Numlock News: May 23, 2018
By Walt Hickey
New data released yesterday by the CDC illuminated how the Affordable Care Act held up during year one of an administration that initially set out to eliminate it. The uninsured rate remained essentially flat at 9.1 percent, and according to the report there were 19.3 million fewer people without health insurance in 2017 than there were in 2010. One issue: early reports from insurance carriers indicate the end of the penalty for not having insurance may cause price hikes.
Margot Sanger-Katz,The New York Times, CDC
A Saudi prince is suing his former wife to stop the sale of a property before they figure out how to split the proceeds. The property in question is an 18-bedroom, 28-bathroom, 27,000-square-foot mansion that counts both Mark Wahlberg and Barry Bonds as neighbors. The house is in Beverly Hills and the suit is in Delaware. I am straining to think of a reason that a home needs that bathroom-to-bedroom ratio, and all I can come up with is some monstrous reverse-Brady Bunch arrangement.
Jef Feely, Bloomberg
The U.S. House voted 258-to-159 to approve of a change that raises the asset thresholds that designates banks as too big to fail. That flag makes banks the subject of further regulatory scrutiny, and the bill would raise the asset threshold from $50 billion to $250 billion. Should it pass the Senate, expect banks that look like Community Bancorp Inc ($49.6 billion in assets) to make deals they'd held off on to avoid extra compliance costs.
Elizabeth Dexheimer, Bloomberg
While about 600 guests attended the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, another 1,200 got to watch from outside the chapel, and thus scored a commemorative gift bag full of swag like "a royal wedding water bottle, shortbread and a gold-wrapped chocolate coin." One enterprising guest sold their gift bag on eBay for £21,400.
Kelly Phillips Erb, Forbes, eBay
An eMarketer analysis projects that this year, there will be 23.4 million people who use the Starbucks app to make a mobile payment at least once every 6 months. This is notable mainly because of how much its projected to beat its competitors: exclusively-mobile payment apps that function at more than one store like Apple Pay (22 million), Google Pay (11.1 million), and Samsung Pay (9.9 million).
Dave Gershgorn, Quartz
Whether you're reading this from a rural, suburban, or urban area, you likely have a chip on your shoulder and think residents of the other two areas don't really get you. A Pew Research Center survey found that65 percent of urban residents, 52 percent of suburbanites and 70 percent of rural residents believed that people from different kinds of communities don't understand their problems.
Parker, Horowitz, Brown, Fry, Cohn and Igielnik, Pew Research Center
A 2018 survey of travelers found 77 percent said their children influenced their vacation activity planning, up from 66 percent in 2014. Hotels are taking notice; destinations have been experimenting with programs targeted at kids who are not yet teenagers but also not remotely interested in day care.
Andrea Petersen, The Wall Street Journal