercuts the claim that the 2026 crypto downturn did the damage: more than half of the losses were already recorded by day 19 of the token's life, and the documented Trump-linked take, up to roughly $960 million across two accounting systems, is about four times what the entire trading crowd netted on paper.
Trump's Housing Bill Bans the Wall Street Landlords Who Were Already Leaving
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act becomes law in early July, and its marquee 'Wall Street landlord' ban restricts only for-profit investors controlling 350 or more single-family homes, roughly 1 percent of purchases, and a cohort that has been a net seller for six straight quarters. The provision aims at a target already walking out the door. The one clause that independent analysts said would genuinely cut new housing supply, a seven-year forced-sale rule on build-to-rent homes, was stripped out by the House before passage.
The Tariff Refund Where Finality, Not the Merits, Decides Who Gets Paid
The Supreme Court voided about $166 billion of IEEPA tariffs for every importer, and U.S. Customs is paying most of it back through a streamlined claims system that does not require a lawsuit. The analysis finds the real fight is over a smaller, finally-liquidated slice, and that whether it is recoverable turns on liquidation timing and who filed suit, not on the law, which is now the same for everyone.
