Just a few months ago, the food giant Kraft Heinz had a plan to boost sales: It would split into two separate companies. On Wednesday, executives at Kraft Heinz unveiled a new plan to boost sales: The company would remain a single entity, for now.
The chief executive, Steve Cahillane, who joined Kraft Heinz in early January to guide the company through the split, said the business needed to be put on firmer ground first. He told Wall Street analysts and investors that the split was postponed because it wanted to focus on “returning the company to growth and not be distracted” by the work required to break it up.
He said there were a number of brands that, with a little investment, could see a growth in sales. For consumers, the strategy will likely mean a reduction in prices for some Kraft Heinz products. Mr. Cahillane said that over the last few years, the industry, responding to commodity inflation, “busted through four or five levels of price points in a very accelerated fashion.” He added: “The consumer was left very disappointed in that, and that’s been very well understood and obvious.”
He said that in 2027, Kraft Heinz would revisit the proposal to split the company. The company warned that sales would likely fall again this year by as much as 3.5 percent, noting, among other challenges, cuts to the federal food stamp program. Purchases from customers using food stamps make up about 13 percent of its business.
Kraft Heinz, with $25 billion in revenue and the home to brands like Kraft Singles and Philadelphia Cream Cheese, has been struggling for years.

President Trump has tried to radically reshape America’s economy. He has slashed taxes, raised tariffs to their highest levels in almost a century, unilaterally canceled federal spending, pushed down immigration and pressured the Federal Reserve to sharply lower interest rates.
Compared with its projections from January 2025, before Mr. Trump took office, the federal government is now expected to run a $23.1 trillion shortfall over the next nine years, rather than a $21.8 trillion one, a $1.4 trillion wider gap. Those were the findings of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan scorekeeper, in its annual benchmark forecast for the federal budget released on Wednesday.
The amount of debt held by the public is expected to become much larger than the annual output of the economy, reaching 120 percent of gross domestic product in 2036. That would put the world’s most important economy at risk of a destabilizing debt crisis. “Our budget projections continue to indicate that the fiscal trajectory is not sustainable,” said the director of the budget office.
There is reason to expect that the fiscal situation could become even more precarious. The most expensive policy change made so far by Republicans and Mr. Trump has been the broad income tax cuts they passed last year. That law, which provided its biggest benefits to the rich as it also cut spending on programs for the poor, came in at a total cost of roughly $4.7 trillion over the next nine years, the C.B.O. said. The biggest source of new money, Mr. Trump’s tariffs, is projected to raise roughly $3 trillion over that same time frame.
In reality, though, the cost of the tax cuts could end up far exceeding the revenue generated by the tariffs. When they passed the tax cuts, Republicans took the unprecedented procedural step of locking many of them in permanently, meaning the cuts would require another act of Congress to reverse them, an unlikely event. Indeed, some of the tax cuts Republicans passed last year are only temporary, and lawmakers may renew them in the future, further reducing revenue.
Many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs are mired in deep legal and political uncertainty. The Supreme Court could soon throw many of them out. If the tariffs survive the legal challenge or Mr. Trump replaces them with different levies, a future president could, with a stroke of the pen, immediately slash the remaining import taxes. That would leave the federal government with a far more meager revenue source just as the country confronts the budget crunch created by Social Security, the most expensive federal program. For years, as the population has aged, the amount of money spent on the retirement program has outpaced the amount of tax paid into it by younger working Americans, driving wider deficits.
Social Security’s flagship trust fund is now expected to run out in 2032, a year earlier than previously expected, the C.B.O. said. The exhaustion of the trust fund will force Congress to decide on a new way of financing Social Security to avoid a deep, across-the-board cut to benefits. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration is also putting pressure on America’s fiscal situation, the C.B.O. said. The budget office expects the American population to have 5.3 million fewer people in 2035 than it previously expected, reducing projected tax revenue, with an overall budget hit of roughly $500 billion over that time frame.
At nearly $1 trillion last fiscal year, the net cost of interest on the debt ranks with Social Security and Medicare as one of the government’s biggest expenses. The United States already spends more financing its debt than it does on defense. By 2036, the budget office projected that interest costs could nearly match the total discretionary spending approved by Congress every year.
Mr. Trump has agitated for the Federal Reserve to lower short-term interest rates to reduce the government’s borrowing costs, part of a broad attack on the central bank’s independence. But the Fed sets interest rates to hold down inflation and keep employment stable, not to reduce borrowing costs for the federal government. If investors started to believe that the Fed instead set short-term interest rates in response to demands from the White House, that could actually raise long-term interest rates, further adding to the government’s borrowing costs.

Job growth over the past two years was far weaker than previously believed: U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Wednesday. That was 69 percent fewer jobs than its initial estimate of 584,000. The agency also lowered its estimate of job growth in 2024 by nearly 28 percent. In total, the U.S. economy has more than a million fewer jobs than previously reported.
The revisions are part of a longstanding annual process in which the B.L.S. reconciles its monthly estimates of job growth, which are derived from surveys, with less timely but more reliable data from state governments. In the past, the so-called benchmark revisions have typically been small and attracted relatively little attention. But the 2024 adjustment was the biggest in years, reducing estimated job growth by nearly 600,000. This year’s revision was even bigger, the largest since 2009 in percentage terms.
The new data makes even more pronounced the “low hire, low fire” stasis that has characterized the labor market for much of the past two years. The revisions didn’t affect the unemployment rate, which ticked down to 4.3 percent in January. But they suggest that job growth ground nearly to a halt last year, making it hard for anyone without a job to find one. “We’ve been hearing from workers that the job market is not working for them for some time,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at the employment site Glassdoor. “The anecdotes are starting to align with the data.”
The revisions also underscore how dependent the job market has become on hiring in the health care sector. Before the revisions, health care accounted for about 405,000 of the 584,000 jobs added in 2025, or nearly 70 percent of the gains. According to the latest data, health care companies added 391,000 jobs, while employment in other sectors fell by a combined 210,000 jobs. “That really puts into sharp relief how poorly other industries are doing even as health care continues to grow,” Mr. Zhao said.
The consecutive large revisions have led some economists to question the reliability of the survey-based monthly estimates. In December, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said economists at the central bank estimated that the B.L.S. has been overstating employment gains by about 60,000 jobs per month — a figure that, if accurate, would suggest that employers were cutting payrolls for much of last year.
The revisions have become a political issue. President Trump pointed to the previous big adjustment when he fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the statistical agency, last summer, saying it showed she was incompetent and biased against him. Experts across the ideological spectrum rejected those accusations, noting that there was no consistent political pattern in the revisions. Rather, they said, the large revisions highlighted the challenge of accurately measuring the economy during a period of falling survey response rates and changing employment patterns. Those challenges have been exacerbated by budget cuts and staff turnover, problems that predated Mr. Trump but have grown worse since he returned to office.
“I think we need to be more skeptical” about the monthly employment estimates, said Guy Berger, a labor economist who follows the numbers closely. He said he remains confident that the estimates are free from political bias. But the large revisions suggest the B.L.S. is struggling to get an accurate read on the state of the labor market. “You can trust that folks are trying to measure this accurately,” he said. But, he added, “I don’t think you can put a lot of weight on the specific monthly numbers.”
But Jed Kolko, an economist who oversaw economic data at the Commerce Department during the Biden administration, said the statistical agencies have faced a particularly challenging period in recent years. “Revisions tend to be bigger when the economy is changing rapidly,” he wrote in an email. “Job growth has been unusually volatile for several years, first from the pandemic and then from the immigration surge, so revisions in recent years have been bigger.”
One possible — though partial — explanation for the recent downward revisions relates to the way government statistics account for jobs created by newly started companies and destroyed by ones that go out of business. Such employers aren’t included in the monthly jobs survey, so the B.L.S. estimates their impact based on historical patterns, using a statistical method known as the “birth-death model.”
That approach can’t always keep up with changes in the economy, however. During the coronavirus pandemic, Americans started new businesses in record numbers. More recently, job gains at new businesses have slowed. But it can take time for such shifts to show up in economic models. The B.L.S. last year said that it would change the birth-death model to be more responsive to shifts in the labor market. That should lead to smaller revisions in the future. But it could also make the initial monthly estimates more volatile and harder to interpret.
The birth-death model accounted for only a fraction of the big revisions in 2024 and 2025, however. That suggests the updated method won’t fully resolve the recent issues with the monthly estimates. Doubts about the government’s data have led some economists in recent months to give renewed attention to alternative estimates from private sources such as ADP, the payroll processor. But those sources are less comprehensive than the official statistics, and often rely on government data to calibrate their models.
Private data isn’t immune from revisions of its own. ADP last week updated its job estimates to align them with government data, a process similar to the B.L.S.’s annual benchmarking procedure. The revision reduced ADP’s estimate of private-sector job growth in 2025 by more than a third, and made substantial changes to the company’s figures as far back as 2020.

@WABAC: my sale of about 1/3 of my OSTIX, coupled with your sale of ( I think) your entire position will surely send ripples throughout the FI markets, Hah! I initiated a position in APFPX with the proceeds. The discussions on the « go-to » bond funds discussion thread helped me choose. Looked at EGRAX, mentioned by a couple of members, but passed due to high ER. The ex-Eaton Vance EM managers have done very well since they joined Artisan in late 2021.

If my broker was like 1968 Teri Garr, I'd go to the office in person for visits!

Instead, pay attention to what the markets are actually telling you and invest accordingly.
Examples:
* SCHD: I liked it for years, then it struggled for about three years (2023–2025), which I posted about at the time. Year-to-date, it’s been performing very well again.

In 2021, a unit of healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson announced “a leap forward”: It had added artificial intelligence to a medical device used to treat chronic sinusitis, an inflammation of the sinuses. Acclarent said the software for its TruDi Navigation System would now use a machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries.
The device had already been on the market for about three years. Until then, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had received unconfirmed reports of seven instances in which the device malfunctioned and another report of a patient injury. Since AI was added to the device, the FDA has received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events.