The meerkats named Nkosi, Lula, Nya, Kgala, and Ari came to the zoo as a group of siblings about a decade ago. The animals are gregarious and are known for their playfulness and communal living style.

Zoo officials use dye to mark the animals as a way to differentiate them as individuals, according to Rachel Metz, the zoos vice president of animal well-being. She said the zoo has been using the same dye for more than three decades without incident.

The dye was used on the meerkats June 1, and one of them was found dead about 30 minutes later, officials said. The four others started showing signs of acute illness minutes later, so veterinary staff anesthetized them and pumped their stomachs. But three of the meerkats then died within 36 hours. The last one died Monday night after being under medical supervision for more than a week.

Metz said the zoo is conducting a detailed investigation and noted that necropsy results are pending.

Yet top Fed officials have made clear that any such pause may be brief  more of a skip  with another rate hike likely as soon as their next meeting in late July.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell and other top policymakers have also indicated that they want to assess how much a pullback in bank lending might be weakening the economy. Banks have been slowing their lending and demand for loans has fallen as interest rates have risen.

Some analysts have expressed concern that the collapse of three large banks last spring could cause nervous lenders to sharply tighten their loan qualifications and worsen the drop in lending. Economists at Goldman Sachs have estimated, though, that such damage will be modest.

For the Fed, skipping a rate hike at this weeks meeting may be the most effective way for Powell to unite a fractious policymaking committee. The 18 committee members appear split between those who favor one or two more rate hikes and those who would like to leave the Feds key rate where it is for at least a few months and see whether inflation further moderates. This group is concerned that hiking too aggressively would heighten the risk of causing a deep recession.

A government report Tuesday on inflation offered some ammunition to both camps, with overall price increases sharply slowing but some measures of underlying inflation remaining high. Consumer prices as a whole rose a modest 4% in May from 12 months earlier, the smallest such rise in more than two years and way below Aprils 4.9% annual increase.

Yet much of that drop reflected sharply lower gas prices and slowdown in food inflation. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, uncomfortably high inflation persisted: So-called core prices rose 5.3% year over year, down from 5.5% in April but far above the Feds 2% annual target.

At the same time, the gradual but steady decline in overall inflation suggests that the Feds rate hikes have had some success. The central bank has jacked up its key rate by a substantial 5 percentage points since March 2022.

Those hikes have led to much higher costs for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business borrowing. The Feds goal is to achieve the delicate task of slowing borrowing and spending enough to cool growth and tame inflation, without derailing the economy in the process.

Tuesdays inflation data showed that most of the rise in core prices reflected high rents and used car prices. Those costs are expected to ease later this year.

Wholesale used car prices, for example, fell in May, raising the prospect that retail prices will follow suit. And rents are expected to ease in the coming months as new leases are signed with milder price increases. Those lower prices, though, will take time to feed into the governments measure.

Some economists have suggested that if those measures start to fall and reduce core inflation, the Fed might end up keeping its key rate unchanged for the rest of the year. Or the policymakers might decide to raise their key rate one last time in July, to about 5.4%, and keep it there.

We think next months increase is probably the last of the cycle, said Alan Detmeister, an economist at UBS.

On Wednesday, Fed officials will also update their quarterly economic projections, including a forecast of what their key rate will be at years end. Most economists expect that rate to tick up from the current 5.1% to 5.4%. That would signal that the central bank doesnt think it has yet curbed inflation. If inflation were to remain chronically high in the months ahead, the Fed might decide to continuing raising rates.

The economy has fared better than the central bank and most economists had expected at the beginning of the year. Companies are still hiring at a robust pace, which has helped encourage many people to keep spending, particularly on travel, dining out and entertainment.

As a result, the Feds updated forecasts Wednesday may reflect its expectation that economic growth will pick up, albeit modestly. Analysts say the policymakers will likely project that the economy will expand 1% this year a sluggish figure but up from a forecast in March of an anemic 0.4%.

Fed officials will also likely forecast a lower unemployment rate than they did three months ago, perhaps to 4.1% by years send, compared with their forecast in March of 4.5%. (The current jobless rate is 3.7%.)

In addition, they will likely raise their inflation estimate, with year-over-year core inflation envisioned to reach 3.8% by the end of this year, up from a forecast of 3.6% in March.

Auctioneer Sothebys said on Wednesday that Dame mit Fächer Lady with a Fan will go up for sale June 27 in London, with an estimated price of 65 million pounds ($80 million).

The last portrait Klimt completed before his death in 1918, the painting shows an unidentified woman against a resplendent, China-influenced backdrop of dragons and lotus blossoms.

It was last sold in 1994, going for $11.6 million at an auction in New York.

Sothebys head of impressionist and modern art department, Helena Newman, said the portrait was a technical tour de force, full of boundary-pushing experimentation, as well as a heartfelt ode to absolute beauty.

Famed for his bold, daring art nouveau paintings, Klimt was a key figure in artistic modernism at the start of the 20th century. His work has fetched some of the highest prices for any artist. Klimts Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II sold at auction in 2006 for $87.9 million, and his landscape Birch Forest sold at Sothebys last year for $104.6 million.

Two more of his portraits are reported to have sold privately for more than $100 million.

The most expensive artworks auctioned in Europe, in dollar prices, are Alberto Giacomettis sculpture Walking Man I, sold for $104.3 million at Sothebys in 2010, and Claude Monets painting Le basin aux nymphéas, which fetched $80.4 million at a Christies sale in 2008.

The world auction record for an artwork is the $450.3 million paid in 2017 for Leonardo da Vincis Salvator Mundi though some experts dispute whether the panting of Jesus Christ is wholly the work of the Renaissance master.

Core to Ramaswamys rise is his supposedly successful business track record, with supporters celebrating him as a billionaire entrepreneur with a triumphant record of value creation and who is not beholden to the elites. Even The Wall Street Journals editorial board has trumpeted Ramaswamys supposed business background repeatedly in glowing editorials.

But the haze of fact-free hype surrounding Ramaswamys business exploits obfuscates some of the key questions about his true business background which have gone unanswered. Already, Ramaswamys standing in the polls dipped just this past week when we revealed his checkered business track recordbut heres a deeper dive as his once-promising candidacy falls like a stone since our revelations.  

Profiting from failure as his investors flounder

If the hype surrounding Ramaswamy is to be believed, he made billions by conjuring drug companies from thin air before branching out into other successful ventures.

In reality, few of Ramaswamys drugs have ever made it past testing, with his failures far outnumbering his successes. In one particularly illuminating example, Ramaswamy first rode to prominence and fortune in 2015 by hyping a supposed drug for Alzheimers named Axovant, which ultimately failed.

An obsequious Forbes profile from 2015 captures the initial hype surrounding Ramaswamys Axovant IPO. Vivek Ramaswamyrang the bell of the NYSE to launch the biggest initial public offering in the history of the American biotechnology industry. Ramaswamys Bermuda-based company, Axovant Sciences, had been formed only eight months earlier, but here it was raising $360 million to develop an Alzheimers drug that had been all but abandoned by GSK. On the first day of trading the stock almost doubled, giving Axovant a market capitalization of nearly $3 billion.after Ramaswamy had persuaded GSK to part with the unproven remedy for a mere $5 million up front.

Axovant, which was 78% owned by Ramaswamys corporate holding company Roivant, then proceeded to blow up after failing FDA tests, with its stock sinking from $200 to 40 cents. Many small investors who followed Ramaswamy lost their shirts. But for Ramaswamy, it was a good year.  His holding company, Roivant, raised $500 million thanks in part to the Axovant hype, all while gradually reducing and diluting its Axovant stake from 78%  to just 25%.  Ramaswamys own tax returns show that the first time Ramaswamy ever made more than ~$1 million in any single year was in 2015, when he suddenly made a whopping $37 million from capital gainsmore money than he had ever made in his life, combined, several times over. His own tax returns show this financial lollapalooza was short lived as he quickly returned to making no more than single-digit millions every year afterward until 2020.

