Author Archives: Michael Murphy

Dear New World Investor: (Sung to the tune of My Boyfriend’s Back by the Angels, 1963) Inflation’s back, and there’s gonna be trouble (Hey-la, hey-la, inflation’s back) Better buy it quick, ’cause the price is gonna double (Hey-la, hey-la, inflation’s back) Today’s Personal Consumption Expenditures Index (PCE) was both high and completely expected. The headline year-over-year number hit a three-year high in April at +3.8% – right on expectations. It was a clear acceleration from March’s +3.5%. Month-over-month, it was up 0.4%. The core PCE, the Fed’s favorite inflation indicator that excludes food and energy prices, was up 3.3%, also...

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Dear New World Investor: Well, that got weird in a hurry. Iran striking its regional neighbors was not on my dance card, and obviously is a massively escalation. It puts a lot of oil infrastructure at risk and makes private insurance on ships going through the Strait of Hormuz uneconomic. President Trump’s US Navy escorts won’t work – there are too many ships, it’s too costly, and some US sailors are going to die. His insurance plan won’t work, either, unless US taxpayers are happy subsidizing losses on oil shipments destined for other countries. Without decisive regime change soon, it’s...

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Dear New World Investor: The headline September payrolls report claimed the US added 119,000 jobs in September. That’s (A) more than double the consensus estimate for +50,000; (B) more than 5x August’s originally reported +22,000; (C) a positive number following August’s -26,000 revision to minus 4,000; and (D) probably wrong. WARN-act notices of impending layoffs across the 21 states tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland spiked to 39,000 in October. We have only seen a greater number of warnings in 2008, 2009, 2020 – all years marked by severe economic downturns – and May 2025. Click for larger...

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Dear New World Investor: The shutdown-delayed September Consumer Price Index rose 3% year over year, up a tenth from 2.9% in August but slightly below consensus expectations for a 3.1% increase. It was the highest reading since May, but much of the gain was in food, gasoline, and energy. So the core CPI rose 3% year over year in September, down a tenth from 3.1% in August and below expectations. On a monthly basis, core prices increased 0.2%, below August’s 0.3% gain, which was the strongest monthly rise in six months. In general, tariffs are still pushing up goods prices...

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Akebia Therapeutics (AKBA) announced this morning that in their Type C meeting with the FDA, they learned that the Agency would require “a significantly larger number of patients than proposed, and accordingly would require meaningfully more time and cost to complete.” Therefore, they are not going to pursue a broad non-dialysis chronic kidney disease (NDD-CKD) label for Vafseo. But: “We were encouraged by the discussion with FDA on smaller subgroups of CKD patients where we may be able to align on a potential clinical trial design and path forward.” Given CEO John Butler’s history of winning against the FDA, I...

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