Photo of the Day: All-Out for Halloween, in a Big Way

Over the last 30 to 40 years, Halloween decorations have increasingly filled the lawns where I live in Northern New Jersey. It’s been a way for baby boomers Gen Xers (and, I guess now, Millennials and Gen Z) to relive their childhoods, and on a scale that their budget-conscious ancestors, after being raised during the Great Depression, would never have dreamed of embracing.

Recently I took this photo several miles from my home. What you see here is only half of all of the figures on the lawn and front porch of this suburban house.

Nor does this photo convey the sounds coming from this ghoulish assembly. Just passing on  the street—not even stepping on the lawn—is enough to elicit the witch on the right-hand side, for instance, to cackle, “Lost your way? Don’t be afraid—I’ll show you! Heee-heee-haaa-haaa!”

This year, Halloween splurging on decorations, masks, makeup, costumes, and candy has continued, despite the threat of tariffs. According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween spending is expected to reach $13.1 billion this year, breaking its prior record of $12.2 billion.

Omar Villafranca’s CBS News report from a month ago indicates that consumers are hitting discount stores and merchants are absorbing as many of the tariff costs (5% to 19% on costumes manufactured overseas) as possible, but there’s only so much they can do. A fog machine sold by a Fort Worth merchant mentioned in the article, for instance, sold for $58 last year but $74 now.

And chocolate candy? The price of the cocoa used for this has more than doubled since the beginning of 2024, a casualty of changing weather patterns (heavy rains followed by El Nino-induced droughts leading to black pod disease and crop rot, according to a USA Today report earlier this month by Betty Lin-Fisher and Carlie Procell).

Quote of the Day (Jen Wieczner, on ‘The Daily Whipsaw Induced by the Tariffs’)

“The daily whipsaw induced by the tariffs feels fundamentally different from crashes past, as if the deep-seated rules underlying the usual chaos of buying and selling no longer apply now that a single man has managed to instigate a financial crisis on an inane whim….

“As… traders were waiting [in early April] with a mix of dread and anticipation for the next headline or Truth Social post to drop, some had already declared the end of an era. Tom Lee, an investor who runs a firm called Fundstrat that distributes market analyses to more than 10,000 clients and manages $900 million, is known on the street for his evangelical enthusiasm that stocks would rise ever upward in the long term. But in a note to his clients, he admitted his zeal might have been misplaced. Trump, he said, had committed ‘a fundamental breach of capitalism's regulatory covenant.’ It's one that could reverberate with unpredictable consequences for a long time to come, even if the tariffs are eventually repealed and their champion replaced. Or as Spencer Hakimian, who manages a $78 million hedge fund called Tolou Capital, told me, ‘I did not think for one second he was going to go this crazy.’”— American journalist Jen Wieczner, “Nightmare on Wall Street,” New York Magazine, Apr. 21-May 4, 2025

The word that comes to mind when I read this passage—and the larger New York cover story from which it derives—is schadenfreude, the German term for joy felt at another’s misfortune.

Or, in the words of “Cell Block Tango,” the cynical, show-stopping number from the musical Chicago: “They had it coming.”

You’re not going to find much sympathy from me on the plight of Wall Street—or, more broadly, executives at America’s largest corporations—following the Trump tariffs, nor their higher costs because of fewer low-wage workers in the wake of deporting undocumented workers.

Far too many of these captains of industry shared what Financial Times reporters Sam Fleming, Harriet Agnew and Gregory Meyer have called “Trump’s belief that corporate animal spirits would be unleashed by deregulation, tax cuts and hacking back bureaucracy.”

The 1% were all too willing to disregard the evidence from the President’s first term of his chaotic management style and maddening caprice. And that “fundamental breach of capitalism's regulatory covenant”? How is that any worse than his violation of time-honored bipartisan norms about a seamless transfer of power on January 6, 2021?

As late as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the week of Trump’s second inauguration, one bank executive exclaimed, according to Fleming, Agnew and Meyer: “It’s five minutes to midnight for Europe,” adding, “Everyone is all-in on America.”

What a difference a few months—and stratospheric tariffs—can make.

Traders may have breathed sighs of relief after Trump scaled back his initial plans, pausing the stiffest tariffs on most countries for 90 days. But that would still leave a baseline 10% rate—and that’s not counting the threats he made to China.

And their heart palpitations surely returned with yesterday’s news that the President was now threatening to impose a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union and “at least” a 25% import tax on Apple iPhones not manufactured in the US.

In a Democratic administration, you could take it to the bank that cries of “creeping socialism” would ring across Corporate America at any such move that would add to the cost of doing business. But you’ll be lucky to hear a squeak, let alone a howl, from this crew today.

Nobody, but nobody, wants to get Trump mad, lest he denounce them on social media. 

I hope Jeff Bezos went to an ENT specialist after hearing the President complain in a phone call about Amazon’s projected, then hastily withdrawn, plan to display costs of US tariffs next to prices for certain products. And Doug McMillon surely have felt a bad case of acid reflux coming on when Trump urged the Walmart CEO to “eat the tariffs.”

Bezos, McMillon, their C-suite comrades, and Wall Street will likely get their tax cuts, all right, courtesy of the “big, beautiful bill” just passed by the GOP-dominated House of Representatives. But it’s part of a package that’s estimated to add $5.2 trillion to US debt, further destabilizing an already anxious bond market—not to mention jittery consumers.

So now, Wall Street waits…and wonders: What will this madman do next?

Quote of the Day (Yaroslav Trofimov, on the Immediate Impact of ‘Worsening Relations Between America and Its Allies’)

“Worsening relations between America and its allies, some of which faced the stiffest tariffs under Trump's initial order, are already having a real effect. Amid tales of harassment and detention by U.S. immigration authorities, overseas arrivals at American airports slumped 11.6% in March. Universities, long a major source of America's global influence, are suffering too, just as government funding for research is being slashed. The U.S. has been losing market share in international education for years, and the Trump administration's move to suddenly cancel thousands of student visas is steering foreign applicants to more welcoming destinations, such as the U.K., Canada and Australia.”— Ukrainian-born Italian author and journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, “As the U.S. Alienates Old Friends, China Is Ready to Reap the Benefits,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 12-13, 2025

Samuel Johnson claimed that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels; the even more cynical Ambrose Bierce countered a century later that it was the first. Both opinions are wrong in our time when it concerns the current occupant of the Oval Office, for whom zenophobia is his first and last refuge.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the current Chaos President was only a Chaos Candidate when he descended from Trump Tower to launch his 2016 campaign by differentiating himself from the rest of the GOP pack with a diatribe against Mexico for sending “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Sure enough, just when some in his own party came to have buyer’s remorse about returning him to the White House because of the tariffs he imposed, Trump deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador without even a bow toward due process—an act so brazenly unlawful that even the conservative-oriented Supreme Court felt obliged to intervene.

Economists have been pointing out the costs laid on an already inflation-scarred American consumer by Trump’s tariffs. But Trofimov’s article might be the best I have seen on how the President’s domestic and foreign policies, by re-casting America as a predator nation, are combining to wreak havoc on the economy.

Trumponomics? No, more like Bullynomics, especially after Trump sneered that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!”

As part of its authoritarian appeal, Bullynomics is an economic model that can be copied and practiced at the local level.

Recently, for instance, a longtime county restaurateur related to me how she was approached on an inspection of her building. “So,” the official started out, “I understand you’re a big Democrat.”

“Oh, no,” the restaurateur answered with a straight face. “I’m five-foot-two. I’m only a little Democrat!”

Who will benefit—who is already benefiting—from Trump’s destabilization of the international monetary and diplomatic order? Two countries that, before he returned to power, were experiencing economic crises brought on by their own authoritarian rulers: Russia and China.

Russia was reeling from Ukrainian resistance to its invasion and the West’s solid opposition to its aggression mounted by the Biden administration—until Trump threw Vladimir Putin a lifeline by disgracefully dressing down Vladimir Zelensky in the now-notorious Oval Office meeting.

As for China, I was pulled up short earlier today when I came across a The New York Times story from last September headlined, “Calling ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy.”

And now? Xi Jinping is posing as an icon of stability following Trump’s stop-and-go signals on across-the-board tariffs. With its wealth of raw materials, it looks poised to withstand whatever the President throws at him.

Trump has always celebrated his “brand.” But it is obvious that now the essence of that brand is bullynomics, and that it may leave the United States as substantially weakened as Britain was after the ill-advised 1956 Suez affair.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Yaroslav Trofimov in Toronto, was taken Dec. 1, 2024, by Mykola Swarnyk.)

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.”