🤕 J&J's Talc Trouble

^{"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”}

— Oscar Wilde

👋 Friends, Rallie here. The newsletter bringing you the heat in crypto, finance, and tech.

On the menu:

• 🤕 J&J's Talc Trouble

• 🗞️ Headlines That Hit

• 📈 Refresh: Creative Destruction

• ✌️ Trivia Tuesday

• 💯 Top Tweets

The Rallie Recap

💊 A multi-billion corporation at its knees? Lawsuits galore, here’s the rundown on Johnson & Johnson’s latest legal battles:

• A pioneer in the medical field since the 1880s, 🥇 Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has become a multi-billion and multi-national household name for more than a century. 

• 😮 The creator of Band-Aids has over 250 individual subsidiary firms in basically every field of medicine and has sales over $70B USD annually. 💰

• So what’s the problem? 🤒 A U.S. judge has just shot down J&J’s 2nd attempt to resolve 38K talc-related lawsuits filed against them. 💥

• The irony of the charges. 🩺 Despite being a corporation aimed towards the medical well-being of its consumers, the lawsuits against them allege that their products contain asbestos, causing mesothelioma, ovarian cancer and other cancers. 🏥

• ⚖️ Essentially, J&J tried to offload the above liabilities into a new company and placed it into bankruptcy, but the courts didn’t fall for it.

• 🏛️ Countless precedents have already been set. At the start of the year, J&J was part of the $26B USD landmark opioid settlement alongside three other major distributors for their role in the opioid addiction crisis. 😨

• In July, the company was ordered to pay $18.8M USD to a California cancer patient in a baby powder lawsuit. 👶 At that time, J&J said costs of talc-related verdicts, settlements and legal fees have reached about $4.5B USD, a number that is looking to be increased in the near future. 💸 

• 🔬 J&J are also filing lawsuits of their own... the corporation is suing the researchers who linked talc to cancer. 

• According to the organization, the researchers used “junk science” to push a “false narrative” that allowed them to collect millions of dollars in their testimonies against the J&J. 🤔

• 🇺🇸 Meanwhile, the corporation has sued the U.S. government in order to block a program that gives the Medicare government health insurance plan the ability to negotiate lower drug prices. 🗂

• Meaning another dent in J&J’s pocket could be incoming.

• 🧐 The results of these lawsuits will determine the fate of millions of people’s lives, and we’ll be keeping an eye on how this all shakes out.

Headlines That Hit

• 👑 Oh dear… Disgraced U.S. Congressman George Santos involved in Nigerian Prince-like crypto scheme. 

• 😠 Lawsuits piling on. X (Twitter) threatens to sue a group of independent researchers who have documented an increase in hate speech on the platform since Musk’s purchase.

• 📢 Pressure on! Peaceful rally to search landfills for Indigenous homicide victims’ bodies gathered at the World Police Fire Games.

• 🇷🇺 Russia hit hard. A drone strike at the heart of Moscow’s financial district makes companies consider employee safety concerns in addition to current and future economic sanctions.

Rallie Refresh: Creative Destruction

🔥 Not an optimistic spin on chaos, but a necessary change for the future. Today, we’re exploring how a theory from the 1940s can still apply to the 21st century.

💣 What is creative destruction?

• The term is ‘creative destruction’ refers to the process of ‘destroying’ long-standing frameworks and practices to create a path for meaningful innovation. 💫

• 🌱 It is seen as a natural result of capitalism and its cycles of advancement.

• Economist and political scientist, Joseph Schumpeter, coined the term and warned that the success of capitalism would eventually lead to a ‘corporatism’ mindset that was more focused on playing it safe and will become hostile to innovation. 😡

• The purpose of creative destruction is to drive change in the markets despite the corporate mindset.

✋ Consequences…!

• 🤖 Out with the old and in with the new is bound to leave behind jobs (as we see with some of today’s strikes) but there needs to be a negotiation of what we allow technology to do to protect the average workers job sustainability. 💼

• It is not usually the underdogs who receive the majority of creative destruction’s benefits… 👛 it’s usually those with wealth, power, and influence who typically stand to gain the most from innovation.

• 🌳 The process may also have negative, unforeseen environmental impacts that take years to understand or predict future implications.

🦾 Creative destruction is incorporated throughout our lives.. in fact, you reading this digital newsletter is proof of that!

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✌️Trivia Tuesday✌️

🌟 The answer for Thursday’s newsletter (True or False? Market cap is a metric that evaluates the attractiveness of an investment) is True! Tune in next time for today’s answer.

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DISCLAIMER: This is not financial or legal advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions.