I'm no fan of tariffs, but oh please. Last time their prices went up because of COVID and because of supply chain disruptions. Now they are going up because of tariffs. All of their earnings calls are filled with analyses of their "pricing power" i.e. the degree to which they can pass on these costs to customers. But when the costs decline, they are happy to keep the prices inflated and pocket the profits.
low net profits margins are simply how retail works, it's not news that retail requires scale. and in fact both target and best buy did see record profits shortly after the pandemic started.
Consumer spending was shattering records during the pandemic.
If consumer spending was dropping as prices were going up, then sure, greed. But prices were rising and consumers were relentless. Which is totally logical. Even more logical when the "spending class" was getting massive raises/offers and rock bottom credit.
This does not at all resonate with my experience with human researchers, even highly paid ones. You still have to do a lot of work to verify their claims.
The article doesn’t rule this out. Most of these emails are templated out in some 3rd party email service. It is extremely plausible that the author is unaware of the text email content.
If someone had a rejection email then we could check this. But
Reading the article is most improper on this here orange website. You’re supposed to read the headline, and imagine what the content of the article might be.
Yes, I did. My point is that the author might be jumping to conclusions. It is far more likely that they introduced a bug in their content than it is that a bunch of email providers who haven't changed in a decade suddenly released the same buggy AI product without fanfare.
Theoretically the role they serve is that they can negotiate with pharmacies and develop a formulary which insurers package into their various offerings. PBMs can negotiate with pharmacies by sending them lots of customers in exchange for negotiating for a discount (or, more likely, a rebate) on their "usual and customary" price. (Pharmacies know they do this, and thus they charge very prices to the uninsured, to ensure their U&C is high enough that they can still make a profit after applying the PBM discounts). Insurers are not experts in the local pharmacy markets of particular geographies, so in essence they outsource this negotiation and craft plans with formularies prepared by PBMs.
GoodRX and other discount providers generally work in one of two ways:
1) They have relationships with multiple PBMs, allowing you to choose the one who has negotiated the cheapest rate with the pharmacy for the drug in question. This is why it might be cheaper than your insurance: another PBM has negotiated a better deal.
2) The discounts come from patient assistance programs run by the manufacturers intended to reduce patient co-pays. Lately insurance companies have started to add clauses to their plans (called copay accumulators or copay maximizers) so that these discounts don't count as part of your copay or your deductible. So these types of discounts are going to be harder to get.
This all stems from a time when pharmacies were much less consolidated and vertically integrated than they are today.
One of the frustrations of the current system is that incentivizes sky-high drug prices. PBMs like high drug prices because they negotiate rebates (some of which they keep, but most they pay back to the insurer) and because the fees they charge to insurers are a percentage of the claims that go through. Pharmacies like high drug prices because they get more money paid them in reimbursements, and because the PBMs send them most of their customers. Manufacturers like high drug prices because they net more revenue, even if they later have to pay it back in the form of rebates, and in any case being on the formulary of major insurers is an existential issue for them. And insurers like high drug prices because they can max out patient co-pays, as the money returned to them in the form of rebates gets kicked into the general fund, thus allowing them to lower premiums, which is their primary axis of competition with other insurers.
The net effect is that you have sick people maxing out their deductibles in order to lower the premiums paid by healthy people--the exact opposite of how insurance is supposed to work. If I could wave a magic wand in Congress and make only a single surgical change to healthcare markets, the change I would make is banning rebates. They were anti-customer when John D Rockefeller used them to obtain a monopoly on oil, and they are anti-customer today.
A good place to read about these dynamics in American healthcare is drugchannels.net. The author is super well informed on how these plans are implemented.
Source: ran a startup targeting pharmacies (which failed) and currently work in a starup focused on discovering and developing new drugs.
That would exclude approximately 99% of all the businesses that have ever existed (including most of those that claim to have some other, loftier goal)
The author doesn't claim that the imbalance is a reason to doubt the study. His claim is that the imbalance is a reason to doubt the claim that an underlying shift in cultural norms explains why the results might have been valid in 2005 but failed to replicate in 2024.
The author rightly observes that despite the undeniable shift, women are still significantly underrepresented in STEM and therefore that cannot explain the lack of replication. There are still many other reasons besides innate differences that might explain it.
From the company's perspective, dividends and buybacks are economically equivalent (i.e. they are giving a certain quantity of cash to shareholders)
However, from the shareholder perspective, buybacks are more tax-efficient since those who sell their shares pay taxes on the gains, and those who hold end up with a larger share of the company and no tax.
This is all according to theory. In practice, there does also seem to be a sort of received wisdom among managers that buybacks are better for companies because they can cut them in times of trouble, whereas investors will perceive cuts in dividend as somehow foretelling bankruptcy.
