Naturally, my pal and I began by kibitzing about the markets and the tariffs. As he was sermonizing and hypothesizing about the second- and third-order effects—this was his business, after all—I walked him through a
Bill Cohan piece we’d published the previous evening, laying out the shoes that the most important players on Wall Street expect to drop next. The story was titled,
When the Bond Market Panics Like This…
Readers of this Saturday pastoral know of my infinite fondness for Bill, whom I’ve worked with for more than a decade and am honored to call a partner at all times, but
especially times like these. Bill has the unfair advantage of having spent a quarter-century in the senior rungs of premier financial institutions, including Lazard and JPMorgan, before deciding to switch careers and become the culture’s most important financial journalist. I’d woken up at dawn on Wednesday to read his first draft on the White House–induced market collapse, and was stunned by his prescient warning of how easily America’s largest foreign creditors could rattle our economic cages. Bill had foreseen the blinking red lights that prompted Trump himself to get
yippy. As I told my lunch companion, Bill’s analysis had anticipated this entire chapter of Trump’s economic misadventure.
You don’t need me to tell you that we’re living in strange and uncertain, if not unexciting, times. And I couldn’t more strongly recommend that you spend some quiet time this weekend with CNBC on mute as you dig into
When the Bond Market Panics Like This…. It’s the most elegant, thoughtful, and cogent explanation of our manufactured semi-recession that you’ll find anywhere. And Bill will have more in Dry Powder, his private email
par excellence, tomorrow. (
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Meanwhile, if you’re looking to unplug from the financial news this weekend, I’d turn your attention to an absolute gem of a
Julia Ioffe joint. Since last Friday, when the MAGA influencer
Laura Loomer touched off a firing spree at the N.S.C., the blob and bureaucracy have been wondering what
really happened. Surely, there had to be something more afoot than a pot-stirring Millennial firecracker pouring poison in the ear of the president. But, as Julia explains in
Fruit of the Loomer, all hopes of sanity should be dashed. Indeed, the backstory of how the N.S.C. got
Loomered (her expression, not mine) is one of the stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.