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Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Thomas Barkin said on Thursday tariffs are very likely to push inflation up over coming months, in remarks that said U.S. central bank policy is where it needs to be to deal with what lies ahead. I do believe we will see pressure on prices, Barkin told a gathering of the New York Association for Business Economics. When it comes to tariffs and their impact on price pressures, to date, these increases have had only modest effects on measured inflation, but I anticipate more pressure is coming, amid comments from businesses that they expect to pass at least some of the rise in import taxes imposed by President Donald Trump. That said, I dont expect the impact on inflation to be anywhere near as significant as what we just experienced during the pandemic and there are signs that consumers will try to move away from tariffed goods, which could limit some of the upsides for higher inflation. Last week, the Feds most recent gathering of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee saw officials leave their overnight target rate unchanged at between 4.25% and 4.5%. Uncertainty over the outlook is keeping the central bank on the sidelines amid expectations the tariffs will push up inflation this year while depressing growth and hiring. In his remarks, Barkin noted the Fed is facing risks on both its job and inflation mandates. Citing the uncertainty of the outlook, Barkin declined to say where monetary policy is heading, while cautioning there are a number of scenarios in play for the central bank’s interest rate target and the exact timing of a rate move matter much less than many expect. While most Fed officials are in a wait-and-see mode and Fed Chair Jerome Powell reiterated that message this week in testimony before Congress, some officials on the Board of Governors have said they view tariffs as a one-time price increase and are open to cutting short-term interest rates at the late July FOMC meeting. Futures markets believe the Fed will cut rates at the September FOMC meeting. Barkin told reporters after his speech that policymakers should never take any action off the table, while adding he’s still seeking data to know what to do with interest rate policy. “Given the strength in todays economy, we have time to track developments patiently and allow the visibility to improve, Barkin said, adding, when it does, we are well positioned to address whatever the economy will require. Barkin also said that given inflation had been on a cooling trend at the onset of the tariff regime, hiking rates to contain price pressures “doesn’t seem like the topic of the day.” Barkin said that as the economy now stands things look pretty good and recent inflation data was encouraging. He said job growth has been healthy. Michael S. Derby, Reuters
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E-Commerce
States can block the countrys biggest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid money for health services such as contraception and cancer screenings without facing lawsuits from patients, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. The 6-3 opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by the rest of the courts conservatives was not directly about abortion, but it comes as Republicans back a wider push across the country to defund the organization. It closes off Planned Parenthood’s primary court path to keeping Medicaid funding in place: patient lawsuits. The justices found that while Medicaid law allows people to choose their own provider, that does not make it a right enforceable in court. The court split along ideological lines, with the three liberals dissenting in the case from South Carolina. Public health care money generally cannot be used to pay for abortions, but Medicaid patients go to Planned Parenthood for other needs in part because it can be difficult to find a doctor who takes the publicly funded insurance, the organization has said. Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC) said Planned Parenthood should not get any taxpayer money. The budget bill backed by President Donald Trump in Congress would also cut Medicaid money for the group. That could force the closure of about 200 centers, most of them in states where abortion is legal, Planned Parenthood has said. McMaster first moved to cut off the Medicaid funding in 2018, but he was blocked in court after a lawsuit from a patient, Julie Edwards, who wanted to keep going to Planned Parenthood for birth control because her diabetes makes pregnancy potentially dangerous. She sued over a provision in Medicaid law that allows patients to choose their own qualified provider. South Carolina argued that patients should not be able to file such lawsuits. The state pointed to lower courts that have been swayed by similar arguments and allowed states such as Texas to act against Planned Parenthood. The high court majority agreed. Deciding whether to permit private enforcement poses delicate policy questions involving competing costs and benefitsdecisions for elected representatives, not judges, Gorsuch wrote. He pointed out that patients can appeal through other administrative processes if coverage is denied. McMaster, in a statement, said his state had taken a stand to protect the sanctity of life and defend South Carolinas authority and valuesand today, we are finally victorious. In a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the ruling is likely to result in tangible harm to real people. It will strip those South Caroliniansand countless other Medicaid recipients around the countryof a deeply personal freedom: the ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable,'” she wrote. Planned Parenthood officials said the decision will hamper access to care such as preventive screenings for 1 million Medicaid recipients in South Carolina and that other conservative states will likely take similar steps. Instead of patients now deciding where to get care, that now lies with the state, said Katherine Farris, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. If they fall on hard financial times, as many are right now, they are fundamentally less free.” She said South Carolina did not say Planned Parenthood provided inadequate care, describing it as political decision. Other conservative states are expected to follow South Carolina’s lead with funding cuts, potentially creating a backdoor abortion ban, said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Medicaid patients make up 3.5% of the organizations South Carolina patients who come for services unrelated to abortion or gender-affirming care, officials said. Because South Carolina has not expanded its Medicaid program, reimbursements do not cover its preventive care costs, spokesperson Molly Rivera said. Public health groups like the American Cancer Society have said in court papers that lawsuits are the only real way that Medicaid patients have been able to enforce their ability to choose their own doctor. Losing that ability is expected to reduce access to healthcare for people on the program, which is estimated to include one-quarter of everyone in the country. Rural areas could be especially affected, advocates said in court papers. In South Carolina, $90,000 in Medicaid funding goes to Planned Parenthood every year, a tiny fraction of the states total Medicaid spending. The state banned abortion at about six weeks gestation after the Supreme Court overturned it as a nationwide right in 2022. The state says other providers can fill a healthcare void left by Planned Parenthood’s removal from Medicaid. By Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Meg Kinnard contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff said the company now relies on artificial intelligence for 30% to 50% of its entire workload. The software giant, like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Microsoft and Google, is going all in on the AI boom. All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work, Benioff told Bloomberg, including positions like software engineering and customer service. “It’s these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out there doing this work servicing the customers, selling to the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, do the marketing, the branding.” Benioff said he even writes his yearly business plan with an AI partner, along with a “human” Salesforce executive, adding the company was on track to have one billion of these “agents” before the end of the year. (65% of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, according to an April KPMG survey.) Benioff also estimated that Salesforce has reached 93% accuracy with the AI product it’s selling to customers, including Walt Disney Co., which was developed to carry out tasks such as customer service without human supervision, according to Bloomberg. Benioff added that it’s not “realistic” to reach 100% accuracy, and that other companies are at “much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata.” The software giant was ranked the No. 1 customer relationship management (CRM) software provider in 2025 for the 12th consecutive year; its clients include Apple, Boeing, Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald’s, to name a few. According to Bloomberg, AI is ushering in a new era of “the tiny team.” Gone are the days when Silicon Valley companies rapidly hire as they scale; now tech companies are in a race to the bottom, competing to see who can manage the lowest headcount in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiencies. The AI boom comes at a time when many tech companies are slashing jobs, in part to keep up with inflation and increased economic uncertainty, spurred on by the Trump administration’s tariffs and conflict with Iran. Salesforce by the numbers Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was trading up less than 1% on Thursday at the time of this writing in midday trading. In the company’s latest round of earnings for the first quarter, which ended April 30, the company reported revenue of $9.8 billion, up nearly 8% year-over-year, beating analyst expectations, and raised guidance “by $400 million to $41.3 billion at the high end of the range.” Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.58, topping estimates of $2.55. Benioff said Salesforce has “built a deeply unified enterprise AI platformwith agents, data, apps, and a metadata platform . . . with Agentforce, Data Cloud, our Customer 360 apps, Tableau, and Slack all built on one trusted, unified foundation, [so] companies of every size can build a digital labor forceboosting productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating growth.” The company had a market capitalization of $257 billion at the time of this writing. Its next earnings report is scheduled for late August.
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E-Commerce
The Senate parliamentarian has advised that a Medicaid provider tax overhaul central to President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending bill does not adhere to the chamber’s procedural rules, delivering a crucial blow as Republicans rush to finish the package this week. Guidance from the parliamentarian is rarely ignored, and Republican leaders are now forced to consider difficult options. Republicans were counting on big cuts to Medicaid and other programs to offset trillions of dollars in Trump tax breaks, their top priority. Additionally, the Senate’s chief arbiter of its often complicated rules had advised against various GOP provisions barring certain immigrants from health care programs. Republicans scrambled Thursday to respond, with some calling for challenging, or firing, the nonpartisan parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who has been on the job since 2012. Democrats said the decisions would devastate GOP plans. We have contingency plans,” said Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota. He did not say whether Friday’s votes were on track, but he insisted that were plowing forward. But Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the Republican proposals would have meant $250 billion less for the healthcare program, massive Medicaid cuts that hurt kids, seniors, Americans with disabilities, and working families. Trump wants action on the bill The outcome is a setback as Senate Republicans hoped to get votes underway by week’s end to meet Trumps Fourth of July deadline for passage. Trump is expected to host an event later Thursday in the White House East Room, joined by truck drivers, firefighters, tipped workers, ranchers, and others that the administration says will benefit from the bill as he urges Congress to pass it, according to a White House official. GOP leaders were already struggling to rally support for Medicaid changes that some senators said went too far and would have left millions without coverage. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said over 10.9 million more people would not have healthcare under the House-passed bill; Senate Republicans were proposing deeper cuts. Republican leaders are relying on the Medicaid provider tax change along with other healthcare restrictions to save billions of dollars and offset the cost of trillions of dollars in tax cuts. Those tax breaks from Trump’s first term would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, meaning a tax increase for Americans. GOP torn over Medicaid cuts Several GOP senators said cutting the Medicaid provider tax change in particular would hurt rural hospitals that depend on the money. Hospital organizations have warned that it could lead to hospital closures. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), among those fighting the change, said he had spoken to Trump late Wednesday and that the president told him to revert back to an earlier proposal from the House. I think it just confirms that we werent ready for a vote yet, said Sen. Thom Tillis, (R-NC), who also had raised concerns about the provider tax cuts. States impose the taxes as a way to help fund Medicaid, largely by boosting the reimbursements they receive from the federal government. Critics say the system is a type of laundering, but almost every state except Alaska uses it to help provide healthcare coverage. More than 80 million people in the United States use the Medicaid program, alongside the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. Republicans want to scale Medicaid back to what they say is its original mission: providing care mainly to women and children, rather than a much larger group of people. The House-passed bill would freeze the provider taxes at current levels. The Senate proposal goes deeper by reducing the tax that some states are able to impose. Tough choices ahead Senate GOP leaders can strip or revise the provisions that are in violation of the chamber’s rules. But if they move ahead, those measures could be challenged in a floor vote, requiring a 60-vote threshold to overcome objections. That would be a tall order in a Senate divided 53-47 and with Democrats unified against Trump’s bill. It’s pretty frustrating, said Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who wants even steeper reductions. But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) stopped short of calls against the parliamentarian. I have no intention of overruling her, he said. To help defray lost revenues to the hospitals, one plan Republicans had been considering would have created a rural hospital fund with $15 billion as backup. Some GOP senators said that was too much; others, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, wanted at least $100 billion. The parliamentarian has worked around the clock since late last week to assess the legislation before votes that were expected as soon as Friday. Overnight Wednesday, the parliamentarian advised against GOP student loan repayment plans, and Thursday advised against provisions that would have blocked access for immigrants who are not citizens to Medicaid, Medicare, and other healthcare programs, including one that would have cut money to states that allow some migrants into Medicaid. Earlier, proposals to cut food stamps were ruled in violation of Senate rules, as was a plan to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By Lisa Mascaro, AP congressional correspondent Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Leah Askarinam, Joey Cappelletti and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has previously made statements skeptical of vaccines, is now recommending the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine for infants.On Thursday, RFK’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to recommend clesrovimab, a new RSV antibody shot made by Merck, for infants 8 months and younger who don’t have protection from a maternal vaccine (a vaccine received in pregnancy). A broader vaccine review is underway The decision comes after the panel announced on Wednesday it would be reviewing the current childhood immunization schedule. The committee is set to vote on recommendations for the influenza vaccine, as well. The RSV shot was approved for use in infants earlier this month by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ENFLONSIA provides an important new preventive option to help protect healthy and at-risk infants born during or entering their first RSV season with the same dose regardless of weight, said Dr. Dean Y. Li, president, Merck Research Laboratories, said at the time.Li continued, We are committed to ensuring availability of ENFLONSIA in the U.S. before the start of the upcoming RSV season to help reduce the significant burden of this widespread seasonal infection on families and health care systems. According to the CDC, RSV infects nearly everyone by age 2, causing cold symptoms, and sometimes, breathing struggles. In the U.S., around 300 infant deaths are caused by RSV each year. The vote, which passed with five for the vaccine and two against, is the first decision from RFK’s committee, made up of members whom RFK handpicked after dismissing the previous panel of 17 members in its entirety. The current panel includes some vaccine skeptics. Retsef Levi, an operations management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Vicki Pebsworth, the research director of a group focused on preventing vaccine injuries and deaths, were the two members who voted against the shot. Kennedys history of vaccine misinformation Trump’s controversial pick for HHS Secretary has frequently made false claims on the topic of vaccines. In regard to COVID, Kennedy once falsely claimed that some race groups have natural immunity to the virus. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately, Kennedy said. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. RFKs critics feel that having a vaccine skeptic at the helm of the HHS is already cause for concern after the CDC began postponing meetings on national vaccine recommendations in February. After the committee also announced that it would start a renewed review of all recommended pediatric vaccines, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) put out a video titled, AAP Steps up on Vaccine Recommendations,” which warned that immunization policy through ACIP is “no longer a credible process” under RFK’s leadership. The AAP added that it will continue to publish its own recommendations on vaccines for children. Uncertainty at the CDC’s helm Thursdays recommendation from RFKs panel still has to be endorsed by the CDC. However, there is major confusion surrounding who is currently in charge of the organization, as it doesn’t seem to have a clear leader. Kennedy, and others, have recently sidestepped questions about the matter. Then, last week, RFK gave the name Matt Buzzelli, who he described as a public health expert” when Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester pressed him on who the current acting director was. The CDCs leadership page has Matthew Buzzelli, a trial lawyer with no health-related experience, listed fourth as the agencys chief of staff. Following the exchange, the Senator sent RFK a letter, expressing grave concern.
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E-Commerce
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