Is Bribery Back?
46:49 Share

Hello. Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello. With Elizabeth Spires of New York Times.

Hello. We are going to talk about bribes and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and whether people are going to be bribing more now that Donald Trump has suspended enforcement thereof. We are going to be talking about the weird case of Elon Musk grabbing $80 million from a bank account in New York City. We are going to talk about inflation, of course, with...

Shane and Ross, we are going to have an egg watch because there's nothing better than an egg watch. We have a Slate Plus segment on 7-Eleven and convenience stores and why they can't be good in America when they're so great in Japan. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

Get the Angel Reef Special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. I participate in restaurants for a limited time. Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching?

Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now.

Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market.

Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at Schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. Okay, so let's talk about one of the many orders that Donald Trump has been putting out. This one didn't come out on day one. It came out this week.

What he did is he said that he was pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is part of this. It's a very, very central part of the sort of big 21st century international consensus on corruption is bad and bribery is bad and we need to make it criminal and we need to find companies who do it billions of dollars. And that way we will manage to stamp out this scourge of global capitalism.

Four reasons which we can speculate about. Donald Trump has never much liked this act. He said in 2012, especially in an interview on CNBC, that he hated the act and he wanted it abolished.

This coincidentally happened about the same time that he was trying to build a hotel in Baku in Azerbaijan. And then when he became president the first time around, he appointed Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general. And Sessions immediately came out and said, you know what, I think this anti-corruption thing is quite good, actually, and enforced it even more strongly than before. And

For better or for worse, Jeff Sessions was not taking direct orders from Donald Trump in the way that this new Bondi woman is. And now, for the first time, Trump really has control of the Justice Department. And this is the first big example of him sort of controlling that along, I guess, with him refusing to prosecute Eric Adams and that kind of stuff.

So let's just say what his stated reason was. We don't have to speculate because he has provided us with a reason. And the reason Trump says he doesn't want to enforce this law, at least for the next 180 days, I think he said, is because it's bad for American companies because they can't compete.

Because they can't do, he doesn't say literally because they can't do bribes, but he says they can't compete because the law is too restrictive, essentially. So this is an argument that you sometimes hear from people doing business in countries like Azerbaijan or sub-Saharan Africa, which is basically, I go in there and I'm not allowed to pay any bribes. And all my competitors are paying bribes. So they get all the contracts and I don't get the contracts and it's not fair.

So that seems to be the rationale. Now, the problem with this as a rationale is that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act applies to foreign companies just as much as it applies to American companies. And if you look at the top 10 biggest fines ever handed out under the FCPA, nine of them are to foreign companies.

big names that you've heard of, like Siemens and Ericsson and Airbus and Odebrecht in Brazil. They're all on the list, right? So it's not like an American company is at a disadvantage against a French company or a Brazilian company because they're all...

subject to the FCPA. And if anything, it looks as though the Department of Justice is more aggressive when it comes to foreign companies than it is when it comes to U.S. companies. Well, they are saying they're considering only enforcing against foreign companies and then just dropping enforcement mechanisms against U.S. companies. So I'm not sure who you're saying is saying that. This was definitely a kind of hypothesis that a couple of people pushed to me. They were like, maybe one of the outcomes here

is that what Trump is signaling between the lines in this executive order is, I want to do this because I want to help American companies. And so one way of helping American companies would be to not enforce the FCPA on American companies, but to continue to enforce it on foreign

foreign companies in general and Chinese companies in particular. To be clear, like this is, you know, week one of this, we have no idea what's going to actually happen. But that could be an outcome. And that could be one way in which Trump sort of exercises his soft power and tries to, you know, put a thumb on the scale in favor of US companies. Felix, you also wrote that

Suspending enforcement of this law puts U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage because they are still subject to U.S. laws, other U.S. laws that prohibit bribery, corruption, blah, blah, blah.