In fact, Ramaswamys tax returns (through 2021) show the only other year in his life he has ever made more than single-digit millions was in 2020, when he suddenly recorded a windfall $175 million in capital gains. That January, he closed a complex deal with Sumitomo of Japan, where he sold 11% of his holding company, Roivant, and some additional odds and ends to Sumitomo for at least $1 billion. The timing was certainly fortuitous, as this was right before Roivant went public via SPAC the following year, subjecting Ramaswamy to mandatory lock-ups restricting stock sales. Despite going to IPO at $10 a share, Roivant subsequently plummeted to a low of $2.81 a share before somewhat rebounding, but still trades below its original IPO price today. Once again, Ramaswamy seemed to have a knack for cashing out at the right time.

Just how wealthy is Vivek Ramaswamy?

Ramaswamy himself is not known for giving straight answers, even delaying the release of his mandatory financial disclosure forms, though he has gone to great lengths to talk a big game. He has grandiosely declared there is no limit to how much he will self-fund his presidential campaign, promising at least $100 million of self-investment.

Although many media accounts label Ramaswamy a billionaire, based on his tax returns through 2021 which we reviewed, his liquid net worth appears to be much smaller, with essentially all of his liquid net worth coming from selling assets in 2015 and 2020 under the circumstances that we detailed above. 

Much of Ramaswamys net worth appears to be tied up in hard-to-value illiquid equity stakes, especially his most substantial holding, a 7% stake in Roivant. The valuation of Ramaswamys stake has fluctuated dramatically amidst massive volatility in the speculative stock, falling to less than $100 million last year but rebounding to $500 million now amidst a surging stock market. However, as an insider, Ramaswamy is tightly bound by SEC rules on when and how he can sell, in addition to lock-ups associated with his SPAC limiting how much stock he can sell, which constrains how much he can tap into his Roivant stake for liquidity.

Ongoing cash losses

Despite bragging that he is not beholden to donor masters thanks to his fortune, virtually all of Ramaswamys companies operate in the red, and none have ever turned a profit consistently. His flagship holding company, Roivant, has never once turned a profit since going public, losing $433 million in 2020, $698 million in 2021, and a whopping $1.12 billion in 2022, with Bloomberg predicting another $1.03 billion in losses in 2023.

As we have shown previously, another one of Ramaswamys flagship ventures, Strive Asset Management, is stagnating with its largest ETF, the Strive US Energy ETF (DRLL), having less AUM today than it did when it was launched in August/September 2022. Its AUM is down nearly 25% from the start of this year alone, and Strives so-called activist campaigns are laughed off by CEOs who think it is a bad joke.

To be sure, many companies operate in the red for prolonged periods of timeAmazon went 20 years before turning a profit. But what this means is that these money-losing companies are continually dependent on new investor funding coming inor else they die. Thus, far from being self-reliant and self-funding, Ramaswamy needs genuine billionaires to sustain his cash-burning enterprises.

A self-aggrandizing origin story

A huge part of Ramaswamys self-created origin story is how he built a successful business when he was still an undergraduate in college, a database called StudentBusinesses.com, and supposedly sold out for millions to the Kaufman Foundation in 2009. He has sat for countless fawning interviews across print media, television, and podcasts focused on his earliest business triumph.

However,  Ramaswamys 2009 tax returns show realized capital gains of only $37,000, hardly a lucrative exit. The following year, in 2010, Ramaswamy reported zero in capital gains.

Similarly, despite bragging that he continued to work as an investment partner while also a full-time student in law school, Ramaswamy received a lucrative scholarship fromof all peoplethe Paul Soros Fellowship, funded by the same Soros family that is a bogeyman to the alt-right. It seems difficult to reconcile why Ramaswamy would have needed to have the Soros family pay for his studies while he was supposedly simultaneously spinning almost suspiciously well-timed investments in Pharmasset and Inhibitex. In a fitting coda, Ramaswamy then reportedly paid to have his Wikipedia page scrubbed of the Soros Fellowship when he declared for president, at the same time he was suing Davos for merely naming him.  

Ramaswamys device to avoid scrutiny of his own record is by flamboyantly making outrageous proposals targeting everythingfrom voting age to retirement age to iconic companies to rescuing banks from collapsemuch like a court jester of corporate governance. Thanks to the frenetic finger-pointing, the facts have not caught up to his myth-makinguntil now.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and Senior Associate Dean at Yale School of Management. 

Steven Tian is the director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

More must-read commentary published by Fortune: