Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, Defining ‘Wall Street’)

“Wall Street. Collective noun for the financial community in lower Manhattan, derived from the wall that early Dutch brokers erected in the seventeenth century to keep out angry, tomahawk-wielding clients.”—American humorist and novelist Christopher Buckley, “Shouts and Murmurs: A No-Bull Guide to Investment Terms,” The New Yorker, July 9, 2001

Those angry clients have been turning into quite a throng in the past week or so, what with watching the value of their stocks and bonds shriveling in the wake of President Trump’s tariff maneuvers. Question: they’d never descend on the Capitol or even the White House after this, would they?

Well, if they did, they wouldn’t be “angry, tomahawk-wielding clients.” Instead, to borrow the term used about certain overly excited Washington visitors on January 6, 2021 that were subsequently pardoned, they’d be merely “tourists.”