Now, we remember that private companies like the Trump Organization, when it was building a hotel in Azerbaijan, aren't subject to a bunch of SEC rules and specifically to Sarbanes-Oxley. But most public companies, most big companies are public, are very much subject to Sarbox. And Sarbox on its own is a very powerful anti-corruption piece of legislation, which is enforced by the SEC. And in fact, there are two agencies that

enforce the FCPA. The DOJ is one of them. The other one is the SEC and Trump's order only applies to the DOJ. So it's not even clear that he's paused all FCPA activities. He might only have paused DOJ FCPA activities. Everything is very unclear. And the other thing we have to mention is that the FCPA is still the law of the land, right? It is still on the books.

It can be enforced at any time by any department of justice. And the,

statute of limitations on the FCPA. It's like five or six years, depending. And so if there's a new attorney general comes in under the next administration, who's not beholden to Donald Trump, that attorney general can absolutely go after American companies, foreign companies, or anyone else who was doing bribes in 2025, 2026. And that's well within the statute of limitations. So if you do that kind of activity right now during the pause,

You might not face an enforcement action from Trump, but you could easily face an enforcement action from his successor. What is the statute of limitations? It's mostly five years, but it's sometimes six years. But it's five years from the last date that the last bribe was paid, basically. So if you hatch a scheme now and then you wind up paying a bunch of bribes over the next couple of years, it winds up going on for like

seven years. So get your bribes in now so the statute will be shorter by the time anyone enforces it. Okay, this is a real question. I'm not just trolling. Does ethics and bribing and corruption matter that much? If a company wants to pay bribes to build a factory in Azerbaijan, why should I care?

Okay, really good question. No, I mean, that's a really good question. It's a fascinating question. And I have been around long enough to remember 20 odd years ago, maybe like 25 years ago, there was actually a relatively popular strain of thought, which largely was based on the experience of Indonesia under Suharto, that said that

corruption was good actually and it caused economic growth. And if you recall, we had an amazing episode of Slate Money with Yuen Yuen Ang about corruption in China and the way that it arguably helped some of the early forms of economic growth in China while then eventually getting to the point where it became more of a problem than a solution. And that actually kind of helps to explain why the government in China has been so keen on cracking down on corruption in recent years.

In certain countries, under certain conditions where you have a relatively weak central state, relatively weak sort of local tax collecting abilities, and so on and so forth, there are certain cases where a little bit of bribery and corruption does seem to sometimes occur.

help economic growth. But it also makes just living in those countries very difficult and unfair. And you'll remember that the Arab Spring was started by a street vendor who set himself on fire and committed suicide because he was so upset by the local authorities constantly coming to him and demanding bribes to allow him to sell things on the street. And that kind of thing is just always bad.

And what we have seen since the OECD came out like 25 years ago and I said very strongly, like we want to crack down on corruption. And then that was in the wake of like the World Bank doing it under Jim Wolfensohn. And then the US really stepped up enforcement around 2004 or so. And we have seen a bunch of like international cooperation in terms of bringing down corruption.

corruption, which does the general consensus among everyone I've talked to on this is it has worked incredibly well and it has been a really good thing. And we do not want to backslide on this. And in fact, people aren't that worried yet.

Because there are enough other rules, you know, there are like the UK has an anti-corruption statute, so does France, so does Brazil, so does Switzerland. And any country in the world, again, any company in the world can fall subject to those laws. Trump can suspend the FCPA, but he can't suspend the UK law or the Swiss law.

So it's very hard to turn back the clock. And the American companies who aren't worried about Trump can still be worried about the Swiss. I don't know, Elizabeth. Doesn't it seem like corruption is kind of back in style these days? Well, I don't think that Trump has actually a very sophisticated rationale for doing this. I think he generally doesn't like ethical constraints or constraints at all, maybe. So I think...

He didn't really have to think very hard about the policy outcomes when he decided to do this. I think he's sort of naturally allergic to anything that looks like ethical restraint, especially in as much as it affects him, you know, in the private sector. You mean this is a way to prevent the Trump organization from being prosecuted for something to do with meme coins? Yeah.

