Drugmaker Novo Nordisk paid U.S. medical professionals at least $25.8 million over a decade in fees and expenses related to its weight-loss drugs, a Reuters analysis found.
https://www.reuters.com/world/maker-wegovy-ozempic-showers-money-us-obesity-doctors-2023-12-01/
After November's furious meltup, which saw the S&P rise by 9% (the Nasdaq was up an even more ludicrous 11%), which was the best November for the stock market since 1980...
... all eyes were on Jerome Powell today to see if the Fed chair would say something to stem the surging stock market tide following the month which saw the biggest easing in financial conditions on record, equivalent to nearly 4 rate cuts.
We got the answer shortly after 11am ET, when after what seemed to be otherwise balanced remarks with a dose of hawkish comments...
"It would be premature to conclude with confidence that we have achieved a sufficiently restrictive stance, or to speculate on when policy might ease. We are prepared to tighten policy further if it becomes appropriate to do so."
... offset by some clearly dovish statements...
"The strong actions we have taken have moved our policy rate well into restrictive territory, meaning that tight monetary policy is putting downward pressure on economic activity and inflation. Monetary policy is thought to affect economic conditions with a lag, and the full effects of our tightening have likely not yet been felt."
... and generally sounding rather optimistic while answering student questions, saying that the US is on the path to 2% inflation without large job losses - i.e., a soft landing - which helped the market to convince itself that Powell had just given the green light for a continued market meltup (thanks to the blackout period, there will be no more Fed comments until the Dec 13 FOMC) as Bloomberg put it...
"Powell points to how the Fed’s past tightening moves will continue to have an impact on the economy -- the full impact hasn’t been felt yet. If anybody thought the Fed wasn’t finished raising rates, his prepared remarks today sure put a fork in it. They are done."
.... and what happened next was a violent repricing in easing odds, with March rate cut odds hitting a lifetime high of 80%, effectively doubling overnight and up from 10% just 5 days ago...
... which then immediately cascaded across assets and sent everything exploding higher, led by stocks which surged above 4,600 for the first time since the July FOMC (aka the "final rate hike")...
...passing through the bond market, and especially 2-Year yields, which tumbled a whopping 12bps to 4.56%...
... and on course for the biggest weekly slide since the regional banking crisis in March, down almost 40bps.
Yet neither stocks, nor bonds, had quite as much fun as either "digital gold", with Bitcoin briefly hitting a fresh 2023 high, briefly surging to $39,000 before easing back with Ether rising to $2100 ...
... but the biggest winner by far from today's market conclusion that a renewed dollar destruction is on deck, was gold which briefly rose above its all time high of $2,075...
... and that's just the start: now that a new record is in the history books, a frenzy of gold calls was bought, both for futures and the biggest ETF tied to the metal, and as shown in the chart below, the buildup of open interest between $2,000 and $2,500 has been relentless over the past week on growing optimism that rates are primed to decline. Next up for gold? $2500 or higher.
Yet not everyone had a great day: the dollar predictably tumbled, extending it losses for a third straight week, the longest streak since June, and comes after the dollar saw its worst month in a year this November.
One dollar pair trade where the convexity is especially high is USDJPY, which after soaring for much of the past year suddenly finds itself in a Wile E Coyote moment, trading just below the 100DMA. Should the selling persist, we may see the pair quickly tumble down to 140, or lower.
To be sure, not all the moves made sense: as Bloomberg noted, bonds have a better reason to rally than stocks, which have to factor in the growth concerns that underpin Powell’s remarks. Evidence is gathering that the economy is slowing and stocks will have to reconcile that with their bullish rate views. Today’s ISM Manufacturing data is case in point that the stagflationary slowing that started in October — and Bloomberg Economics says it’s observing typical early signs of recession — extended last month.
The ISM commentary was generally downbeat, equally split between companies hiring and others reducing their labor forces "a first since such comments have been tracked" according to Bloomberg.
But it gets worse: the latest update to the Atlanta GDPNOW tracker slipped to 1.2% from 1.8% yesterday and over 2% just last week.
