So grateful for the birth of our son Lucas.

Brilliant essay by Mana Afsari. thepointmag.com/politics/last-…

Lina Kahn still doing God’s work. nytimes.com/2025/02/04/opi…

Combined with the China tariff changes slated for tomorrow, Trump’s tariff are a $130 billion annual tax increase on Americans (almost $1,000 per household on average) and will shrink American incomes by 1.2% (on a dynamic basis) this year.

Probably stating the obvious here, but these tariffs are going to make building new homes significantly more expensive, which is bad for our ongoing housing shortage.

Unless we all wake up from this collective tariffs nightmare, the reality is recession. Recession with inflation, which is called stagflation. It's the worst kind of recession, because people lose their jobs and prices stay high along with interest rates.

President Trump believes that the key to transforming America is to revive factories and foundries across this country. But the effort to revive manufacturing via protectionism defies basic economics. It will only lead to stagnation. My take:

Earlier on Bloomberg TV: Tariffs are not tax cuts, and tariffs are not the easy way to pay for actual tax cuts. Lower-income and many middle-income Americans would be worse off with a trade war and tax cut extension.

A couple of folks have crunched the numbers (Evercore ISI - their chart, below; Omair Sharif) and concluded that the U.S. weighted average tariff, with all Trump's new orders in effect, will be higher than under Smoot-Hawley.

I miss Gary Cohn so fucking much.

Arsenal. No words...

Even Kylian Mbappé couldn't deny Declan Rice's second free kick 😮‍💨

You know it's really going down when Joe is up at almost midnight

Fox News is in full-on Trump fluffing mode, calling it the art of the deal, blah blah...But Charles Gasparino is popping their propaganda bubble and saying that Trump blinked because of a mass sale of bonds by Japan, and that we still have no deals done.

Up to an hour ago, there was a debate on what would convince the US Administration to opt for some type of pause on tariffs. Would it be Congress, the President's advisors, business leaders, the legal system, markets, or something else? We got the answer today: It's the

Why did Trump just cave? Because when the US borrows money it does so by selling Treasury bonds. Mostly to China, Japan, Europe. Overnight there was a sudden spike in holders dumping their bonds. Trump picked a fight with our creditors, and our creditors just won.

The bond market made him tap out

"Bond investors are the economy's bond vigilantes. ... So if the fiscal and monetary authorities won’t regulate the economy, the bond investors will. The economy will be run by vigilantes in the credit markets.” Ed Yardeni, 1983

WHAT COMES NEXT AFTER 'BLINK WEDNESDAY' In the Odd Lots Newsletter, the big things that are on my mind, as we watch markets sink yet again in this new era of high tariffs and extreme uncertainty about how the world is going to look three months from now

Seems like a great time to do this 😐