Ed. note: This article first appeared in this week’s Finance Docket newsletter. You can subscribe here. As of this writing, 38 states have legalized medical marijuana. A total of 24 states have also legalized the drug for recreational use. Despite the legitimate domestic cannabis market being worth an estimated $30 billion, marijuana remains an illegal controlled substance under federal law. Though the federal government rarely, if ever, prosecutes individuals who operate within the confines of states’ legal cannabis frameworks, marijuana’s current status as a Schedule I drug does have signifi ..read more

The crown jewel of the Elon Musk collection of exploding products remains the Tesla electric vehicle. Not so much for the car itself, but as a financial vehicle that continues to inflate his net worth… even beyond what Delaware corporate law can countenance. While Musk still requires a social media babysitter — a condition of his settlement with the feds over past securities manipulation claims — thanks to the Supreme Court’s refusal to get him out of the deal he signed, that may not be enough to save his company from another round of charges. Failing to get out of his own legal commitments? S ..read more

Ed. note: This article first appeared in this week’s Finance Docket newsletter. You can subscribe here. With hospital consolidation blamed for increasing costs and decreasing quality—while boosting profits for private equity investors—more than a dozen states have moved to restrict the industry’s activity in the healthcare space. And, increasingly, Democrats and Republicans, from coast to coast, are coming together to denounce p.e. ownership of single-family homes. Over the last few years, home affordability “has just totally collapsed,” according to Redfin senior economist Chen Zhao. Buying t ..read more

Novo Holdings’ planned acquisition of Catalent is facing another delay. Just weeks after Novo Holdings decided to resubmit its application to the Federal Trade Commission, the agency is seeking more information about the deal. The transaction was originally expected to close by the end of this year, but this timeline may not be as solid given the repeated delays in the FTC’s review process. The acquisition was announced in early February when Novo Holdings — the investment arm of the foundation that owns a controlling stake in Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk — disclosed its plans to acquire N ..read more

For years, those on the political right have railed against ESG, DEI, woke capitalism or whatever initialism or term of art is in anti-fashion at the moment. They’ve divested from companies who take such things into account, passed laws barring them from taking stands on any social issues and foamed at the mouth furiously at any effort by a company’s owners—it’s shareholders—to demand such from them. Well, as we’ve seen time and time again, intellectual consistency and sincerity isn’t held in especially high regard on the political right. Conservative groups are increasingly asking company sh ..read more

'Who are these people?': Trump uses day off to host dinner for NFT buyers [MSNBC] Former president Trump took advantage of his day off from his criminal hush money trial to host dinner for his NFT trading card buyers. Trump’s latest cash grab, dubbed the “Mugshot Edition,” included a bonus swatch of the suit he wore during his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot amid racketeering charges linked to 2020 election disputes. Weekly jobless claims jump to 231,000, the highest since August [CNBC] “Weekly jobless claims are one of the timeliest indicators of when the economy is starting to undergo serious ..read more

If there’s one thing federal prosecutors are sure about in the Archegos Capital Management collapse, it’s that something illegal was going on. Surely, it’s not possible to lose your banks $10 billion, thereby causing some $100 billion in market losses, legally, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams reckons. The thing is, though, it’s not clear what laws, exactly, Archegos chief Bill Hwang broke. Unlike in Hwang’s previous run-ins with the law, there doesn’t appear to be any insider-trading. Nor was Archegos’ strategy a pump-and-dump. And, as a family office, it didn’t have to make the sort o ..read more

People are not happy about private-equity’s growing stranglehold on the American healthcare system. And by people, we mean elected officials and regulators. There’s a cross-departmental federal probe into the “impact of corporate greed in health care.” Some dozen states—red, blue and purple—have or hope to bolster scrutiny of M&A in healthcare. We can’t imagine why. In the spring of 2020, Cerberus Capital Management was faced with a tricky financial situation. It owned a struggling hospital chain that needed $400 million to dig out of a deep financial hole, but Cerberus wanted to sell rat ..read more

America’s first bank failure of the year has been a long time in coming. Republic First Bancorp, d.b.a. Republic Bank, was in trouble even before its near namesake First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank went belly-up last year. It seems its growth strategy left it terribly vulnerable to rising interest rates, and in 2022 shareholders canned CEO Vernon Hill. Which isn’t to say there weren’t red flags long before that. As it happens, the same Vernon Hill is the founder of Commerce Bank, and got fired there, as well, in part for hiring his wife to design its branches and market it ..read more

BlackRock, PIMCO and other holders of Ukrainian debt were happy to suspend interest payments owed them as Russian troops poured over the country’s eastern border and bombs began battering its capital, Kyiv. But, you know, isn’t two years more than enough time to have defeated the nuclear-armed fifth-largest military in the world on the battlefield? And they can’t help but notice that $60 billion Joe Biden just sent them, on top of that €50 billion the Europeans have promised and wonder, you know, if it maybe isn’t time for Volodymyr & co. to spend a little less on artillery shells and a li ..read more