A new class of weight-loss drugs has rattled global equity markets, sending shares of everything from food and beverage companies to medical-device makers tumbling. As earnings season kicks into high gear, firms are expected to reveal if consumer behaviors are being altered by the likes of Ozempic.
So far, fear has driven investors to sell consumer-exposed stocks. A basket of such companies — including Oreo cookies maker Mondelez International Inc. and Modelo beer producer Constellation Brand Inc. — is down nearly 9% since early August with losses roughly double those of the S&P 500 Index, while makers of things like insulin pumps have wiped out close to a third of their value over the same stretch amid concerns that fewer people will need their products.
Is junk food finally becoming the new tobacco? We can only hope. Maybe in my lifetime it will become unusual to see people having Oreos and Mountain Dew, just like it's rare to see people out smoking in public anymore.
Fruit has fiber, antioxidants, vitamins and no fat or cholesterol. To me the fixation on sugar is misguided - vegetable starches are exactly the same thing. A potato is basically 25% sugar for example since potato starch is simply a chain of glucose molecules.
I doubt it. if only because the dividing line is much more vague than with tobacco. There's a whole range of products that's somewhere between healthy and unhealthy.
People being more healthy and living longer also threatens the profits of health care providers and funeral homes. The government should do something about that. Maybe ban exercise, or implement a mandatory daily cheese infusion. Would that make the capitalists happy?
Yep, living longer? After useful labor age, while collecting social security, medicare and pensions? I can't imagine republican politicians really wanting that.
This has been in financial news for a few weeks. I personally don't think the weight loss drug has anything to do with it. What I think happened is these companies jacked the price up on their "food". People already know it's bad for you, and raising price just led people to make better, more health conscious decisions rather than pay $6 for a bag of chips. I know anecdotally that I have done exactly that, and when I do get chips or crackers nowadays, it's the store brand. Fuck Mondelez, Frito-Lay and coca cola. I'm not paying higher price for stuff I already know I shouldn't be eating.
Everything about this article is definitely absurdly horrible. “Earnings season” is a reasonable concept, I guess, but somehow I don’t feel good at all about such financial abstractions that people take very seriously. The concept that these companies depended on excessive or compulsive consumption to make money and people are cutting down not because they obtained a clue or motivation, but due to an injectable drug, is pretty pathetic for humankind.
We have this cultural fixation that "mind over matter" and willpower alone can do anything, but the reality is that we are just animals with a slight bit of clever self-awareness on top. I feel like judging humankind as pathetic is misplaced here, when the reality we don't want to admit is that modern processed foods are as unnatural to our reward systems and present hazardous habit-forming as some drugs. There are a lot of people in situations with food that they can't easily get out of on their own and we should maybe consider whether there is such a thing as a food product too addictive to allow for sale to the public
My concern is that they're replacing a group of unnatural products with a pharmaceutical, without addressing the underlying causes. Most people regain weight after ending use of the drug. This is quite an expensive medication, as well. Also check out the list of side effects.
While it's reasonable, I don't think the public would accept broad restrictions on basic food composition.
And for the venture capitalists who won't let us keep nice things - you took away Kaybee Toys and Toys R Us. If you take away Oreos, I can't guarantee your safety. /s
There's a shortage of it. They cant produce enough of it right now. So pretty prolific. Also it's an injection.
But there's online services that will let you get it for weight loss for like $200 a month and practically no push back because they are operating in a weird online pharmacy grey market. The Verge just did a big article about it. But that worked so well that company isn't doing it anymore because they caused a shortage and can't supply themselves.
Or are these relatively few people really having that much of an impact?
I'm imagining a world where 99% of grocery shoppers ignore the cookie aisle while the last 1% fill their carts with Oreos every visit, like Whales in pay to win mobile games.
Jesus do the masters of the universe really want a recession bad. Just constantly telling their media companies to report in a definite economic downturn coming any day now.
I guess the COVID recession just wasn't on the right timetable for them? Or they were too busy trying not to die that they couldn't maximize their recession profiteering?
Meaning, that this has been on the news for months. Also, it's not a dig on you, it's a dig on Bloomberg. Instructional investors already have puts in place. Late articles like this just fuck the individual investors.