I don't think it is, by the way. The FCPA in particular really focuses on bribing government officials of foreign countries. It's like part of what's happening now at the federal level with the Trump administration. He's moving towards bilateral deals on trade. He's moving towards just transactional interactions. You give me this, I give you that. Versus there are rules and laws. And the bribes are classic bilateral. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He doesn't like playing according to the rules. He likes making his own rules and negotiating his own rules on a case-by-case basis. Yeah. And that really leads to a lot of uncertainty and confusion because...

We rely on rules kind of like the ground beneath our feet and laws. And to take them away and make everything a one-to-one interaction or transaction really takes away a lot of stability that it sounds like has been developed over decades. I don't think he's really capable of thinking like that, though. He views everything as as your as some transaction. And so the idea of diplomacy, he doesn't understand it. He thinks that everything's a scenario where he's

wielding all the power and it's a very sort of unilateral relationship. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apply in the Wallet app today and see a credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

Elizabeth, since you're the personal finance columnist here, I can ask you, is there any heuristic, any rule of thumb for how much money is a sensible amount of money to spend on someone you love on Valentine's Day?

Not that I know of. I think that's highly individual. It should be above zero. What is the range of Valentine's spending that you have engaged in over your life? I think the most expensive Valentine's Day I've ever had was at a really nice restaurant with a tasting menu. And in New York, those run 200 bucks a person. And they're even more on Valentine's. Yeah.

So is it economically rational and perfectly sensible for a restaurant to charge more on Valentines and for people to be happy to pay more on Valentines?

If Valentine's Day dinner in a restaurant was like a critical need, like water in a hurricane or something, you would call it price gouging. But Valentine's Day dinner at a restaurant is not that kind of necessity. So I say go for it. And if people want to pay it, also go for it. This is fine with me. I approve.

So this is actually a really good segue to the other story that I wanted to talk about, which was the way in which Elon Musk seemingly was able to unsend $80 million from FEMA that was sent to New York City. And that is also like a really good example of sort of pulling out the ground from underneath our feet.

When the world that we live in is a world where you can look at the amount of money in your bank account and say, oh, that is how much money I have. And that is a profoundly important action within a capitalist system to be able to think of a bank account as being money and being money that is available to you. If we are living in a world where Elon Musk can reach in and grab money and take it out

then the whole concept of like moneyness and the whole idea of bank accounts as being a safe place to keep money becomes problematic. And it means that people lose faith in one of the main bedrocks of the capitalist system. And that's one of the reasons why I think

this was a really silly thing to do, quite aside from the fact that it also seems like it was probably illegal. Yeah, that money is already appropriated by Congress. So, yeah, Congress appropriated a few hundred million dollars, which was sent via FEMA for reasons, to help reimburse municipalities that were paying to house various economic migrants in hotels.

And those cities were reimbursed at a rate of $12.50 per night by the federal government after that money had already been spent, you know, paid to the hotels. And so New York did what it was intended to do under the law that was passed by Congress. And, you know, it's basically sent an invoice to the federal government saying, can you please pay us $59 million? And, and

The US government did. They paid the invoice and the money arrived in the account by an ACH transfer, just as these transactions happen every day. It's no big deal. And then Elon Musk got wind of this and said,

this was an illegal payment because he seemed to think that FEMA only disperses money for disaster relief, which is not true. And he said, well, this isn't disaster relief. And then he said, oh, this money was meant for disaster relief, which it wasn't. And therefore this is a misuse of this money. And I'm going to claw back this money. And so the first claim about like illegality was Elon Musk's claim that the

Money was illegally sent to New York City in the first place. And that seems to be clearly false. But then even if he is right, that doesn't give him the legal ability to just go back into the bank account and take the money back out.

