Your Grocery Bill Just Won The Argument With Your Paycheck

CPI 3.8%. Real wages negative for the first time this cycle. The Fed has stopped talking about cuts. For anyone on a fixed retirement income, this is the conversation your plan was built for — and the one your annuity sleeve was sold for.

Here is the line out of the April CPI report that should land on every kitchen table in the country: inflation-adjusted hourly earnings fell 0.3% from a year earlier. First negative print of the cycle. Americans are paid more in nominal dollars this April than last; they are paid less in groceries, gasoline, and rent. The University of Michigan sentiment number says they have noticed. It sits at 48.2 — you have to go back to the 1970s to find a reading that low outside a recession.

The proximate cause is the Iran war. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for weeks. Gasoline is up 28% year-over-year, fuel oil up 54%, airfares up 21%. The Trump administration is rejecting the latest Iranian response on the ceasefire framework. The President called the pause in fighting “on massive life support.” The market read the words and the chart, and the bond desk did the actual work: the 10-year cracked back to 4.46%, energy ripped, gold gave back $41.

For our book this is one of the cleanest fat pitches we have had in two years. Four months ago the Fed was debating when to cut. They are not debating that anymore. The internal conversation has shifted to when to start signaling that a hike is as likely as a cut. That is a sentence that would have been unthinkable in January. Kevin Warsh inherits this seat under a president who has been clear he expects cuts. The Fed’s independence is about to be tested in front of a CPI print that has every right to scare them.

That “Wellness Coach” Selling Your Wife Supplements Is Probably On Commission

A Pew study of 6,500 health-and-wellness influencers found that 41% call themselves “healthcare professionals.” A separate University of Sydney study of medical-test promotions found that 70% had undisclosed financial conflicts. This is now the wellness market.

The Pew Research Center released numbers this week on the health-and-wellness influencer economy that you should know about because they almost certainly describe an account in someone in your household’s feed. Out of 6,500 influencers with 100,000+ followers studied, 41% described themselves as some sort of “healthcare professional” in their bios. The category as Pew defines it is generous: doctors, nurses, dietitians, social workers, chiropractors, massage therapists. Another 31% called themselves “coaches.” Another 28% called themselves entrepreneurs. Sixteen percent listed no credentials at all.

The harder number is from the University of Sydney School of Public Health. Brooke Nickel and colleagues analyzed social-media posts about controversial medical tests — full-body MRI scans, gut microbiome tests, hormone panels — and found that about 70% of the posts came from influencers with an undisclosed financial interest in the product being promoted. Most of those posts were promotional and did not mention downsides like additional unnecessary tests and treatments. A 2024 Australian study found roughly 45% of nutrition posts from popular influencers contained inaccurate information — recommending the avoidance of food groups or the addition of specific supplements without basis.

Why this lands in a financial-advisor newsletter: the same household budget that absorbs $40K a year of insurance premiums and $200 a month of supplements is the budget that gets squeezed when CPI runs 3.8% and real wages turn negative. The supplements line is also the easiest line to renegotiate. If your spouse spends $130 a month on stack-of-vitamins recommended by an Instagram “wellness coach” who is on commission — that is $1,560 a year not going to retirement savings, not going to the LTC premium, and not going to the kid’s 529.

Your Grandkid’s iPad At Dinner Started In A Nebraska Egg Plant In 1953

Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Deborah Kenny’s The Well-Educated Child. The original screen-time problem wasn’t TikTok. It was the Swanson TV Dinner, and we have been losing the dinner-table battle for seventy-three years.

Naomi Schaefer Riley’s Bookshelf column on Deborah Kenny’s The Well-Educated Child opens with an observation that lands harder than the book it’s reviewing. In 1950, newspaper advertisements began promoting “TV trays” — storable metal tables on tubular legs whose only purpose was to let a family eat in front of the television instead of at the dinner table. Three years later, Nebraska’s C.A. Swanson & Sons Co. — an egg-and-poultry concern — introduced something it trademarked: the TV Dinner. Aluminum trays, three compartments, the cover printed as a television screen with the food displayed as if being broadcast.

