Hi! Bowl, en español: The NFL has announced that Bad Bunny, the third most-streamed artist on Spotify of all time with an almost entirely Spanish discography, will headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show next February. Today we’re exploring: |
- Vocation mode: Which industries does America view favorably… and unfavorably?
- Private party: Stocks are disappearing as startups eschew IPOs and take-private deals explode.
- Starbucking: The coffee giant is doing something it rarely does — shutting stores.
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The US federal government is viewed negatively by most Americans, poll finds |
America is waiting in anticipation to see if a federal funding deal will be reached by midnight tomorrow to avoid a government shutdown — which would mark the 22nd shutdown in the last five decades and the fourth since 2018. Regardless of whether the shutdown goes ahead — and if it’s met with a wave of mass resignations or mass firings, or both — Americans’ view of the US government as a whole appears to have soured. An updated survey from Gallup for 2025, published last Thursday, asked US adults to rate 25 key business sectors on a five-point scale from “very positive” to “very negative,” and found that the federal government was the worst-rated sector, with more than 6 in 10 respondents reporting a negative view. |
This places the government below the pharmaceutical industry, which has been at the lowest position in the ranking for the last two years. In a year that’s seen sky-high tariffs for pharmaceutical product imports, the sector’s share of positive ratings has increased by 8% from 2024, while the government’s has sunk by 3%. Still, along with healthcare, both sectors scored very few neutral responses. |
On the other end of the spectrum, Americans’ favorite sectors were food-adjacent farming and restaurant industries (60% and 52% positive, respectively), as well as the computer industry (59%), which have all earned consistently positive ratings in the survey’s 24-year history, per Gallup. So, the administration reaching fever pitch aside: Americans love food being put on the table, the table the food is being put on, and the machine that can help them find the best food and best tables. |
Electronic Arts set to go private in $55 billion deal — the latest in a long line of disappearing stocks |
This morning, video game maker Electronic Arts confirmed that it will be taken private by a consortium including Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund and private equity firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, in a transaction that would value the company at some $55 billion — roughly 25% more than what it was worth before deal rumors started circling last week. The deal marks the largest take-private transaction in US history, topping the $45 billion buyout of Texas utility group TXU in 2007. That’s quite a record considering the rise of take-private deals more generally, which have exploded since 2012 in both count and volume. Per data from Bloomberg, last year saw a whopping 173 deals take stocks off the market, in transactions worth some ~$289 billion and change. |
Aided by a private markets capital pool that increasingly rivals its public cousin, the swelling dealmaking economy is contributing to a broader trend: the slow decline of public markets. Indeed, many high-profile startups like SpaceX and OpenAI have completely bypassed the hassle of public markets (like quarterly reporting *cough*), finding no problem raising tens of billions of dollars for their cash-hungry operations. |
The combined effect of fewer IPOs and a rise in take-private deals? There are now only half the number of public companies that were listed in the US in 1996, with just 4,010 public equities as of last year. |
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Starbucks is shutting around 1% of its stores in North America |
In a message posted on the company’s website toward the end of last week, Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol, announced that it would be shutting hundreds of stores that don’t fit with the “Back to Starbucks” vision that he’s been implementing since taking the role just over a year ago. The closures will translate to a 1% drop in Starbucks’ North American store count, taking the chain's total locations across the US and Canada to fewer than 18,300 by the end of the fiscal year. For anyone worried about whether their local branch to pick up a pumpkin spice latte has been chopped, Business Insider has started compiling a list of closing locations. As fans of the chain will know, Starbucks shutting stores rather than more cropping up is a pretty rare occurrence. With a hybrid business model — in which roughly half of the company’s 40,000+ stores are run by Starbucks itself — the closures suggest we might have hit “peak Starbucks” in North America. |
Although much has been written (and charted) about the coffee giant’s struggles internationally (not least in China, where it’s lost market share to local behemoth Luckin) the company’s issues on home soil are a little more surprising. Consumers moving away from heavily-Starbucked urban areas during the pandemic, perturbing high prices, and the rise of independents or smaller chains like Dutch Bros — where sales grew faster than any other public fast food chain in Q2 — have all hurt America’s largest coffee company. At branches that have been open for more than a year, sales have dropped for the last six quarters in a row. |
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- US electric vehicle sales are expected to reach 410,000 this quarter — a record 10% share of the new car market — as Americans rush to make purchases before the tax credit ends this month.
- Swings of fortune: Europe beat the US 15-13 to clinch their first Ryder Cup away victory in 13 years yesterday…
- …But today, AstraZeneca, one of the EU’s largest drugmakers with a market value of ~$229 billion, said that it will list its shares directly on the New York Stock Exchange.
- Singapore’s population hit a record 6.11 million in June, as international workers flock to the Southeast Asian hub.
- Golden girls: Guinness World Records on why the oldest person in the world is almost always female, after the current oldest woman turned 116 last month.
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| - Breaking down a decade on the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit.
- Bean count: Axios mapped where coffee prices are rising the most across the US.
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Off the charts: Which piece of punctuation, often employed in complicated lists or to combine separate clauses, is the least used, per a recent YouGov survey? [Answer below]. |
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