Which is what happened. Which is what happened. ACH transactions are reversible, but they're reversible only for three very specific reasons. If there's a duplicate transaction, if you sent two of the same transaction at the same time, or if you literally just typed the account number in wrong and you sent it to the wrong person, or you typed the amount in wrong and you added an extra zero or something like that, then you need to correct that. Those are the only three reasons why you can reverse an ACH transaction.

This is an illegal transaction that should have been spent on disaster relief and was instead being spent on hotels is not a legal reason to reverse an ACH transaction under NACHA, the National ACH Association, under their rules. So that's the claim that like Brad Lander, the New York City Comptroller is making is that Elon's action of clawing back the funds

was illegal, regardless of whether the funds themselves were legally appropriated. Also, the administration's rhetoric is that the border crisis, as they refer to it, is actually a national emergency. Trump has been trying to use that in order to justify things like deploying the National Guard to the border.

And this stuff hasn't happened yet. But if they are using that, they're classifying it as an emergency. It seems like housing migrants would absolutely fall under the purview of FEMA, even by Elon's own logic.

Well, yes, we, you know, the Elon logic is pretty clear, honestly, in this situation, the Elon logic is basically, we are spending money, and I don't want to be spending money. And this money is going to the libs in New York City. And those are especially people I don't want to be getting the money. And in some way, this money is going to help migrants, and I'm not into helping migrants. And so for all of these reasons, I don't want to be spending that money.

And it's clear that he doesn't want to be spending the money and that if he had been in Congress when that bill came up, he would surely have voted against it. But yeah, what he is then doing is he's basically placing himself one level above Congress and saying, well, I don't care what you signed into law about what the government has to spend. I am unilaterally just going to stop you spending that. And that seems like a very dangerous move.

position for a private citizen to be in. And so now you're saying that by doing this, by just like zooping into the New York City bank account and zooping out $80 million in this unprecedented way, destabilizes the very concept of bank accounts and money? Is that what you're saying? One of the other headlines that we saw this week was a headline about how

Elon Musk also wants to abolish the FDIC. What? Why? Everyone loves the FDIC. Curiously, this is the one area where I kind of agree with Musk. I think that the FDIC is kind of a useless organization and probably should be abolished. But the FDIC insurance. So this is the really crucial thing. Felix.

Absolutely no one wants to get rid of deposit insurance. Okay, great. Deposit insurance is a wonderful thing. And everyone agrees that deposit insurance is a wonderful thing. And the only real question which is being debated is, is it high enough or should it that the limits for deposit insurance be even bigger than the $250,000 where they're at right now? The problem is...

that, thanks to decades of messaging from the FDIC, the FDIC as an organization has basically become coterminous with deposit insurance. And so when people talk about abolishing the FDIC, which is like this, you know, one of this alphabet soup of bank examiners, along with the OCC and various state examiners and the Fed and everyone else, like,

In terms of what is a sensible way to do bank regulation, I would be fine, honestly, with the FDIC bit of the bank regulation being folded into the OCC or the Fed or someone else. I'm also fine with deposit insurance just becoming part of Treasury rather than being the separate agency called the FDIC. But if you talk in public about abolishing the FDIC, people think that you are talking about abolishing deposit insurance.

And if people think that you are abolishing deposit insurance, then at that point, your bank account stops being money and it starts being the unsecured obligation of a bank. And you don't know how credit worthy that bank is. And so it's basically a credit instrument rather than money. And so that again,

sort of, it helps us to loosen our faith in what we think money is. And then for good measure, another executive order signed by the president saying, stop printing the penny. That's good. Again, I think this is a good thing. I'm all in favor of abolishing the FDIC and getting rid of the penny. But again, what it's doing is it's getting rid of a thing that is money. And if we're getting rid of people's faith in money,

That could have destabilizing, broader consequences. It could go topsy-turvy quickly. I could see that. Do you think that Elon actually understands the distinction you're making about deposit insurance versus the FDIC as an agency? Yes. I don't think there's anyone on right or left who wants to get rid of deposit insurance. I think deposit insurance is...

is universally popular on both sides of the aisle. And if anything, Steve Mnuchin, who was Trump's last treasury secretary, has come out and said that deposit insurance should be raised to 2.5 million. So yeah, I don't think that there's anyone who thinks... I mean, there might be a couple of... Maybe Rand Paul or someone is so ultra-libertarian, he thinks that everyone should do their own credit analysis on a bank before opening up a bank account. But most...

remotely sane human beings where they're just like, no, that doesn't make any sense at all. Deposit insurance serves a crucial function in any modern banking system. You know, if you destabilize everyone from the mass illusion that money is real, that's what crypto has been, that's the answer. That's what they're waiting for. That's what they've been saying all along.

right dollars are just as made up as cryptocurrency so here we go get on the roller coaster exactly yeah we'll be spending fart coin instead i mean what is the dollar but a very expensive fart coin or a very cheap fraud coin depending on like the price of fart coin

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.

This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card is everything a credit card should be. It's easy to manage, built to be secure, and gives users up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase. The best part about Apple Card is applying is quick and easy. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone and see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

Emily, there were inflation figures out this week and inflation is refusing to die. What is the news? So rude. The news is rude. Inflation moved higher in January. The consumer price index rose 0.5% month over month, which is higher than the month before and the month before. Basically, the line keeps ticking up and to the right on CPI, which is

is a huge bummer because we all thought we had this thing beat, right? I mean, I can do basic math, which is it's not like complicated compound anything. But 0.5 times 12 months is 6% that you would have if it rose that much every month. And that's a lot of inflation. Now, I don't think anyone is expecting inflation to be 6% in 2025, right?

But if you annualize 0.5% month-on-month, that's what you get. That's bad. I mean, the year-over-year for right now is 3%, which, of course, is one percentage point above the Federal Reserve's arbitrary target. And it is an arbitrary target, if we're being honest, of 2%. I mean, all targets are arbitrary, but it's a real target. It's a real target that is just made up. The Federal Reserve wants inflation to come down so long as it is above 2%, and it wants inflation to go up so long as it is below 2%.

2%. And it has been above 2% for much longer than it is comfortable with. Then again, it was also below 2% for much longer than it was comfortable with. So the Fed doesn't seem to have been doing a great job at keeping it basically at that 2% level. They always seem to be undershooting or overshooting. But yeah, they are now definitely in that mode of thinking to themselves, maybe we shouldn't have done that massive 50 basis point rate cut because we have not licked this thing.

When they cut interest rates by 50 basis points, they said inflation is still too high, but it's coming down. And even after cutting by 50 basis points, we're still going to have tight monetary policy. And so we are still going to be pushing it down even further, if not quite pushing it down as aggressively. And so we should get down to that 2% pretty much when we want to. They are now revisiting those assumptions and thinking to themselves,

oh, yeah, maybe if we keep rates at this level or only cut one or two times for the rest of the year, we're not going to get down to 2% and we're going to look like we do not have this under control.

Well, we're also kind of in a chaotic environment because the country's being run by an economic chaos monkey. So however they choose to try to forecast what's going to happen, I feel like there are so many variables that were just not a factor during the Biden administration.

So when you say nobody thinks we'll have 6% inflation, I wouldn't rule it out. Oh, no, no one's ruling it out. And you're absolutely right. The error bars have increased massively and there's a huge amount of uncertainty. And yeah, if we do wind up throwing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and the dollar weakens and all manner of other stuff, it is possible. Anything is possible.

That said, I mean, yes, the month over month number is the scary 0.5% in January, but January is known for having a little bit higher inflation because that is the new year and a lot of companies and services raise prices in January. So if you like look back historically, inflation does go up a bit more in January. So there's reason to think

maybe this, if not a blip, because it's been three steady months of the steps going up, it could not be as bad as we think. It is just one month. And it's not like a Trump thing. I just also want to say that this isn't Trump inflation. Yeah, this is January. This is before his inauguration, nearly all before his inauguration. The other thing we should mention is that a lot of that high headline figure is

what the economists like to think of as food and energy, which is oil prices and, of course, eggs. And so this means that we get an egg watch...

