Day: March 6, 2025

“A hospital is no place to be sick,” pioneering Hollywood producer and film studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn is credited with saying. Of course, if you need hospitalization, you go. And if you’re scheduling a surgical procedure, the No. 1 question you want to ask is, “Which day?”

Every year, 15 million Americans have some type of surgery, according to the American College of Surgeons. Many U.S. hospitals are crowded, and delays in getting a procedure and shortages of post-operation beds are common. Such setbacks are costly for hospitals, exhausting for doctors and nurses, and for some patients, deadly.

Earlier this year, we watched in horror as catastrophic fires raged across the Los Angeles area. Just two weeks after the fires were contained, on Feb. 1, disaster struck again in Kentucky, with severe flooding and freezing temperatures brining one of the worst weather disasters the state has seen in years.

One thing we know for sure is that rebuilding from weather-related disasters is expensive. Experts have predicted that the Los Angeles fires will be the costliest in U.S. history. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are estimating $30 billion in insured losses, and early estimates put the total economic damage at $250 billion. Behind those numbers are things which are unquantifiable — the memories, stories and meanings attached to the places that we call home. 

A favorite aphorism of the late Art Cashin, Wall Street legend and UBS’s long-serving director of floor operations at the NYSE, is that “no one rings a bell at the top of the market.”

And of course, the same applies to the bottom. There was no clanging to be heard on that day in March 2009, when the S&P 500 SPX hit a low of 666 during the height of the global financial crisis.

Dear Quentin,

I read your response to this woman who was scammed and is still waiting by the phone. I have been living a nightmare with my mother for seven years. They came through Facebook META and had several different names; they took her for over $400,000 and, to this day, she is still sending Apple gift cards. She now lives with me, but she is still beholden to these scam artists who are relentless.

I have called the cops. I have called the FBI. I have called the local  sheriff for internet fraud with zero help; they told me there’s nothing they can do. I have yelled, screamed and cried. She does not care. I called a lawyer and they said it would be very difficult because she is of sound mind. 

Investors got what they wanted on Wednesday — temporary tariff relief from the Trump administration that finally halted a two-day selloff that sent the stock market into a tailspin earlier this week. 

However, so-called reciprocal tariffs on foreign imports from all major U.S. trading partners are still coming in April, leaving investors wondering how they should prepare for another round of tariff-induced volatility.

Talks with European leaders to replace Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite services in Ukraine have “intensified” over the past two weeks, said the chief executive officer of rival Eutelsat Communications.

“Until now, we have been together with Starlink there, but it’s clear that everybody is asking us today, ‘Can you actually replace especially the very large number of terminals that Starlink has across Ukraine?’ And that’s something we’re looking very actively at,” Eve Berneke, who heads the French satellite operator, told Bloomberg on Thursday.