And after diverging for much of the year, all three regional Feds that do GDP nowcasts have converged on 2% - a far cry from the "5.2%" GDP print the Biden department of seasonal adjustments goalseeked last month.
Bottom line: the onus is now on the payrolls report next week to further guide markets into next year. The continued rise in ongoing jobless claims pose a risk that unemployment could rise further. But so far, this isn’t a consensus view, with economists projecting the unemployment rate to stay unchanged at 3.9% (and more see a 3.8% rate than 4%).
And while that may only add more fuel to the rate-cut speculation, at some point the softening in economic data will have to be squared with its impact on profits. As a reminder, while much of the interval between the last rate hike and the first rate cut is favorable for risk assets, the weeks right before the cut usually send stocks anywhere between 10% and 30% lower as the market realizes just why the Fed is panicking.
However, judging by today's action, we still have some time before that particular rude awakening kicks in.
Concentra Biosciences has made an unsolicited bid to acquire all outstanding shares of LianBio, a biotechnology company focused on bringing medicines to China and other Asian markets.
Concentra, which is controlled by Tang Capital, is offering $4.30 per share of LianBio along with a contingent value right for 80% of the net proceeds from any LianBio licenses or assets that Concentra might sell after a deal.
An offer letter from Tang Capital’s Kevin Tang, filed Thursday, cited LianBio’s recent deal selling Bristol Myers Squibb rights in China and other Asian country markets to the heart drug mavacamten, which Bristol Myers owns elsewhere in the world. LianBio will receive $350 million through the deal.
Hedge fund Perceptive Advisors launched LianBio in 2020, with the idea the company could gain rights to medicines and bring them to China and other nearby markets. Initially, the company had licenses to several cancer and heart disease drugs, including mavacamten, which was then owned by MyoKardia.
Bristol Myers later acquired MyoKardia for $13.1 billion, inheriting the license agreement with LianBio that it’s now bought out.
Tang Capital, meanwhile, has been on the hunt for deals amid a biotech market that’s been on a downswing. Through Concentra, Tang has this fall made offers to acquire Rain Oncology following that company’s restructuring in the wake of a trial failure. More recently, it bid $3.80 per share for Theseus Pharmaceuticals, which has also received a take-private proposal from backers Foresite Capital and OrbiMed Advisors.
The deals included a similar contingent value rights component as Concentra’s offer to LianBio. Both Rain and Theseus are still considering their options.
Tang and Concentra have had mixed success in earlier deal offers this year. Atea Pharmaceuticals ultimately rejected a bid that it claimed “undervalue[d] the company,” while Jounce Therapeutics agreed to abandon a merger plan with Redx Pharma and accept an offer from Concentra.
Kevin Tang, Tang Capital Partners and Tang Capital Management collectively own about 25% of LianBio, the Thursday securities filing showed. Concentra gave LianBio a deadline of Dec. 8 to respond.
https://finance.yahoo.com/m/c0fc703e-0425-319c-a400-072afc0fb3b3/concentra%2C-on-the-hunt-for.html
In a move that has prompted many to wonder which is the bigger banana republic, Venezuela or the US, Joe Biden's new BFF, Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro (who has promised to export a few barrels of oil to the US president - now that draining the SPR is no longer an option - to keep gas prices low ahead of the 2024 presidential election in exchange for sanction relaxation and defacto recognition by the White House that Maduro is the dictatorially "democratically" elected president of Venezuela, making a mockery of a decade of Western virtue-signaling sanctions), on Sunday Caracas is set to hold a referendum among Venezuelans on annexing (i.e., invading and taking over) a whopping 160,000 sq km of extremely oil-rich land in neighbouring Guyana.
Why now? Why only now when Caracas has for more than 200 years claimed rights over Essequibo, a vast swath of the territory Guyana? Simple: because as we said several days ago, it was only a few months ago that Maduro realized he has leverage over the US president of the "most powerful nation in the world" and get away with anything... even invading a sovereign nation.
Of course, (oil rich but extraction poor) Venezuela's heightened interest at this expanse of Amazon jungle springs in part from its resource riches, including offshore oil deposits that have since 2019 made Guyana the world’s fastest-growing economy. Another reason lies closer to home for Venezuela’s strongman leader Nicolás Maduro: elections next year. But at the end of the day, had Biden not signed a smoky back-room deal with Maduro, admitting he needs the dictator's oil in exchange for what appears to be a diplomatic blank check, none of this would have happened. Instead, we are now facing actual war between two nations which between them have some of the largest oil deposits in the world.
As the FT notes, the potential for Venezuela, an ally of Russia, to follow the referendum with an incursion into western-leaning Guyana has raised concerns in the region. Brazil this week said it had increased the military presence in its northern areas, which border both countries.
“On Sunday December 3, we will respond to the provocations of Exxon, the US Southern Command, and the president of Guyana with a people’s vote,” Maduro said during a broadcast of his weekly television program on November 20.
Guyana correctly fears that the referendum is be a pretext for a land grab, and has appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to halt the referendum — a move that Caracas has rejected, though its claim to the land is largely internationally unrecognised.
It isn't: on Friday, judges at the World Court on Friday ordered Venezuela to refrain from taking any action that would alter the situation on the ground. The court did not expressly forbid Venezuela to hold a planned Dec. 3 referendum over its rights to the region around the Esequibo river, the subject of the long-running border dispute, as Guyana has requested. However, judges at the International Court of Justice - as the World Court is formally known - made clear that any concrete action to alter the status quo should be stopped.
"The court observes that the situation that currently prevails in the territory in dispute is that Guyana administers and exercises control over that area," presiding judge Joan Donoghue said. "Venezuela must refrain from taking any action which would modify that situation," she added
“This is a textbook example of annexation,” Paul Reichler, a US lawyer representing Guyana before the ICJ, said in The Hague last month, claiming that Venezuela was preparing a military build-up in the Essequibo region in case it wished to enforce the outcome of the referendum.
For its part, Caracas said that its troops were carrying out anti-illegal mining operations near the territory, a sparsely populated region that is home to about 200,000 Guyanese who speak English and indigenous languages, though little Spanish.
Meanwhile in pro-Maduro Brazil, local media reported that a senator for the state of Roraima said the defense minister had agreed to his requests for military reinforcements in the municipality of Pacaraima, a strategic location for access to Essequibo. The defence ministry said: “Defence actions have been intensified in the northern border region of the country, promoting a greater military presence.” It wasn't immediately clear if Brazil's socialist leader Lula is planning on aiding his comrade Maduro in invading and pillaging Guyana's oil, but it would be par for the socialist course, especially when the US president is implicitly approving your actions.
That said, analysts question whether Venezuela will genuinely seek to annex the territory. They argue the referendum exercise is aimed at bolstering Maduro’s domestic support ahead of elections that Venezuela agreed to hold in exchange for relief from debilitating sanctions imposed by the US.
“Political calculations are driving Maduro to escalate tensions in an attempt to stir up nationalist sentiment, but those same political calculations also limit his military options,” said Theodore Kahn, director for the Andean region at the consultancy Control Risks.
“An actual invasion would shut the door to further negotiations with the US and force the Biden administration to reimpose oil sector sanctions.”
Come to think of it, that's a joke of a deterrent, considering Maduro had no problem living with sanctions for years. If Maduro were to get his grubby hands on some of the most state of the art oil facilities in the world - as a reminder, Guyana is where Exxon has invested billions to extract much of the country's oil- he would do so in a heartbeat.
Still, Maduro needs to mobilise party loyalists to defend two decades of socialist rule during which his party and its predecessors have turned Caracas into an international pariah, shattered its state-run oil industry, fueled mass emigration and empowered violent gangs.
Luis Vicente León, who runs Caracas-based research company Datanálisis, said the government was using the referendum to reduce the perceived impact of a pre-election primary held by the opposition in October despite government disapproval. The primary drew 2.4mn voters to the polls, well above expectations.
“It’s also a test of the government’s capacity to engage its political machinery and mobilise voters,” León said. “Alongside that, it pressures the opposition to take a position on a sensitive subject and gives [Maduro] a potential excuse to declare a state of emergency and avoid the election altogether.”
