Cardinal Health Inc. plans to sell bonds in the US investment-grade primary market on Wednesday to help fund its acquisition of Solaris Health.
The health-care company is marketing dollar-denominated five-year and 10-year senior unsecured bonds, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The longest portion of the offering, a 10-year security, may yield 1.25 percentage points above Treasuries, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the details are private.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made his most explicit call yet for the Federal Reserve to execute a cycle of interest-rate cuts, suggesting the central bank’s benchmark ought to be at least 1.5 percentage points lower than it is now.
“I think we could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis point rate cut in September,” Bessent said in a television interview on Wednesday. “If you look at any model” it suggests that “we should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower.”
Fed policymakers kept their benchmark at a target range of 4.25% to 4.5% at their last policy meeting. Bessent reiterated his view that, had officials been aware of the revised data on the labor market that were released two days after that gathering, they might have cut rates. That may have also been the case for the June meeting, he said.
“I suspect we could have had rate cuts in June and July,” Bessent said — alluding to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Aug. 1 that downwardly revised payroll gains in May and June by 258,000.
Treasury secretaries have typically shied away from making specific calls on Fed rates, and Bessent himself for months has said he would only discuss the central bank’s past policy decisions — not their upcoming ones. President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Chair Jerome Powell for refraining from rate cuts this year.
Chair Nomination
Powell and many of his colleagues have said they want to see greater evidence about any impact on inflation and inflation expectations from the tariff hikes.
Bessent said that there are 10 or 11 candidates under consideration to succeed Powell when his term as chair concludes in May, without running through the names. He said there are both current Fed officials as well as private-sector individuals on the list.
He also said that he didn’t expect Stephen Miran, whom Trump has nominated to fill the existing opening on the Fed board, to stay at the central bank past January, when that term concludes.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-urges-fed-lower-rates-122606681.html
The speed and magnitude of Novo Nordisk’s rise and fall stand out even in the long history of turbulent biopharma valuations. Novo’s valuation increased by hundreds of billions in a few years amid the GLP-1 boom—and then fell just as fast as competition intensified and doubts about its next-generation drugs grew.
Created in 1989 through the merger of two Danish companies, Novo spent decades as a large, growing but somewhat anonymous outfit. The company traded on the New York Stock Exchange but its share price had never broken the $30 barrier when Ozempic won FDA approval for type 2 diabetes in 2017.
Ozempic initially had relatively little impact on Novo’s fortunes. Things began to change as Novo started publishing more evidence of changes in body weight in people taking semaglutide, the drug’s active ingredient. Novo’s share price crossed $30 in March 2021, the month the company reported 68-week data from people who took weekly 2.4 mg doses of semaglutide.
With evidence of efficacy in obesity and GLP-1 sales growing 26% in 2020, Novo was on the up when it received FDA approval for Wegovy in June 2021 but the rise was still gradual. Novo’s share price ticked above $40 around the time of the weight loss approval. Three years later, the stock peaked above $140.
The surge covered a period in which Novo’s GLP-1 sales ballooned, growing from 23.4 billion Danish krone ($3.7 billion) in the first half of 2021 to 72 billion Danish Krone ($11.2 billion) in the first half of 2024. Annual Wegovy sales rose eightfold between 2022 and 2024. Physicians wrote as many prescriptions for Wegovy in the first five weeks of its launch as they did for its predecessor Saxenda in its first four years on the market.
Novo’s GLP-1 diabetes and obesity medicines were so successful that they shaped the Danish economy, driving GDP growth, increasing the value of the Danish krone and suppressing interest rates. Changes in Denmark from motorway construction to surging hot dog sales were linked to Novo as the drugmaker rose to become the most valuable company in Europe.
Over the same period, excitement about the potential for further growth increased as Novo raced to meet soaring demand in its existing indications and began exploring additional major markets including Alzheimer’s disease.
But Novo struggled to keep up with demand throughout the boom years, reporting initial supply challenges in 2021 that were exacerbated by problems at a third-party plant toward the end of that year. U.S. supply began to improve in the summer of 2024, with first the 1.7 mg dose of Wegovy coming off the shortage list in April and the 0.5 mg and 1 mg doses following in August.
Yet, in those months when supply was finally starting to meet demand, Novo was entering a tailspin that saw its share price fall from above $140 to below $50 in 13 months as the company grappled with rivals on two main fronts.
Eli Lilly was one of the drivers of Novo’s descent. The approvals of Lilly’s Mounjaro in 2022 and Zepbound in 2023 established competitors to Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy, respectively. Impressions that Lilly’s molecule may have an edge solidified in December 2024, when a head-to-head trial found people lost more weight on Zepbound than Wegovy. Novo’s efforts to improve on semaglutide’s efficacy have disappointed investors.
Lilly beat Novo to the direct-to-consumer channel, too, launching LillyDirect in January 2024 and cutting the cost of Zepbound vials for uninsured patients eight months later. As late as November 2024, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, then the CEO of Novo, was saying patients “should really be helped by insurance” as he differentiated his company’s offering from pharmacies offering compounded semaglutide online.
The pharmacies are the other group behind Novo’s downfall. Compounding pharmacies stepped in to meet demand for semaglutide across the more than 1,000 days when the molecule was on the FDA’s shortage list. Novo’s assessment of the threat compounders pose to its business evolved quickly around the end of 2024.
Asked in November 2024 about what market share compounders take, Jørgensen told analysts on an earnings call that the company had “limited visibility” into the topic. By February 2025, Dave Moore, EVP of U.S. operations at Novo, was telling analysts that pharmacies were “having an impact and it is growing faster than we had anticipated.”
Novo estimates 1 million patients are on compounded GLP-1s in the U.S. Lilly CFO Lucas Montarce said at an investor event in March that there is “very limited tirzepatide compounding,” something that Leerink Partners analyst David Risinger attributed to the fact that the molecule is harder to make than semaglutide.
Reducing the number of patients on compounded semaglutide is one part of Novo’s turnaround strategy. BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman said Novo executives’ tone on an earnings call in August “regarding compounders was notably more pointed, with clear understanding that more needs to be done.” Yet, the analyst believes targeting compounders is unlikely to provide a quick fix to Novo’s woes.
“While we appreciate Novo’s commitment to removing illegal compounded products from the market and their redoubled efforts in legal/regulatory channels, we continue to be of the view that this dynamic will take time to resolve and remain a headwind to Novo’s business in the meantime,” Seigerman said in a note to investors.
Novo is also changing its GLP-1 messaging, reverting to a focus on weight loss after expanding the scope of its campaigns to cover comorbidities.
Moore said on an investor call in August that Novo found “it’s a little premature” to expand messaging beyond weight loss. Patients are focused on weight loss, Moore said, and armed with real-world data, Novo believes it can show semaglutide is competitive.
The company has also changed the messenger; CEO Jørgensen was suddenly sent packing in May, ending his tenure on the most recent earnings call and passing the reins to Maziar Mike Doustdar. “Let me say this: Novo Nordisk’s strategy remains unchanged,” Novo Nordisk Board Chair Helge Lund said in announcing the mutual decision for Jørgensen to depart.
The removal of Jørgensen was a break from Novo’s decades-long history, with just five CEOs leading the organization over the 100 years that it has existed in one form or another. One analyst remarking on the leadership change during the conference callsaid “it just feels like there’s something pretty wrong here.”
Meanwhile, Novo is also racing to launch new products. A higher, 7.2 mg injectable semaglutide dose and an oral version of the molecule are nearing the market and the next-generation candidates CagriSema and amycretin are in or approaching Phase III. However, some analysts are yet to be convinced that Novo has a pipeline program that can fix its problems.
“We expect Novo to face continued headwinds as the competitive landscape intensifies without a clear answer from Novo in the pipeline,” Guggenheim Securities analyst Seamus Fernandez said in a note to investors.
YouTube on Wednesday will begin testing a new age-verification system in the U.S. that relies on artificial intelligence to differentiate between adults and minors, based on the kinds of videos that they have been watching.
The tests initially will only affect a sliver of YouTube’s audience in the U.S., but it will likely become more pervasive if the system works as well at guessing viewers’ ages as it does in other parts of the world. The system will only work when viewers are logged into their accounts, and it will make its age assessments regardless of the birth date a user might have entered upon signing up.
If the system flags a logged-in viewer as being under 18, YouTube will impose the normal controls and restrictions that the site already uses as a way to prevent minors from watching videos and engaging in other behavior deemed inappropriate for that age.
The safeguards include reminders to take a break from the screen, privacy warnings and restrictions on video recommendations. YouTube, which has been owned by Google for nearly 20 years, also doesn’t show ads tailored to individual tastes if a viewer is under 18.
If the system has inaccurately called out a viewer as a minor, the mistake can be corrected by showing YouTube a government-issued identification card, a credit card or a selfie.
“YouTube was one of the first platforms to offer experiences designed specifically for young people, and we’re proud to again be at the forefront of introducing technology that allows us to deliver safety protections while preserving teen privacy,” James Beser, the video service’s director of product management, wrote in a blog post about the age-verification system.
People still will be able to watch YouTube videos without logging into an account, but viewing that way triggers an automatic block on some content without proof of age.
The political pressure has been building on websites to do a better job of verifying ages to shield children from inappropriate content since late June when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law aimed at preventing minors from watching pornography online.
While some services, such as YouTube, have been stepping up their efforts to verify users’ ages, others have contended that the responsibility should primarily fall upon the two main smartphone app stores run by Apple and Google — a position that those two technology powerhouses have resisted.
Some digital rights groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy & Technology, have raised concerns that age verification could infringe on personal privacy and violate First Amendment protections on free speech.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/12/tech/youtube-to-test-ai-powered-age-verification-system-for-us-users/
Mexico turned over 26 cartel members wanted for crimes in the US to American authorities as part of the latest deal with the Trump administration.
The prisoners include leaders and managers of several Mexican drug cartels and they’re facing charges like murder, hostage-taking, human smuggling and kidnapping, the US Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
One of the “fugitives” sent to the US is Abigael González Valencia, a high-ranking leader of the “Los Cuinis” organization that helped finance and grow the notorious cartel Jalisco New Generation, better known as CJNG, according to the DOJ.
Valencia is also the brother-in-law of CJNG leader Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, a top target who the US government is offering $15 million just for information that could lead to his capture or conviction.
Roberto Salazar, another prisoner shipped to the states, had been sought in connection to the murder of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Juan Escalante in 2008, according to the Justice Department.
Another man, Abdul Karim Conteh, is a national from Sierra Leone who was held in Mexico for allegedly smuggling migrants from countries in and around the Middle East, according to the DOJ. He had no listed affiliation with a cartel.
“Today is the latest example of the Trump administration’s historic efforts to dismantle cartels and foreign terrorist organizations. These 26 men have all played a role in bringing violence and drugs to American shores — under this Department of Justice, they will face severe consequences for their crimes against this country. We are grateful to Mexico’s National Security team for their collaboration in this matter,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said.
US Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson added: “These fugitives will now face justice in U.S. courts, and the citizens of both of our nations will be safer from these common enemies.”
In February, 29 cartel figures were handed over to the US, including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero who was previously linked to the murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1985. Since then, many have begun to face terror charges for their alleged crimes.
That same month, the Trump administration classified CJNG and seven other Latin American-based crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations and secretly authorized the military to fight them by land and sea.
The second round of inmates were all flown to US soil after the DOJ agreed not to seek the death penalty against any defendants or cartel affiliates in February’s transfer, a source close to the matter told The Associated Press.
The ongoing deal and second transfer is the culmination of ever-increasing pressure from the Trump administration to curb drug trafficking and smuggling across the US-Mexico border.
