Welcome back to Dry Powder. I’m Bill Cohan.

Forgive the phrase, but we’re undeniably in the midst of a Kamala mania, with the Democratic presidential nominee raking in some $310 million from donors over the past fortnight. Wowza. On Monday, I called up Rufus Gifford, Harris’s finance chair, who was celebrating his 50th birthday on Nantucket, for a firsthand account of the fundraising rush, and to hear how the campaign is preparing for the final three-month sprint to November 7.

But first…

• About that “market correction”…: Instead of freaking out every time the market takes a tumble, as happened on Monday, we would all be much better served by realizing how incredibly healthy it is for financial markets to let out some steam every once in a while, especially considering the equity markets have been on a tear for the past few years. The S&P 500 is up 80 percent in the past five years, including Monday’s sell-off. Is that something to be freaking out about, or should we be thanking our good fortune for having been invested in the U.S. stock market during that time? Perhaps certain CNBC guests should take a chill pill.

  Yes, there was a whole lot of digital ink spilled this week about the collapse of the yen “carry trade,” and the role that played in starting the market rout in Tokyo, which then spread around the globe. But that’s just Wall Street mumbo jumbo to explain a long-overdue market correction, driven mostly by the stocks of a handful of technology companies that have been hyping their investments in artificial intelligence ad nauseam, while tacking on billions, and in some cases trillions, of dollars onto their enterprise values. That was unsustainable, obviously.

  I also think the reports that Warren Buffett had sold half of his highly appreciated stakes in both Apple and Bank of America, and that he is now sitting on a cash hoard of nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, is incredibly bullish, although I am sure that news added to Monday’s market rout. Which leads me to one of my favorite Buffett maxims: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy only when others are fearful.”

• Boeing, we have a problem: For all the chaos surrounding the 737 Max airplane, with exit doors flying off their bolts, the first big problem that the new Boeing C.E.O. Kelly Ortberg must solve is returning Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth from the International Space Station. The veteran NASA astronauts launched on Boeing’s inaugural crewed Starliner mission, on June 5, and then docked into the I.S.S. as scheduled. The mission was supposed to last around 10 days; they have now been in space for 63 days, after a mysterious problem developed with the Starliner’s thrusters and propulsion system.

  NASA, which has been working with Boeing to try to solve the problem, said it will continue testing Starliner’s propulsion system into next week, with a hoped-for return to Earth for the two astronauts sometime thereafter—assuming the spacecraft can make it back. On Wednesday, however, NASA officials conceded the problems could be more serious than originally thought and that the spaceship may return to Earth without the two astronauts. If that were to happen, believe it or not, one of Elon Musk’s rockets, with two astronauts aboard, would rendezvous with the space station instead, before all returning together on the SpaceX craft sometime in 2025.

  For its part, Boeing is certain everything will work out just fine. “Boeing remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft and its ability to return safely with crew,” the company said in a recent statement. “We continue to support NASA’s requests for additional testing, data, analysis and reviews to affirm the spacecraft’s safe undocking and landing capabilities.” Let’s get them home, Kelly.

Finally, before tonight’s main event, an excerpt from my partner Marion Maneker’s recent conversation with Jeffrey Gundlach, the C.E.O. of DoubleLine Capital and the guy occasionally known as “the bond king,” about his art market philosophy and the best trade of his life…

• Gundlach & Loaded: One day in 2002, while searching for a John Singer Sargent painting in London’s Tate Gallery, Gundlach stumbled across a painter copying a Mondrian. Intrigued, he started reading the museum’s explanatory text. “All of a sudden, it was like the clouds parted and the sun came out,” he said, describing his Damascene conversion. “I thought, instantaneously, This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. That’s how I started collecting more important work.”

  In pursuit of more important work, Gundlach started buying at auction. He was particularly interested in mid-century painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. “The first really expensive painting I bought was my Rauschenberg,” Gundlach said. He had stopped in at a Christie’s auction preview where they had a private room with six or eight paintings. The one that caught Gundlach’s eye was a Rauschenberg combine painting from 1955—only Gundlach didn’t know anything about Rauschenberg. “The name didn’t mean anything to me,” he recalled. Even so, he asked for the estimate. When the specialist said “two to three,” Gundlach assumed that meant two to three hundred thousand dollars. It turned out that meant millions, but that wasn’t really a stretch, either. “I had no significant knowledge of what Rauschenberg’s work and practice was all about,” Gundlach remembered. “I just really liked it, and so I ended up buying it.”

  In 2007, he bought Warhol’s Lemon Marilyn, a smaller 1962 version of the famous Marilyn Monroe image that Warhol used several different ways. The most famous of these Marilyns are the large 40-inch-square versions in red, orange, blue, turquoise, and sage blue, which are owned by a pantheon of big-money collectors including Philip Niarchos, Ken Griffin, Peter Brant, Steven Cohen, and Larry Gagosian. The Orange Marilyn sold privately to Griffin for $240 million. Gagosian bought the sage blue one for $195 million at auction.