Maduro, in office since his firebrand predecessor Hugo Chávez died of cancer in 2013, has yet to officially announce his candidacy in the upcoming elections. However, he is widely expected to run despite approval ratings of just 20 per cent, according to Datanálisis, amid an economic and humanitarian crisis.
Hilarious, Maduro’s re-election in 2018 was regarded by the US and its allies as fraudulent, but so much has changed since then, well not that much: just Biden becoming president and folding to Maduro's demands in exchange for oil. Seeking to entice him into allowing a “free and fair” election this time (please don't laugh) the US last month relaxed sanctions on oil, gold and secondary financial markets for six months. The move followed a deal between Maduro and a US-backed faction of the opposition to resume political talks.
Yet hopes of a political opening were tempered when just days later, the government-backed Supreme Justice Tribunal suspended the results of the opposition primary, which was convincingly won by MarÃa Corina Machado.
Machado, a pro-market former lawmaker who once called for external military intervention in Venezuela, is banned from holding office at present, something she claims will not stop her from running.
While the government and the fractious opposition agree that the Essequibo region is part of Venezuela’s territory, Machado has said the referendum is a “distraction” that must be suspended. She advocates settling the dispute at the ICJ.
The referendum will put five questions to Venezuela’s public. One seeks approval for granting all residents of the Essequibo region Venezuelan citizenship and creating a new state within Venezuela, while another asks voters if they recognise the jurisdiction of the ICJ to rule on the matter. Both would likely lead to a military invasion.
In April, the ICJ ruled that it had jurisdiction to decide on the territorial dispute, following a request from Guyana in 2018 to confirm the border that was drawn in arbitration in 1899 between Venezuela and what was then British Guiana, a colony. A final ruling could take years, however.
“It is not an exaggeration to describe the current threat to Guyana as existential and the need for provisional measures as urgent,” Carl Greenidge, who leads Guyana’s delegation at the ICJ, told judges in The Hague with reference to the referendum.
A specialised US army delegation visited Guyana this week, and discussed “processes to enhance both countries’ military readiness and capabilities to respond to security threats,” said the US embassy in Georgetown. Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s vice-president, said last week that “all the options available for us to defend our country will be pursued. Every option.”
Caracas has long held that the Essequibo river to the region’s east is its natural border, as it was during Spanish rule before 1899. But Venezuela’s interest in pressing that claim has fluctuated. In 2004, while seeking international support for his Bolivarian revolution, Chávez said in Guyana that Georgetown had the right to grant concessions in the Essequibo territory.
But since 2015, when ExxonMobil announced it had found oil beneath the waters off the Essequibo coast in the Stabroek Block, Caracas has adopted a more bellicose tone (well, of course).
In October this year, the US major — which leads a consortium producing oil in the South American country — made another find in the waters claimed by Venezuela. Drilling bids were awarded to companies including Exxon, French major Total, and local company Sispro. Francisco Monaldi, a Latin America energy expert at Rice University in Houston, said: “So far Exxon’s wells and discoveries are in the area north of Guyana’s undisputed land territory, but the awarded oil blocks do go into the disputed waters.”
Oil is transforming the Guyanese economy, which grew 62 per cent last year, according to the IMF, and is projected to expand another 37 per cent this year. With around 11bn barrels in reserves and a population of just 800,000, the country has the largest amount of oil per capita in the world.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves, and in its heyday at the turn of the century pumped about 3mn barrels per day, but mismanagement, corruption and sanctions led production to collapse. In September this year, it pumped 735,000 bpd.
Exxon said that “border issues are for governments and appropriate international organisations to address”.
Still, we wouldn't be surprised if Darren Woods is quietly putting together a mercenary army to quietly take out Maduro. It should cost him at most 2-3 days worth of oil extraction revenues.
The self-described “house of medicine” is entertaining support for a government takeover of health insurance for the second time in five years.
A group of New England doctors pressed the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates this month to drop the organization’s opposition to single-payer health care.
The effort ultimately failed (for now). And good thing.
