It's a finpost, this is just for illustrative purposes.

Two big things went down last night. First, treasury yields shot up, indicating someone big - like China or an institutional - had dumped a bunch of bonds. Second, retaliatory tariffs went into effect at midnight.

So it was weird that the market started the day flat. The president tweeted that it would be a good time to "buy!!! djt". It's unclear if it was punctuated as intended which probably means it was intentionally unclear.

Poor_Life-choices42

Only a matter of time before Kid Rock is brought onto CNBC to explain how tariffs were successful for a 4 year period back in 1677.

The previous tariff extensions had come hours before, then hours after the measures took effect. At market open we were eight hours past the midnight activation of the escalatory tariffs, meaning we were deeper into it than the previous spats with just Canada and Mexico. The previous day had started up 3-4% and ended the inverse of that so I was wary of a rugpull.

oatmeal-claypole

seen on twitter How it appears to me right now (would be happy to be wrong): Trump doesn't want to negotiate Fed becoming irrelevant to escalating situation Only thing that stops this train is legislative or judicial intervention We are a lot more pain away from that

The news dropped in the early afternoon: retaliatory tariffs on everyone except China would be pushed right 90 days. The market immediately clawed back all but a few percent of its post-Liberation Day losses.

abroadbroadband

Nobody negotiates like him, that's for sure The guy just negotiated with himself for a week and changed his mind

"Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."

miata_only

Call volume spiked like hell before the tweet. I'm sure it was just a coincidence though, you guys.

It'll be interested to see the tax returns of people connected to the president.

31andnotdone

so the fake news leak the other day was just a test to see how far otm calls they should buy?

A few thoughts

• It's reassuring to know that we'll have an emergency 90 days from now and that the executive will be able to take swift action by announcing its retaliatory tariffs. I'm happy to see the Constitution working as intended.
• Per the image above, the treasury secretary claimed that we were never going to go through with the retaliatory tariffs. It's not like the administration had a lot of credibility to begin with, but this doesn't do it any favors. If this can be believed, however, it indicates that either China was the target of the tariff war (beyond the base 10%) or they happened to be the only country to really push back.
• The 90-day pause sounds suspiciously like the dubious leak mentioned Monday.

The markets may have been excessively euphoric considering that, as things stand, business with China just got twice as expensive. Maybe we'll see the remaining tariffs pause tomorrow when Trump takes calls from Bezos and Walton.

Icommandyou

Markets aren't pricing in shit, it's all just sentiment driven right now

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Time capsule moment: people posted Ghibli AI selfies on social media, everyone loathed it. But I needed a picture with medicine in the color of stonks going down.

A quick follow-up to yesterday's finpost: things didn't go quite as expected but the White House is continuing to administer 'medicine' to Wall Street. Surprised no one's said "I'm not against the medicine, I'm against the mandate".


Before New York woke up, bears had already run amok at other exchanges.

Yesterday I reposted Bill Ackman's simpish request for a three-month pause of the tariffpocalpyse. That tweet seems to have started a game of telephone:

CoolWerewolf

What just happened? At 10:10 AM ET, rumors emerged that the White House was considering a "90-day tariff pause." At 10:15 AM ET, CNBC reported that Trump is considering a 90-day pause on tariffs for ALL countries except for China. By 10:18 AM ET, the S&P 500 had added over +$3 TRILLION in market cap from its low. At 10:25 AM ET, reports emerged that the White House was "unaware" of Trump considering a 90-day pause. At 10:26 AM ET, CNBC reports that the 90-day tariff pause headlines were incorrect. At 10:34 AM ET, the White House officially called the tariff pause headlines "fake news." By 10:40 AM ET, the S&P 500 erased -$2.5 TRILLION of market cap from its high, 22 minutes prior. Never in history have we seen something like this.

Indexes ended the day close to flat (well, DJIA was down almost 1% but nobody cares about the Dow).


The WSB daily thread had more than 40k comments; that is, many were gathered around the water cooler to shitpost about their losses.

adwise27

I think I am going to post "no fucking way" every 45 minutes today just to cause a little extra stress for everyone

Theinsulated

SPY down 1% - Joe is destroying America. SPY down 15% - We need to trust Trump's instincts.

zlordbeats

NOBODY CARES WHAT JA RULE THINKS IN A TIME LIKE THIS

Apparently Vietnam's offer of free trade was rejected by the White House as not being good enough. There seems to be no certainty on what the administration actually wants from its trade partners. Perhaps it's all being done behind closed doors (or the Tariff PC Small Group). But with x economic advisors * y countries, you'd expect something to have leaked by now.

New Republic

Miran argued that other countries ought to comply with Trump's demands for more money because of the "global public goods" that the U.S. provides, including global security and the dollar and other reserve assets, "which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known."

Somehow pax americana has been twisted into mobsters demanding protection money.

China seems to have drawn more ire from the president than even Canada.

China's economy is big and complex and I won't pretend to understand it beyond the basics like manufacturing, technology, and currency. Another elementary-level observation: depending on who you ask, China is either in a bubble or - as a huge country with vast resources and centralized power - impossible to harm economically.

Ever since the Evergrande thing, everyone knows that an outsized portion of China's GDP comes from domestic real estate that's often unoccupied or unbuilt. This reminds bubble theorists of the the subprime meltdown of '08 and so they think the collapse is imminent. Well, they've thought a collapse was imminent for the past three years. It would seem that global-scale manufacturing go a long way to ensuring financial stability. That is, as long as there's plenty of GDP to go around, Beijing can backfill failing sectors like everyone did during covid.

China is also the US president's arch nemesis. Probably. Who even knows. But let's pretend for a moment that he really wants to beat China or feels he needs to do so to accomplish a political objective. Escalatory tariffs with China's largest trading partner could be a calculated (or inadvertent) attack on the nonfailing pillar of China's economy. Perhaps the Mexico and Canada and EU noise is just a smokescreen for the main target. On the other hand, I can't think of why a global tariff war would be necessary - it seems like it'd be smarter to only battle on one front. It won't matter if both leaders decide to play hardball, the outcome would be the same.

I don't imagine the US or China have rosey long term economic prospects with a protracted 50-100% mutual tariff rate. So either the White House is hoping to bully an advantageous trade deal out of Beijing or they're poking at what it perceives to be a bubble and hoping to see a pop. We've seen markets, manufacturing, and supply chains recover from adversity (covid, war, Crowdstrike). But sometimes the damage cannot be undone - namely bankruptcies/liquidation. Perhaps the plan is to push large portions of the Chinese economy past the brink such that only foreign investment can bail it out.

I doubt it will work, but maybe that's the plan.

The floodgates are open, we can now reply to everything with this one annoying phrase.

I was on a large boat for Liberation Day but, after returning, got caught up on last week's sequential 3% market routs. And now after hours and Asian markets are looking just as bad going into Monday. Kind of feels like covid.

EViLTeW

On the flip side, you have to take everything Trump says literally, because when you don't, he does it. You shouldn't assume it's all true, but you have to assume it could be.

The market is supposed to price in future events as they progressively become more likely. And so I got a chuckle from the fact that after threatening and pausing tariffs with Canada and Mexico a couple of times, the market didn't seem to think Liberation Day was actually going to happen.

In my tariffpost I neglected to mention that trade policy is ordinarily a power of Congress. Trump used the supposed border and fentanyl crises to invoke emergency/wartime powers to impose the import duties. This was addressed pretty directly in his Time interview:

Time

Time: I'm curious. You have control of Congress, both houses. Much of your agenda is executive driven. Why? Trump: Um... Time: You have the power to do things legislatively. Trump: Yeah? Time: So why is so much of your agenda executive driven? Trump: I don't know what you mean by that. Time: Well, you said lots of what you can do is without- Trump: Oh, like executive orders. Time: Yeah. Trump: Well, I think that Congress should have behaved differently when it came to the border. I ended up taking the money. You know, I built, you know, hundreds of miles of wall, but I took it from the military because I considered it an invasion.

Since the president has wide discretion in determining emergencies, I don't imagine we'll see a successful legal challenge to the emergency that has grown from our terrestrial borders to the entire planet.

Outspoken hedge fund manager Bill Ackman took to Twitter to beg for tariff reprieve while being careful not to sound like he was second-guessing the president. The result was a textwall that I am reproducing in its entirety to illustrate the point:

Bill Ackman

The country is 100% behind the president on fixing a global system of tariffs that has disadvantaged the country. But, business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust. President @realDonaldTrump has elevated the tariff issue to the most important geopolitical issue in the world, and he has gotten everyone's attention. So far, so good. And yes, other nations have taken advantage of the U.S. by protecting their home industries at the expense of millions of our jobs and economic growth in our country. But, by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital. The president has an opportunity to call a 90-day time out, negotiate and resolve unfair asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country. If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate. What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large, long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war? I don't know of one who will do so. When markets crash, new investment stops, consumers stop spending money, and businesses have no choice but to curtail investment and fire workers. And it is not just the big companies that will suffer. Small and medium size businesses and entrepreneurs will experience much greater pain. Almost no business can pass through an overnight massive increase in costs to their customers. And that's true even if they have no debt, and, unfortunately, there is a massive amount of leverage in the system. Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe. The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president - in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress - are going to be severely negative. This is not what we voted for. The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system. Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail.

We all remember the tech luminaries - Zuck, Elon, Sundar, Bezos - seated at the inauguration. And the CEO pilgrammages to Mar-a-Lago. It seemed like they had made the Faustian bargain to avoid running afoul of the administration's capricious use of executive power. Were business leaders really not looped in that the tariffs were for real? Were they not the intended beneficiaries? Here's something from a December WSB comment on a Benzinga article about then-prospective tariffs:

bmeisler

The bottom 50 percentile of Americans essentially pay no income tax. They do, of course pay sales, tax, property tax - even if they rent they paying their landlord's property tax - excise taxes, etc., all of which are extremely regressive. Tariffs would be an even more regressive tax., That would barely affect the richest Americans. Agree that we're well on our way to another gilded age - but tariffs would put it into overdrive.

I'm not rooting for a gilded age but I'm confused that a hedge fund manager would be complaining about a market pullback caused by policies promised a year ago.

President Trump

Energy prices are down, Interest Rates are down, Inflation is down, even Eggs are down 69%, and Jobs are UP, all within two months - A BIG WIN for America. CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!

We might see Trump attempt to fire Jerome Powell. It wouldn't be legal but the illegality is something that does not sit well with between 2 and 6 Supreme Court justices. Eliminating independent agencies is on the P2025 bucket list so perhaps this will be the firing that escalates the matter to the Roberts court.

orockers

The only presidents I care about are dead and green. Benny Franklin ya feel me???

Before getting on the boat last week I weighed the Liberation Day outlook. Since Trump gave it a stupid name, I was inclined to believe the tariff deadline wouldn't be extended: SH, UVXY. But calls were cheap so I also got some TQQQ in case there was a surprise reversal.

The amount of market pullback and outcry has me expecting a tariff pause from the White House in the coming days. OTM ͥ calls might be my Monday morning buy.


The WSB daily thread will probably be fairly entertaining this week.

BooBrew32

Cramer: (while naked, chugging Jim Beam) THEY KNOW NOTHING!! THEY KNOW NOTHING!!

I've been on a couple of cruises - a three-day Ensenada party boat and a Caribbean family cruise. They aren't really my cup of tea but when Cheryl says you should go, you need a pretty good reason not to. Not lost in the calculus was the fact the selected cruise was sailing out of our local harbor and was thereby simpler than other vacation itineraries. Most notably, it was a Disney cruise. Danielle hasn't watched much Disney but likes her Star Wars books and really likes pools. Jessica hates everything Disney stands for and sings/hums the music frequently.

Travel guide

When we were walking off the boat at the end of the trip, a lady in front of me remarked to her daughter that she (the mother) should start a cruise blog to record and share everything she'd learned. One needn't look hard to find cruise or Disney mom-bloggers and we leveraged their knowledge via Cheryl's pre-cruise research. So I guess that's me now, and cheers to Random Lady From the Disembarkation Ramp for wanting to keep the outer web alive.


I think the in-room informercial said Wonder was built in 1999. That would put its construction in the modern cuise era but a decade before ships started getting rollercoasters and climbing walls and such. Like other mega cruise ships, Wonder felt like a floating casino (without gambling, not even sabacc) with similar decor and eclectic theming (Luxor, Paris, Caesar's -> various Disney analogues).

Accommodations

For whatever reason I expected everything on the ship to be cramped. The common areas certainly were not; they felt like normal hotel lobby, small pub, or crowded restaurant. Our ~300 sq ft stateroom was more aligned with my expectations but wide enough to fit a king bed with room to walk around it (I can only speak for the bougie Deck 8 rooms though). The patio provided a nice view of the Pacific but was small and subject to inhospitable weather. Since the couch wasn't remotely comfortable, I found myself inclined to either be in bed or roaming the ship. Certainly I prefer to spend vacation time doing experiential things and not on the couch, at ages 4 and 40 it's important to have ample downtime.

Amenities

The ship has two small all-ages pools, a single adult pool, and a couple of hot tubs. The all-ages pools were packed during all but the worst weather and the hot tubs were occupied almost every time I checked. Wonder has a three-story waterslide with a nice view and a very gentle incline. I took Dani on it twice, waiting ten and then fifteen minutes for our turn.

Like any all-inclusive resort, Wonder has a variety of eateries open for various periods throughout the day. Lunch and dinner were scheduled/seated with menus and wait staff. A variety of theaters (stage and screen) had activities and movie screenings throughout the trip.

App

Disney really wants you to do everything from their app. I'm not really an app guy, so I let Jes handle that part of things. It probably would have been wise to put it on some wifi-connected device since it has chat and, critically, notifications from the kids' club (i.e. "your child is ready to go").

Wonder doesn't have much Star Wars decor, the concierge lounge is one exception.

'Concierge' doesn't actually have a grave over the first 'e' but since it makes the word look classier I went for it. We paid (I'm told) roughly double the equivalent room rate to get access to concierge amenities for our voyage. The ones I remember:

• Priority boarding (early arrival) and disembarkation (front of the boat exit line, same CBP line)
• Priority for bookable activities
• Free popcorn
• Access to an exclusive lounge

Lounge

Since the staterooms aren't particularly spacious, the concierge lounge became our collective home away from home away from home. It was nice that our rooms were almost directly under the lounge, two decks below.

The lounge had the all-important cappucino machine and a rotating selection of pastries and snacks.

For quick eats, there was a buffet and a collection of walk-up restaurants with chicken tenders and burgers and soups. For lunch and dinner, we sat at one of the three larger restaurants. In terms of quality, the closest terrestrial equivalent to the food on Wonder would probably be Outback Steakhouse - mass market dining masquerading as a fancier establishment yet unquestionably preferable to the bottom-tier chains (whose names include Apple, Chili, and Olive).

The food was, more or less, what I expected with two notable exceptions: a delicious samosa and some egg noodles whose texture and inconsistent diameter suggested they were handmade. I won't go so far as to say these dishes knocked my pirate socks off, but they were good and they left me disappointed by how much cuisine was crowded out of the menu by steakhouse fare. It's not easy to serve great steak or fish, particularly when it has to sit on ice for numerous days and be served to thousands of guests. The cruise food could more easily punch above its weight by offering dishes not so focused on the palate of middle America.

One last thing that is very important to me: all of the bread was hard as a rock. There was actually one exception: Tiana's Place had non-rock bread. I'm not familiar with the logistics of large scale breadmaking but would have happily traded a restaurant option or lower guest deck for some fresh loaves.

Kids' club

This was during an uncrowded parent walkthrough.

I heard from various sources that my daughter would want to go to the oceaneer club and never return. I was willing to settle for a happy medium. Alas, while the slide was a highlight for little Dani, she didn't really like being at the club on her own. She's been fine with daycare and school since a very young age so I imagine her disinterest in oceaneering was one or more of these reasons:

• All ages (4-10) share the same area
• There were a lot of kids there
• Dani isn't super familiar with the SF kids we traveled with

Regular activities

The ship's bars and theaters seem to have something going on every half hour or so. We did movie quote trivia, Star Wars trivia, origami, 3d character crafting, and design-a-kuzy. While it was nice to have things to simply show up to, the execution on everything felt pretty half-assed. The pub trivias were just twenty rapid fire questions with scoring, the origami was taught by a guy reading from an origami book, and there was "here's a white kuzy and some sharpies".

Movies and shows

The ship has a few theaters that showed various Disney films throughout the day. Each evening featured a live show with the actors and actresses that did the Disney character photo op sessions. Jes went to these while I did bedtime, she said the production quality was as good as any of the on-tour musicals we've seen (Book of Mormon, Rent, Hamilton, Lion King, etc.). The dinners also each had a mini-show between the final course and dessert.

I had vague aspirations to feign seasickness and spend the entire cruise in the stateroom watching all of the Star Wars streaming serieses since I've seen none of them. Alas, while the entertainment system has a bunch of Disney/Marvel/Star Wars movies available, the only non-film option was a handful of two-minute shorts with Mickey talking over wildlife footage.

Tastings

There were a variety of add-on ($50-100) adult beverage tastings - whiskey, tequila, wine, martini, mixed drinks, to name a few. I did the whiskey one, Jes the tequila one, all of the parents managed to make the mixology seminar. The humor-laced spiels were entertaining and informative since I had zero knowledge about any of the subjects. Mostly it was a great time to catch up with my SF friends and promise to try a 'trash can iced tea'.

Excursions

I learned long ago that any cruise ship or resort 'excursion' is the slowest, most watered-down version of whatever activity they advertise. It didn't really matter, there wasn't much available for the Pacific Ocean in April.

Catalina

I was hoping to get a Casino Point dive in during our ten-ish hours in Catalina. Since Cheryl said a recent cruise had to cancel the stop due to weather, I held off booking the dive. Sure enough, our Catalina day turned into a day at sea.

Ensenada

Ensenada harbor, complete with rainbow and oil slick.

We didn't plan to get off the boat in Ensenada but since the wind cancelled Catalina we decided to stretch our legs. It's the same as it was 20 years ago and the same as TJ: tchotchkes, bars, and shady 18+ stuff. On our first lap around town Zac set his sights on Sr Poblano's taqueria but needed to return to get the kids from the club. So the guys did a second lap.

Pirate night

It's pretty much what it sounds like.

Princesses and stuff

One of the bookable activities for kids is a princess makeover that includes a dress and heavy dusting of glitter. At the moment, this isn't Dani's cup of tea. She might have gone for a Star Wars option but Princesses Leia and Amidala were not available, also Duckduckgo's AI assistant says:

DDG Assist

Rey is not officially recognized as a princess, despite being the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine.

Danielle did enjoy a couple of cartoon character photo ops and hesitantly met Ariel and Tiana when we went with the other SF kids.

It was great to see friends and take a trip that didn't require a drive or flight. That said, even with the premium booking I was never able to find a seat in the hot tub, walk right onto the waterslide, or share more than a 3' corner of the all-ages pool with my kid. In bad weather. These constitute 60% of the breadth of activities Dani and I had set our respective sights on. Of course, I would hang out with my college buddies and be happy as a clam, Dani would binge Disney movies without complaint, but there are plenty of places that offer those things and an available pool. To be fair, not many of them have nightly Disney musicals so Jes would be ship outta luck.


Dani has had a couple of weeks off schools so there's been some fun with Grandma and a trip to Legoland. Oh yeah, Dani and I spent part of a morning on the cruise watching Lego Star Wars. We both loved it.