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- [00:00]
Advertising/Marketing Voice
Trustage helps make annuities simple. Our flexible products and personalized support help you build stronger relationships and grow your business with confidence. Discover how@truestage.com grow TrueStage is the marketing name for Trustage Financial Group Inc. At subsidiaries and affiliates. Corporate headquarters is located in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Caitlin McCabe
The Supreme Court extends a pause of food assistance payments as a bill to reopen the government works its way through the House. Plus, the Trump administration explores new rules that would upend shareholder voting.
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Alex Frango
The proxy firms have become kind of these boogeymen for especially for investors with more of a right wing sensibility in terms of politics.
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Caitlin McCabe
And we take a look at whether Harvard is handing out too many A's. It's Wednesday, November 12th. I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal and here's the AM edition of what's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. The Supreme Court has said the Trump administration can continue for now to withhold full food assistance benefits for November, extending a temporary order that came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson last week. The new order will expire just before midnight tomorrow. The House is set to vote as soon as today on a measure to reopen the government, which would then head to President Trump's desk. Once passed, the package would restore programs such as snap. In the meantime, the order creates more uncertainty for the 42 million Americans who rely on the SNAP program to feed themselves and their families, as well as for the small businesses that rely on customers who use the benefits. Ryan Sprankel, whose family owns three grocery stores near Pittsburgh, says the number of shoppers has slowed. His store in Katanning, Pennsylvania, gets 25% of its revenue from Snap.
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Ryan Sprankel
We should be slammed right now, but I mean, you can see we're not. I mean, so the sales not being there, you know, affects everybody's wages, affects everybody's hours. And let's face facts, too. The people that should be here buying the product, they're not buying the product. So they're going without the product. They're going without meals.
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Caitlin McCabe
Fast moving court rulings have meant that food aid for Americans has been inconsistent across states. At least 16 states paid out SNAP benefits in full after a U.S. district judge ordered the government last week to do so. Others have drawn from state funding to disperse some money or increased aid to food banks, while another group of states has said they are waiting for the matter to be resolved in the courts. Now we're exclusively reporting that the Fannie Mae watchdogs that were fired from their job had been probing if Trump appointee Bill Pulte had improperly obtained mortgage records of key Democratic officials, including New York Attorney General Letitia James. People familiar with the matter say Fanny's ethics and investigations group had received internal complaints alleging that senior officials had improperly properly directed staff to access the mortgage documents. The investigators were probing who made the orders, whether Pulte had the authority to seek the documents, and whether or not they had followed proper procedure. Since being installed at the top of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is normally a sleepy administration post, Pulte has been investigating alleged mortgage fraud, including against some of Trump's political opponents. Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California have all been targeted for mortgage fraud investigations and have denied wrongdoing. Responding to a request for comment, a spokesman for the FHFA told us that, quote, the anonymous sources in the story are attempting to obstruct the criminal justice system by completely fabricating false and defamatory claims. The spokesman declined to elaborate which claims the statement referred to. The White House is exploring new measures to curb the influence of proxy advisors and index fund managers, something that has been a pain point for high profile CEOs, including Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon. We're exclusively reporting that Trump administration officials are discussing at least one executive order that would restrict proxy advisor firms, Journal Finance editor Alex Frango says that could include a broad ban on shareholder recommendations or an order blocking recommendations on companies that have engaged proxy advisors for consulting work.
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Alex Frango
There's a broad range of criticisms of the proxy firms, but a couple of the areas tend to do with recommendations that the proxy firms make about corporate governance, meaning, you know, how a company is run, things like executive pay, whether a company should have a separate chairman from a CEO, but also things related to diversity on boards, environmental policies. And so the proxy firms have become kind of these boogeymen for especially for investors with more of a right wing sensibility in terms of politics. And they for instance, recently Elon Musk at Tesla, there was a vote whether to give him this potential $1 trillion pay package. Shareholders had to vote on it. And these companies basically provide a voter guide, a recommendation. And the reason for that is that a lot of shareholders are passive funds. They own lots and lots of stocks and they don't want to be held liable for voting the wrong way by their own shareholders. So they outsource this process of research, the proposals at these companies to these proxy firms who say, hey, vote this way, and then they just vote that way and get on with their day.
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Caitlin McCabe
Alex says officials are also exploring limits on how index fund managers are allowed to vote, with the aim of limiting the power of Wall street giants, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
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Alex Frango
What the White House is looking at here is the incredible concentration of influence of these index funds. So you and I might own A S&P 500 index fund. Not really paying attention. It owns all of these companies. The fund manager actually is holding on to the stock and gets to vote. And some of these companies have set up some processes so that individual investors like you and I can vote on, you know, a resolution that's going on at General Motors or Tesla or United Airlines or Nvidia, but that it's cumbersome and there remains too much concentration of power. These index funds, some of whom own, you know, 30% of a company, if you put them all together and are able to kind of drive the agendas at the boards of these companies.
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Caitlin McCabe
And after Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk struck a deal with the White House to expand Medicare coverage of their popular obesity drugs in exchange for slashing net prices, the pharma companies are looking at a mass market opportunity potentially worth billions of dollars. With Medicare and potentially Medicaid coverage, the number of people covered for GLP1 drugs could roughly double over the next few years. Journal columnist David Weiner says Lilly and Novo Nordisk are essentially trading price for volume.
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Ryan Sprankel
They're accepting smaller margins in exchange for a much bigger, more stable market. Analysts expect net prices to fall by about 25 to 30% once rebates and government discounts are factored in. The deal raises the bar for everyone else. Rivals like Pfizer, Roche and Amgen will have a harder time catching up because Lilly and Novo Nordisk can afford to sell cheaper and still make money at scale. It could also squeeze out compounders and telehealth startups that have been thriving on the fact that these drugs are being sold for really high prices and that many people lack insurance coverage for the branded drugs. Once you have these drugs being sold at slightly lower prices, that makes it less worthwhile for someone to, say, go to hims and hers and get the compounded version of the drug, rather than buying it directly from the manufacturer where they know the drug is for sure FDA inspected.
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Caitlin McCabe
The timing of the deal is favorable for the drug companies as well, with both Novo Nordisk and Lilly preparing to launch oral versions of their drugs. The Trump administration is also granting the company's special priority review vouchers through the Food and Drug Administration intended to speed up the agency's decision process. Coming up, Trump moves to drill, baby drill off the coast of California. And is Harvard doling out too many A's? Find out after the break.
- [08:33]
Advertising/Marketing Voice
Think of your commute, your train, your car, maybe your walk. Even if you don't realize it, blockchain innovations are all around you on your way into the office, so why not learn about them on the way? From institutional custody solutions to 247 cross border payments with nearly real time settlements, crypto and blockchain are shaping flexibility and innovation for institutions all over the globe and your city. Join Ripple and host David Schwartz for crypto and blockchain conversations on Blockstars, the podcast.
- [09:06]
Caitlin McCabe
The U.S. navy's largest aircraft carrier has arrived in waters near Latin America as the Trump administration continues to turn up the heat on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. While the president has expressed reservations about taking military action against Venezuela, the FirePower of the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group means the US could attack targets in the country, including Venezuela's air defenses. That goes well beyond what is needed to strike the small boats that the Trump administration says are being used to smuggle drugs. In response, Venezuela has started extensive military exercises with the aim of safeguarding its airspace. Speaking on state television, the country's defense minister, Pedrino Lopez, said the military is prepared to defend their homeland whatever the threat or intensity of an attack is. To date, the US has carried out 19 strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 76 people. The Trump administration is poised to unveil a plan that would allow oil drilling off the California coast. We're reporting that the announcement could come later this week and is expected to include a proposal for drilling around Alaska and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, too. The push to expand oil production offshore is part of President Trump's campaign pledge to drill, baby drill and follows a concerted phaseout of federal tax incentives for renewable energy. Julia Petroni covers energy markets for Dow Jones Newswires. She says Trump's campaign against green energies even stretched to the International energy agency. The IEA's influential annual report has several models for future energy demand, and crucially, this morning's outlook reintroduced a scenario that had been scrapped years ago.
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Julia Petroni
The IA has repeatedly estimated oil demand will peak before 2030, but this new scenario suggests that growth could persist well into the middle of the century. The reason why we care is that peak oil consumption has been a key issue in energy discussions, with different views across the industries on when that might happen. Now, this scenario assumes a slowdown in the adoption of electric electric vehicles, largely due to a lack of policy support in some regions. As a result, oil demand is expected to keep growing into the2030s and beyond under the scenario where the growth of renewables is much slower. Global temperatures are projected to rise by nearly 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which is obviously well above the international target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.
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Caitlin McCabe
And finally, Harvard University has built a reputation for being one of the hardest American universities to get into. But as it turns out, once you're in, you've got a good chance of getting an A. A recent internal report found that about 60% of grades were A's during the 2024-2025 school year, up from about 25% in 2005-2006. The median GPA upon grad 3.83, up from 3.29 in 1985. Meanwhile, the average time students spend studying outside class has barely changed, hovering around six hours a week. The report includes recommendations to curb grade inflation, and Harvard is considering introducing a limited number of A plus grades. It's not going down well on campus, prompting uproar from students who say they already study a lot, sleep very little, and face immense stress to perform academically. Grade inflation has drawn scrutiny from President Trump, who earlier this year asked schools to, quote, commit to grade integrity when he asked colleges to sign sweeping agreements about their operations in exchange for federal funding advantages. And that's it for what's news for this Wednesday morning. Today's show is produced by Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer was Sondra Kilhoff. And I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.
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Advertising/Marketing Voice
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