Such a system would be disastrous for physicians — and patients.
Single-payer health care is what it sounds like — an insurance program where the government is the only insurer.
Private insurance would be banned.
And the government would pay health-care providers whatever it deemed appropriate and affordable.
In countries with government-dominated systems of universal coverage, those public payments are much lower than what American doctors are used to earning.
The average physician in America makes $316,000 a year, compared with $183,000 in Germany and $138,000 in the United Kingdom, according to a 2021 survey.
Even here in the United States, public insurers pay less than private ones.
Medicare, the government health plan for seniors, pays doctors roughly 30% less than private insurance.
It cut Medicare reimbursements in 2023 — and is set to do so again in 2024.
Medicaid, the public health plan for low-income Americans, pays even lower rates — 30% less than Medicare.
Seemingly every year, Congress considers slashing Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors.
And seemingly every year, the AMA descends on Capitol Hill to lobby against those cuts, arguing that lower pay will cause doctors to turn away Medicare patients — and thereby make it harder for patients to access care.
Yet the AMA is flirting with Medicare for All, which would result in bargain-basement government payment rates for every man, woman and child in the United States.
What gives?
American doctors battling private insurers over billing, prior authorizations and paperwork may think that a government-run system will be simpler and easier to deal with.
But government-run systems stretch doctors to their professional breaking point.
A 2023 Commonwealth Fund survey of primary-care providers in 10 high-income countries found that 47% of American doctors were satisfied overall with their practices.
That’s a higher level of satisfaction than what primary-care doctors in Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Canada reported.
Just 7% of British and German doctors were happy with how much time they saw each patient, compared with nearly one-fourth of US primary-care providers.
And German, British and Canadian doctors all reported lower levels of work-life balance satisfaction than American counterparts.
Doctors in England’s National Health Service have undertaken a series of short-term strikes over the past year to protest working conditions and seek better pay and hours.
Low government payment rates in countries with single-payer or government-dominated universal-coverage systems result in chronic shortages of care.
Who wants to work long hours for a salary that doesn’t reflect one’s level of productivity?
Patients may have ostensibly “free” care through a government-run health plan.
But they must wait for that treatment.
In the United Kingdom, the wait list to receive care from the National Health Service has reached 8 million, in large part because of staff shortages and underfunding.
In Canada, the median wait for treatment from a specialist following referral by a general practitioner was more than 27 weeks last year.
Many Brits are responding to these waits by paying for care privately out of pocket.
Similarly, several Canadian provinces are increasing their reliance on private clinics to help clear backlogs of people waiting for care.
In other words, as progressive Americans make the case for single-payer, foreign countries with such systems are going the other way.
Contrary to popular belief, just one-quarter of practicing physicians in the United States are members of the American Medical Association.
That number may decline further if the organization keeps flirting with a single-payer system, which would prove devastating for physicians and patients alike.
Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health-care policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All.”
America’s national debt now easily exceeds $33 trillion. That jaw-dropping total amounts to more than $100,000 per American, and that frightening figure has prompted the new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to propose the creation of a 16-member bipartisan debt commission.
This is a tall order. The giant federal entitlements, Medicare and Social Security, are the main drivers of America’s debt. In fact, according to former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, spending for Medicare — the federal program that provides health coverage for senior and disabled citizens — alone accounted for 34 percent of all outstanding federal debt between 1966 and the end of 2019.
Given the enormous popularity of this huge federal entitlement, any serious effort to address federal deficits and debt is thus fraught with political peril, and perennially ripe for low-minded demagoguery. What The Washington Post terms “Mediscare”: cynical political rhetoric designed to frighten seniors into opposing any rational entitlement reforms.
For some reason, policymakers are under the impression that they can mostly leave Medicare well enough alone and continue blithely along the well-trodden paths of the status quo. Reporters for The New York Times, for example, recently penned an intriguing piece: titled “Huge Threat to the U.S. Budget Has Receded. And No One is Sure Why”. The piece focuses in on the fact that per capita Medicare spending has slowed and flattened since 2011, resulting in $3.9 trillion less spending than the CBO had projected. Since that change is not attributable to any “obvious policy shifts,” the danger is that Washington politicians could conclude, based on the Times’ report, that the worsening condition of our entitlement programs will simply resolve itself.