And this means that we get Shaina Roth to join us. Shaina, welcome. I feel like I've been activated and called into duty. I'm so excited. You are activated. You are called into duty. What is the latest on eggs? Okay, so the latest is that U.S. egg prices have hit a record high of $4.95 a dozen, and they're likely to keep climbing. And I should, as always, point out that obviously prices are going to vary. This is something of an average. For example,

Where I live in Michigan, eggs are currently about $5 a dozen. But at a tiny little grocery store in Bay City, Michigan, where my parents live, they reported to me

because, you know, I'm a serious journalist in charge of Midwest egg prices. They informed me today that they got eggs for $2.75 a dozen. What? Right. I don't know if I should name the place because I worry Bay City is going to get flooded with egg enthusiasts. No, it's not egg enthusiasts. It's egg arbitrageurs. Egg hunters. People are going to be rocking up in their trucks.

buying eggs by the thousand and selling them in New York City where they're being sold as loosies for a dollar a piece. Apparently, we're getting reports that like at Trader Joe's, they're running out of eggs and they're limiting how many cartons of eggs people can get in certain places. It's an egg catastrophe. In America. In America, of all places, Emily. In America. Don't we know that the Trump-France administration doesn't believe in quotas? Well, you know, there are quotas across the country when it comes to eggs.

Yes. If I ran a grocery store in these times, I would underprice my eggs because you imagine you get more business that way, don't you think? It's the concept of a loss leader. You have a big headline, really low price of eggs, and then everyone comes in and winds up buying much more chocolate because of the money that they think they saved on eggs. Yes.

And everyone's very upset because the Trump administration, President Trump said he would bring in the deflation and the eggs just keep getting more and more pricey. I saw 53% price gain over the past year. Of course, that's not Donald Trump's fault because he wasn't president for the past year, though sometimes it felt like it. He also didn't cause the avian flu, as far as we know, that is really hitting a lot of this hard. But they have.

criticize the Biden administration for the culling of the chickens because you kill the chickens that are sick. Does that mean they're not going to cull the chickens? You have to cull the chickens, don't you? I think you have to cull the chickens. You must cull. Yeah, because they don't vaccinate. Americans have a very idiosyncratic egg system. Number one, they don't vaccinate their chickens against the flu. Get your flu vaccine, people. The flu, which is out there right now, is a terrible strain and it'll put you on your back for 10 days. So get your flu vaccine.

Whether you're a human or a chicken, you should have a flu vaccine. But the chickens don't get their flu vaccines. And then also there's this whole thing that the Americans do about like pasteurizing and washing the eggs, which means they need to be refrigerated and all that sort of bit that doesn't happen in any other, any like civilized country. Isn't it good to pasteurize the eggs? Are you like a raw egg, kind of like raw milk kind of guy? Raw eggs, you can eat an egg right out of the chicken. It's perfectly, I've done it many times. Like Rocky? Yes.

Okay. I think that doesn't make sense to pasteurize when we're dealing with like factory farming, you know, if they're organic eggs, like I could say. Well, yeah. And this is something which we should note since we are disappearing down this egg rabbit hole, as it were. I mean, it's egg watch. It's the egg watch. It is egg watch. The two things that have not been affected by the avian flu are

Number one, chickens for like chicken meat. That's fine. That didn't go up in value because chickens get killed so young that they don't have time to get the flu basically before they're slaughtered and eaten. And then secondly, free range organic eggs because those chickens just stay away from each other anyway and they don't tend to give the

to each other and so that hasn't been you've seen the price of organic eggs not go up nearly as much as the price of you know the factory farmed eggs this should be a lesson to us all to just eat the organic eggs they're better for everyone and certainly better for the chickens

Do you guys think that given we are in an egg crisis, an egg catastrophe, if you will, that we Americans will learn any lessons and we will start to vaccinate our chickens and maybe have them in like really nice living areas so that when there is a flu outbreak, the chickens won't all infect each other and I'll have to get their heads lopped off? No? We're thinking no? No? No.