  Gundlach’s Lemon Marilyn is only half the size, but he doesn’t mind. He paid a mere $28 million for it in 2007, and purchased it with house money, as far as he is concerned. After Société Générale bought TCW, he received stock in the French bank, which was soaring pre-Lehman and pre-Bear. But Gundlach knew the profits that were driving the rally were based on what ended up being disastrous lending. He sold his stock at what turned out to be the highest price at which Société Générale ever traded. “That was actually the best trade of my life,” he told me. (SocGen now trades at 10 percent of its peak 17 years ago.) “I took the proceeds and bought the Lemon Marilyn. It’s probably up at least 300 percent, if not more. That’s what we call a good trade.” [Read the full story here]

It’s no exaggeration to say that money is in Rufus’s D.N.A. His father is Chad Gifford, the legendary Boston banker and C.E.O. of Bank of Boston, and the former chairman of the board of Bank of America. And he’s not new to politics, either. Before Harris tapped him, Rufus was the finance chair of Biden’s reelection effort, and he held a similar job during Obama’s 2012 campaign. After that successful race, Obama named him the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, an appointment he held until January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated. Upon his return from Europe, Gifford ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in Massachusetts, then joined Biden’s 2020 campaign as deputy campaign manager. After the election, Gifford was named chief of protocol for the United States, a diplomatic advisory post he held until around a year ago, when he moved over to the Biden reelect.

Now focused on electing Harris, he said that his job over the next three months is to create an environment where “fundraising can thrive.” Gifford’s partner in this endeavor remains Jeffrey Katzenberg, who refers to their pairing as akin to Batman and Robin’s. “He calls me Batman,” Gifford said. “I question whether or not that’s accurate, but Jeffrey and I are in lockstep on pretty much everything we’re doing.”

That goes beyond just asking people for money, he said: Their focus is to “create connectivity” between “the outside world,” the “donor class,” and the campaign. But even for a Democratic fundraising veteran, the past two weeks have been remarkable, he said, and there has been “a level of enthusiasm that I haven’t seen ever, honestly, before in my career.” Naturally, I wondered how this present moment compared to his experience with Obama in 2012. “By sheer dollars and enthusiasm, in a short amount of time—obviously, we’re only two weeks into this campaign with a V.P. at the top of the ticket—the level of enthusiasm that we are seeing is unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before, including Obama,” he said.

Gifford agreed with what business executive Charles Phillips told me the other day: There could be an element of a “relief rally” in the tsunami of support for Kamala—a veritable Kamalapalooza. “And we’ve got to keep it going,” he said. “We’re under no illusions that this is going to be easy. We know it’s going to be extremely hard, and an extremely close election. But that energy is not just wind in the sails for our team and our staff, it’s allowing us to have the resources and the volunteer manpower to execute our vision and execute our path to victory. And that’s very encouraging as well.”

He supported Biden’s decision, and “assuming we win,” believes that it will burnish and protect his legacy. “He’s a very unique and heroic American figure, and I believe that people are going to see that more and more in the days, weeks, and months to come,” he said. “I don’t think this decision was selfish by any stretch of the imagination. I think that this was about the country beyond anything else.”

Having just turned 50, Gifford said that his job—which he describes as a “24-7” position—is not as easy as it used to be when he was younger. But he keeps at it not only because he believes Kamala can win, but because “ensuring that Donald Trump does not get anywhere near the Oval Office is a top priority of mine.” He said he’s looking forward to the day when MAGA is no longer a substantial portion of the American electorate, “because it’s certainly not the United States I know.” And he feels that day approaching when he watches the crowds at the Harris rallies and counts the donations flooding into the campaign from everyday Americans. “I try to focus less on the negativity and sort of the anti-American sentiment that comes out of [Trump’s] mouth every day—the lies and disparaging remarks about fellow Americans,” he said. “I find it to be so disturbing. I try to focus less on that and more on what we’re in this for, and that’s what I’m going to continue to do.”

Gifford said that he must keep his foot on the gas, since he believes nothing less than the future of American democracy is on the ballot. “It’s actually extraordinarily important for all Americans to understand the stakes in this election, and do all they can to participate, whatever that means,” he said. “And I hope they do, because I really do believe that the contrast between our campaign and their campaign is starker than any I’ve seen before in my young 50 years, and that this is arguably the most important American election in 150 years. I know that there are people on the other side who feel similarly, but feel the exact opposite. I try to understand their sentiment, but I simply don’t. And I do believe that who we are as a people, as a nation, will be reflected in November.”