That would be exactly the wrong conclusion. For starters, CBO is always quick to warn that its health care projections are highly uncertain. And in any case, CBO’s past predictive failures provide no current comfort in the face of future fiscal realities.
While lawmakers should not ignore the causes of Medicare’s past per capita spending slowdown, Congressional leadership should also focus laser-like on the implications of current Medicare spending projections. Today, the Medicare Board of Trustees project a rapid acceleration of ten-year Medicare enrollment, accompanied by a doubling of Medicare spending from roughly $1 trillion to nearly $2 trillion, or about $6200 for every person in the country.
Medicare spending will impose higher financial burdens on beneficiaries and taxpayers alike, while aggravating record federal deficits and our already dangerously high debt. By 2040, the Trustees report Medicare spending will consume nearly 27 percent of all federal business and income taxes, while accumulating trillions of dollars in higher unfunded obligations. Baby Boomers living longer in retirement, while benefiting from advanced medical technologies, are bound to increase the program’s per capita cost. So, any notion that Medicare's financial issues are somehow a thing of the past is akin to breaking diplomatic relations with reality.
Given that the giant federal entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, cost $2.7 trillion — or almost half of the entire federal budget — Speaker Johnson and likeminded colleagues must work to bring Democrats and Republicans together and find common ground and take specific steps to preserve these programs for the next generation of retirees.
That is another tall order. Progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans not only disagree on the nature of Medicare’s problems but also on the best means to secure Medicare’s future. During a Senate Budget Committee hearing in September, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), sponsor of the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, was characteristically blunt about this difference: “Republicans want to maintain the massive exemption for inheritances to wealthy heirs. They want to keep tax breaks for multinational corporations that send profits and jobs offshore. And they want to hamstring the IRS from catching wealthy tax cheats.”
Whitehouse’s prescription to shore up Medicare, meanwhile, aren’t particularly reassuring. He wants to raise hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenues by closing various “tax loopholes” and ending the “rigging” of the federal tax code that favors the wealthy. Never mind that the top 10 percent of earners already pay about 74 percent of all federal income taxes.
Thankfully, Senators Mike Braun (R-IN) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) took a vastly different tack. Acknowledging that America’s overly complicated federal tax code contains loopholes, they emphasized that closing the gap between Medicare’s costs and spending will require a deft combination of spending reforms and creative policymaking. Simply soaking the rich, Braun noted, will not be enough, while Johnson warned that heavy taxation, including new taxation on business income, would further harm economic growth, thus further attenuating Medicare’s financial supply lines.
As the members of Speaker Johnson’s proposed debt commission come together, they should follow Braun and Johnson’s example by focusing on ways to slow the growth in Medicare spending and recommend structural changes to improve the program, including more flexibility in benefit offerings and greater transparency of provider prices and performance.
They should also examine past efforts to reform Medicare. The Medicare Advantage program, the competing system of private health plans created in 2003, can provide the platform for reform. The program’s evident flaws, such as inefficient plan payment, are easily fixable.
Medicare Advantage already provides the standard Medicare benefits at an average of 17 percent less than the cost of traditional (fee-for-service) Medicare itself. So, the fact that it now enrolls half of all Medicare patients should not be surprising. With a strong emphasis on preventive services, case management, and care coordination, the private plans have not only increased seniors' quality of care, but demonstrated repeatedly an ability to provide that care to beneficiaries at an affordable premium cost. With more transparent pricing and efficient plan payment, Speaker Johnson’s commission could build on what seniors already know and like, potentially secure greater beneficiary savings, and maybe even help to alleviate our mounting debt.
Robert E. Moffit, Ph.D., a seasoned veteran of more than three decades in Washington policymaking, is a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Caleb Keng is a member of the Heritage Young Leaders Program, and a graduate of the University of Texas.
The average human generates at least enough data to fill a 350-page book every second. Smart phones have accelerated the amount and rate of data creation to an almost incomprehensible scale. The International Data Corporation estimates that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be produced every day. To get an idea of how much this is, it is estimated that only 5 exabytes would store all of the words spoken by all humans throughout history.
The other element is that much of this data is public. It includes YouTube videos, home purchases, streaming radio, crop harvests, government budgets, academic publications, music composition, corporate reports, news, Yelp reviews, comments on online forums, public databases, trademark applications, flight tracker information, and so on.
This has raised appropriate concerns about privacy. But if this ever-growing ocean of data can be collected in substantial amounts, in a timely and ethical fashion, and can be analyzed correctly, it has tremendous value and ability to do good. It can help the government improve national security and better represent and serve its citizens. It can help businesses make smarter decisions about capital allocations and the marketplace to deliver better products and services to consumers.
The explosion of data, and the increasingly sophisticated tools to gather and understand that data, has combined to create a revolution of publicly available information.
Publicly available information, or PAI, can be defined by what it is not. It is not legally protected personal health and medical information, personal identification data, or material non-public information, such as a company’s trade secrets. These should be off-limits to ethical data collection.
In theory, PAI can be found by anybody. In reality, the sheer amount of PAI means that it can only be usefully gathered and analyzed by organizations that have invested in technology that allows them to gather the data at scale; infrastructure that enables them to store and access it en masse; and data engineering that enables them to take unstructured data and make it digestible and understandable to users.
PAI can reveal hidden patterns in the behavior of consumers or combatants. An analysis of corporate hiring notices may reveal a strategic direction a company is about to take, giving insight to investors and competitors. Blips in supply chains can inform military intelligence about another country’s military intentions. Increasingly, governments and corporations want to find the gold inside PAI, for both national security and commercial reasons.
If an organization decides it wants to leverage the enormous power of PAI, it’s critical to be a good citizen of the internet. Only PAI that has been aggregated and anonymized should be collected and analyzed. Data that can reveal individuals’ identities, such as biometrics or even advertising information, should not be used. Organizations should follow the data compliance practices of the regulatory bodies in that sector. Responsible PAI firms should do no harm. Reckless firms that engage in common-crawl discovery of PAI can disrupt the websites they’re looking at. That can result in problems ranging from annoying – slowing down an e-commerce website – to much worse, such as disabling a medical or health site. And most importantly, organizations first need to understand exactly what they want to find in PAI. A responsible firm will be their guide.
What are some real-world examples of how smart collection and use of publicly available data can help organizations?
In the government sector, PAI is mission-critical to helping agencies tackle the toughest problems of natural security. Consider Taiwan. The country produces more than 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90 percent of the most advanced ones. Any conflict involving Taiwan would create catastrophic disruptions to the global supply chain in both the commercial and defense spheres. Fortunately, there is copious data in the public domain that can spotlight the Taiwanese chip industry’s critical vulnerabilities ahead of time.
These include identifying choke points for raw materials and components needed to make semiconductors, uncovering ownership stakes by hostile countries in chip-adjacent companies, predicting workforce disruptions, assessing cyberattack potential, and understanding the susceptibility of logistics corridors in contested space. On the positive side, PAI can suggest de-risking options – what do the patent and regulatory environments in other friendly countries look like, and how hard would it be to expand chipmaking there?
In the commercial sector, imagine an owner of multiple apartment and office buildings. They want to get new tenants and retain existing ones, but can do so only if customers are happy. It can be hard for a big company to understand the customer experience at a granular level; they can only hire so many customer service agents. But it is not difficult for someone to have their voice heard in the public domain today. In addition to direct feedback tenants may give, they will post their opinions on Google reviews, Reddit and sub-Reddit forums, YouTube, and elsewhere. All of this information is publicly available, and can help the building owner identify and fix problems in its buildings.
Data-generation will continue to grow exponentially, and much of it will continue to be in the public domain. The understanding and effective use of PAI by the government and companies is a net-positive for citizens and customers, as long as personal information and PAI never intersect. PAI can help everyone make smarter decisions.
Brian O’Keefe is the CEO of Vertical Knowledge, a data products, insights and intelligence company.