Have Americans ever learned a lesson? Look, it's very cynical to say that. I'm sure we have. We absolutely have, right? But just not recently. Just seems like recently. Yes, correct. We learned some, but now it feels like we're unlearning the lesson. We tend to learn them the hard way. The hard way. Or not at all. Or not at all. So Shaina, as a resident egg prognosticator, how's the bird flu going? Are things going to get worse before they get worse?

I mean, I think it's definitely going to get worse before they get better. The projections are that the egg prices will continue to increase. I think there's probably still some flu going around. There's still some culling of chickens going around. Honestly, like if you have an egg hookup, I have a friend who has chickens. She lives like two hours away. And I'm like, it might be time for us to start meeting in the middle for some sort of like egg handoff.

So if you know friends with chickens or know people with chickens. All the sort of hipsters raising chickens in their Brooklyn backyards are feeling so vindicated right now. Yes. Also probably a good time to hit farmer's markets. I know that sometimes the farmer's markets, they will have eggs. I've gotten eggs for like $4 a dozen at the farmer's market, which at the time was like, oh, that seems like a lot. And now I'm like, maybe not.

I mean, is it time to just walk away from eggs? Do we really need them so much? Who cares? I think we do. Are you sure? There's other sources of protein. Our editor at Axios wrote a story about how beef is cheaper now than eggs. Yeah, you know what the cheapest source of protein is? Dried lentils. So yeah, do you want that instead?

I've always maintained that breakfast was unfairly controlled by Big Egg in the first place. Yes, there you go. Yes. I also am curious about the price of a bacon, egg, and cheese versus buying the Lucy's, the Lucy eggs at the Bronx Deli that we read about in the prep. Well, the egg Lucy situation seems to be more for people who cannot afford a full dozen, giving them an opportunity to still have the eggs, which I think is a good thing.

thing, but also that's still, I mean, a dollar an egg is still incredibly high. Also, they looked hard-boiled. I don't know if I was just looking at the picture wrong, but like they look... How can you look hard-boiled? Like an egg looks like an egg.

That's a fair point. It looked like they had taken the shell off and it was like all slimy. It's attitudinal. Right. You know how you buy like eggs in a jar? Oh, maybe eggs in a jar will come back. Like pickled eggs. Like in the bar? Yeah. No, I think people need to just figure something else out. This has been Egg Watch 2025.

This episode of Slate Money is brought to you by NetSuite. Have you wondered what the future holds for your business? If you ask nine experts, you'll get 10 answers.

What we really need is a perfect crystal ball. But until we get such an amazing device, over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform.

With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions.

real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash money.net

This guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash money, netsuite.com slash money.

Let's have a numbers round. Spires, what's your number? My number is $400 million, and that is how much the State Department has supposedly agreed to pay for armored Cybertrucks. So Elon Musk, who has been running around complaining about government waste, and in particular complaining about what he thinks are expensive soap dispensers at the Pentagon, is totally fine with the State Department paying $400 million.

million for a consumer vehicle that then has to be modified into an armored vehicle. And there's no indication that all the things that led to Cybertruck recalls are going to be any different. To be clear, the $400 million is post-armorization. It's not all going to Elon. They're paying the armorization companies and the armorization companies made by the Cybertrucks.

Also, after this was discovered, that line item suddenly disappeared from the document. So whether that means that the contract has disappeared or not, we can only speculate. But we do know that Elon has roughly $13 billion worth of government contracts, mostly through SpaceX. So his ability to get government contracts is well established.

