Nearly half of IE hospitals lost money last quarter — and the biggest ones lost the most
The most recent hospital financials California has published — covering October through December 2025 — show 14 of the IE's highest-Medi-Cal hospitals running a median loss margin of nearly 17%. Patient payer mix, more than size or ownership, is what separates the hospitals making money from the ones bleeding it.
California ran the federal housing-credit overhaul the opposite way the country did. The IE pipeline rode it.
California was first in the country to implement the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's central housing-credit change — and its fall bond round was the largest on record. For IE developers, the constraint was never finding takers. The question is whether the deals still pencil at IE rents.
Amazon's new freight service runs on the same intermodal bet rebuilding Barstow
Citrus Belt Review: Wall Street spent Wednesday deciding Amazon's full entry into less-than-truckload freight wasn't a threat. The detail the analysts filed under "limitation" — that the service leans on an intermodal container pool — is the exact freight model the Inland Empire is being physically reconstructed to run on.
California ordered 6 gigawatts of new power for data centers. The Inland Empire makes almost none of its own.
Citrus Belt Review: A PJM trade group told the eastern grid this month that the generation shortage is over — more than 130 GW of developers have raised their hands to build for data centers, and the only thing missing is signed contracts and transmission. Run that logic through the Inland Empire and it inverts. The corridor doesn't have a generation glut waiting on buyers. It has barely any generation at all.
The tariff refunds are flowing to whoever held the import-of-record line — which in the IE often isn't the tenant
Citrus Belt Review: Customs is widening the refund portal for the IEEPA tariffs the Supreme Court struck down, and the money is real — but it travels by a rule that cuts against how the IE's distribution economy actually imports. Only the importer of record gets paid. In a region built on outsourced logistics, that party is frequently not the company that ate the cost.
A national factory revival is a warning the Inland Empire reads backward
Citrus Belt Review: U.S. manufacturing just posted its strongest month in four years, and the reason it happened is the reason it should worry the corridor: factories are stockpiling inputs ahead of war-driven price spikes and shortages — inventory that has to be stored somewhere, and the Inland Empire is where the country stores things.
Healthcare's 9% cost jump hits commercial plans the IE largely skips
Citrus Belt Review: PwC's new forecast of a 9% jump in commercial healthcare costs for 2027 — the steepest in 17 years — is built on the part of the insurance market the Inland Empire mostly doesn't use. Four in 10 residents are on Medi-Cal. The squeeze here runs the other way.
The port is planning for less cargo, and the IE already has the empty buildings
Citrus Belt Review: The Port of Los Angeles just adopted a budget that forecasts fewer containers next year. The Inland Empire — the port's inland warehouse — has been pricing that in for three straight quarters.
National private equity is buying construction — but not the IE's contractors
Citrus Belt Review: Private equity poured $31.4 billion into construction across an estimated 453 deals in 2025, the sector's strongest year on record per PitchBook — but almost none of it bought the firms that actually pour the IE's slabs.
National rail is surging on freight the Inland Empire doesn't run on
Citrus Belt Review: The Association of American Railroads reported a 7.8% jump in rail traffic this week, the kind of number that reads as a logistics recovery. Disaggregated, it's a carload story — grain, metals, autos — and the corridor's actual rail input, the import container, is having a quieter year than the headline suggests.
A CDFI cracks the IE's top-ten SBA lenders — writing the small checks others dropped
Citrus Belt Review: Lendistry's eight approvals averaged $160K against a quarter average of $557K — small-dollar lending in a quarter where small loans fell 39%.
Parker Hannifin to buy Corona-based Circor Aerospace from KKR for $2.55 billion
KKR / Circor International: Parker Hannifin agreed on May 21 to buy Circor Aerospace — headquartered in Corona — from private equity firm KKR for $2.55 billion in cash.
IE logistics shed 2,200 jobs as Washington pitches a faster supply chain
Citrus Belt Review: A container-screening plan unveiled at the Port of Los Angeles this week was sold as relief for a strained supply chain. Sixty miles inland, the region that actually moves the freight is shedding the jobs that strain was supposed to support — and the reasons have little to do with how fast a box clears the dock.
Sleep Number bankruptcy puts its Inland Empire store cluster in play
SupplyChainBrain: Sleep Number's Chapter 11 filing and forced 26-day sale put the fate of its nine-store Inland Empire retail cluster — Redlands, Riverside, Rancho Cucamonga, Corona, Menifee, Hesperia, Montclair, Chino Hills, and Temecula — in the hands of a Canadian buyer, even as the company pledges to keep as many locations open as it can.
Tariffs are hitting Inland Empire construction where it's already weakest
Citrus Belt Review: A third of California's commercial real estate developers say they've delayed or killed projects over construction costs and trade tension — and in the Inland Empire, that cost shock is landing on a building market already running at a decade-low pipeline with more than 50 million square feet of empty warehouse space. The national story is that tariffs squeeze contractor margins. Here, they decide whether the project happens at all.
Franchise loans hit a twelve-quarter high across the IE counties
Citrus Belt Review: SBA lenders approved 29 franchise loans in Riverside and San Bernardino counties in Q1 — the most in three years, and four times the share of a year-ago trough.
Bloomington trucking firm changes hands with $2.8M approval
Citrus Belt Review: An ownership change in local freight, part of a quarter where buyout loans doubled their share.
IE small business borrowing: fewer loans, bigger checks
Citrus Belt Review: SBA lenders approved 230 loans for IE businesses in the first quarter — down 23% from a year ago — but the dollars held flat at $128 million. The average loan jumped 30%.
Raising Cane's opens third Ontario location June 15
IE Business Daily: The chicken chain keeps treating the Inland Empire as a growth market — about 100 jobs at the new Ontario Ranch store, its third in the city.
Inland Empire inflation hits 3.4% as gas prices drive the gain
Inland Empire Economic Intelligence: The headline number masks a split: transportation is doing all the work. Strip out gas and autos and the picture is stable to cooling — restaurant inflation is decelerating and shelter costs have leveled off after three rough years.