By 1954, Americans had bought 10 million TV Dinners. Within a few years a fourth compartment for dessert was added. Apple crisp, in foil, in front of the television. Riley’s argument is that the dinner-table erosion is the through-line: the family meal as a unit of attention has been under continuous attack since the Truman administration, and the iPad-at-dinner phenomenon is the latest chapter of a story that goes back to a refrigerator on a stage with a silky-voiced pitchman talking about whipped sweet potatoes with golden Swanson butter.

Why this matters for a financial advisor: the inter-generational money conversation requires inter-generational attention. The wealth-transfer plans we have written for clients in their late 60s only work if their kids and grandkids are in the room when the will is opened. Increasingly, they are not in the room because they were never in the room — the family meal stopped being a venue for the conversations that wealth transfer requires. Riley’s column is a reminder that this is a 73-year-old problem, not a 2010s one.

The NBA Coach Who Cut Himself From His Own Team At 27

Chris Finch took the Sheffield Sharks of the British Basketball League in the late 1990s and turned them into giant-killers by driving eight hours each way to scout opponents in person. The discipline he built then is the discipline that just beat Nikola Jokic in round one of these playoffs.

Three decades before he became the Minnesota Timberwolves’ defensive mastermind, Chris Finch made the strangest roster cut of his career. He kicked himself off his own team. He was 27, newly promoted to head coach of the Sheffield Sharks in the British Basketball League — 3,500 miles from the NBA and, in basketball terms, much farther. He could have kept the player slot. He gave it to a more talented athlete. “We could see very early on,” Sharks chairman Yuri Matischen told the Journal, “that he would be a better coach than a player.”

What Finch did next is the part worth reading twice. Scouting was impossible the modern way — no iPad game film, no league-wide stat library, no analytics consultancy in Brighton. So he got in his car. He drove four hours, watched the opponent in person, drove four hours back, and ran practice the next day. The round trip could stretch past eight hours. He did it every week. BBL teams routinely scored in the 100s — except when they played Sheffield, where their totals sometimes dropped by 30 points. The Sharks won the league. Three decades and a half-dozen jobs later, his Timberwolves just knocked Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets out of round one of the playoffs.

Why this lands in a financial-advisor newsletter: the second-most important question in a Q2 review is not “what’s the return.” It is “what discipline is actually being applied to this portfolio between reviews.” Most outside-managed accounts have no Finch in the seat. They have a robo-advisor on autopilot, a brokerage app that does whatever the client clicks, and a 401(k) target-date fund that no one has looked at since enrollment. The Finch story is a reminder that the work that compounds is the work that does not look like work — the eight-hour drive nobody else makes.

Google Is Quietly Negotiating To Put Data Centers In Space

Yes, literally in orbit. The Alphabet–SpaceX talks are preliminary, but the engineering case is not science fiction. The investable read is in the supply chain, not in the headline names.

Alphabet is in early talks with SpaceX about a rocket-launch deal as Google expands an internal program to put data centers in orbit. That is not a typo. Solar panels in space run at near-100% duty cycle versus about 25% on Earth. Free radiative cooling into the vacuum eliminates the single largest opex line for an AI training cluster. Latency does not matter for training workloads, which is the workload the entire AI capex wave is built around. As launch costs have fallen, the capex math has slid into “cheaper per FLOP in orbit than in Phoenix” territory. Three years ago this was a research paper. This week it is a deal under negotiation.

For a portfolio, the obvious names are not the most interesting. Alphabet is mid-rally; the news is bullish but priced. SpaceX is private. The actual investable surface is the second-order supply chain: power systems (Honeywell, HON), satellite-grade electronics (L3Harris, LHX), in-orbit servicing pure plays (Maxar, MAXR), and the radiation-tolerant chip economy (NVDA, AMD, ON). The same defense-prime overweight your portfolio already has (LMT, RTX, NOC, GD) is also the orbital-infrastructure overweight — the engineering capacity is shared.