Emily, do you have a number? 54. Okay. 54 out of the top 100 films, top 100 grossing films of 2024, 54 of them had protagonists that were, who were women or girls. That's the first time that has ever happened, that the top 100 grossing films of the year had 54 protagonists that were women or girls. In 2007, when I think it's Annenberg,

First started looking at this, the number was 20%. Pretty cool. But then I started thinking about it more because I read about it in Axios AM on Thursday and I had a few thoughts. In 2024, movies weren't good.

The movie industry is not doing well. So now is women's chance. Very depressing. It's just like- No, no, Emily, it's the other way around. The reason the movies aren't doing well is because they have female protagonists and no one wants to watch that shit. No, that's not true because, no, that's wrong. But- So what were the top grossing films this year? Why are you asking that? I didn't prepare. Hang on. Can you wait? Top grossing movies 2024. This is a nightmare. Okay. Inside Out 2.

Female protagonist. Deadpool and Wolverine. No. No.

Moana 2. Wait, these female protagonists are animated. Animated, two-dimensional, yeah. Despicable Me 4. I feel like that's a no, but Wicked definitely is, yeah. Wicked is a super yes. Dune Part 2 is a no. I feel like Dune Part 2 is, it would count. There's at least one female protagonist in Dune Part 2. Sure. I don't know. I didn't do this research. Annenberg did it.

They got the 54% number. It reminded me of so many professions over the years that like start out male and then move to female and the pay goes down. Like secretaries is the example people like to give. Computer programmers. Yes. So it kind of like I was making those connections. And then the lead story in Axios on AM Thursday was called masculine maximalism. And it was all about the Trump administration and their masculine energy. So it was like kind of like

spun me out. And so just to be clear, I was wrong about computer programmers. That's the other way around. That's the one that started out female and became male and then pay went up. Pay went up, yes. Converse. I think that's what's happening in the movies, maybe. That's like my crackpot theory. That's probably not crackpot, honestly. If you had to put a percentage probability of it being crackpot, what would you say that percentage was?

I'd say it was 46% crackpot and 54% expert. I'm just going to move swiftly on and say that my number is 295 million, which is the valuation of London Spirit.

Do either of you two know what London Spirit is? No. It's like when the tea is really caffeinated. And the tea is really boozy. Boozy. Would it help if I told you it was a sports team? Is it football? Soccer? It is not football. Soccer. Snooker? Nope. Elizabeth? Is it cricket? It is cricket. Nice. The London Cricket Team. The London Spirit.

has received a large investment from, you might have heard of some of these people, Nikesh Arora, the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Sundar Pichai from Google, Satya Nadella from Microsoft. All these big gazillionaires in Silicon Valley are like, ooh, we're going to join this consortium and buy the London spirit and make a big investment in English cricket. That's great.

That sounds fun. Why don't billionaires do more stuff like that? Buy sports teams and leagues that I don't care about. Instead of trying to destroy the government. Exactly. Why aren't they doing more of that? Do stuff like that. Fun stuff. It is interesting because cricket really is the number two big sport in the world. Really? After soccer. Yeah. Well, for one thing, the most populous country in the world, India, which has 1.2 billion people or whatever it is these days, is cricket mad.

Not to mention its neighbor, Pakistan, which is also very populous. And then even small irrelevant islands like Great Britain have big cricket followings. So yeah, cricket is big in many, many countries. The 35th most top grossing movie of last year was called Detective Conan colon the million dollar pentagram. The hell is that?

All right. I think that is officially the point at which we are going to wrap up this show because otherwise it's going completely off the rails. Emily is cracking herself up here looking down the list of movies that she has never heard of. It's an international release. That's why I've never heard of it. Could be good. But it has an international pentagram, so it almost certainly is.

Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Thank you for emailing us on slatemoneyatslate.com. Thank you to Jessamyn Marley for producing. And thank you even more so to Shaina Roth for being the queen of all things egg. I will be back on Tuesday talking to Lizzie O'Leary about government statistics and how important they are. And I hope you're a Slate Plus member because if you are, you get to listen to us all talk about convenience stores. In any case, see you all next week.

For more, slate money. I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up.

The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president?

The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.