"Investors appear to be treating an end to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran as a foregone conclusion, as the S&P 500 closes above 7,000."

The NYT reports.

Camera time for Geraldo: "This is why Trump is triumphant!... That charisma is unbelievable! I could sing his praises forever. I wonder, if the markets were down, if I would be singing the same tune. I hope so...."

🚨NEW: Geraldo Rivera heaps praise on Trump over "BRILLIANT" tariff moves🚨

"I believe that he ambushed China ... I just think he wants the best possible deal he can get the United States of America. God bless him for that. That's why people really dig the guy. That's why he's… pic.twitter.com/IU2zwTvD2g

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) April 9, 2025

When things go well, let loose with your Trump-is-a-genius tirade. 

Prompt I gave Grok this morning: "Write an essay 'On Gloating.'"

I don't like to quote A.I., because I don't think people want to consume material that didn't originate in a human mind, but some human-generated material is insipid — I can live without the emanations of the mind of Rivera — and my non-human companion brought up Shakespeare (and Napoleon), so I'm making an exception to quote 3 sentences:

"In literature and history, gloating often serves as a cautionary trope. Shakespeare’s Iago gloats over his manipulations in Othello, only to meet a grim fate. Victorious generals who boasted excessively, like Napoleon at the height of his power, often found their hubris prelude to downfall."

Remember, all gloating is pre-gloating. You could end up in a montage over which your enemies gloat:

"Like the ouroboros, I believe Big Tech is eating itself alive with its component companies throwing more and more cash at investments in each other that are most likely to generate less and less of a return...."

"[T]hese companies... will one day disappoint those who view them as safe assets. And the self-cannibalization will not just reveal itself to be a mediocre investment but a shaky bet on an illusion propagated by a mythical and messianic belief in technology and these companies.... One need not look at ancient folklore to find depictions of the ouroboros. The economist Joseph Schumpeter...wrote of a cycle of industrial mutation' that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.'"

Writes Harvard law and business professor Mihir A. Desai, in "The Future of A.I. May Not Be as Revolutionary as We Thought" (NYT).

"China’s DeepSeek AI app sends U.S. tech stocks reeling/The tech-heavy Nasdaq index lost nearly 4 percent in early trading Monday, with chipmaker Nvidia down nearly 12 percent.."

WaPo reports (free-access link).

Analysts said the Monday sell-off underscores anxieties about whether the massive spending on artificial intelligence ― and the specialized chips, data centers and related power infrastructure ― are justified....

DeepSeek is a China-based start-up that last week launched a free AI assistant that it says can operate at a lower cost than American AI models like ChatGPT....  DeepSeek has shaken the market because it purports to need fewer and less advanced chips than other AI models, while still performing as well as U.S. rivals — challenging the premise that only big, well-capitalized companies can make breakthroughs in the sector.

Bloodbath.

This is the third post of the morning and, like the previous two, it has a title consisting of one word that's in the news this morning. I can see from the comments in those other posts and in last night's open thread, that people especially want to talk about "bloodbath."

I feel so pushed to talk about "bloodbath" this morning that I balk at churning out a "bloodbath" post. You already know what you want to say. Is it my job to expound on "bloodbath" as it relates to the free-speaking raconteur Donald Trump and his gasping, raging antagonists?

I'll just feed your bloodbathlust with my favorite "bloodbath" quotations from the OED:

"While the FDIC guarantees deposits up to $250,000, the overwhelming majority of SVB deposits exceeded that amount."

"It was the bank of choice for many tech start-ups. Without access to their cash, those companies would have difficulty meeting payroll. Additionally, the sudden collapse of SVB could lead companies and individuals who have deposits in other similar financial institutions to withdraw their money starting on Monday, triggering more bank runs, and more bank collapses.... Defenders of this decision will try to make it seem as if it’s an extraordinary, one-off decision by regulators, but in practice, it has created a huge moral hazard by signaling that the $250,000 FDIC limit on deposit insurance does not exist in practice...."

From "Silicon Valley Bank Depositor Bailout Makes Mockery of ‘Too Big to Fail'" by Philip Klein (National Review).

I'm not linking to this because I agree with it. I don't know what the right answer was or what the real risks were. 

Here's what Elizabeth Warren says, "Silicon Valley Bank Is Gone. We Know Who Is Responsible" (NYT):

"[T]he crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends..."

"... on their perceived trustworthiness. In which case, what is the point? Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? Furthermore, trust in conventional financial institutions rests in part on validation by Uncle Sam: The government supervises banks, regulates the risks they can take and guarantees many deposits, while crypto operates largely without oversight. So investors must rely on the honesty and competence of entrepreneurs; when they offer exceptionally good deals, investors must believe not just in their competence but in their genius. How has that been working out?"

Writes Paul Krugman in "Is This the End Game for Crypto?" (NYT).

Comments need to address the substance of the argument.

Well, you can teach a law school class in just about anything — for years, at my law school we jokingly called idiosyncratic seminars "Law and My Ego" — so...

... I shrugged when I saw the New York Magazine article, "Elon Musk Has So Many Lawsuits They’re Teaching a Class in Law School."

It's not a question of how many lawsuits you've got going, but whether any given law professor gets inspired to build a course around your lawsuits — or lawsuit. Even a single lawsuit could form the basis of a course.

What makes it interesting enough to blog — any given article can inspire a blogger to write a post — is that the lawprof is Stephen M. Bainbridge. His course is “Law of Elon Musk.” He explains:

Tesla’s acquisition of SolarCity is an excellent case to teach students. And then there is a pending case on his Tesla CEO-compensation package, which is a great case because it’s what will strike the students as an egregious amount of money — billions of dollars in CEO compensation — in excess of anything we’ve ever seen. It’s a great case to talk about: Is this a situation in which it would be rational for a company to put together that sort of a compensation package?...

"They gather on Telegram to let out howls of grief and short, sharp shrieks of pain. 'Eeeeeeee!' yowls a young woman. 'Waahahahah,' roars a man in a deep baritone."

"A third person wails like a baby. These are victims of the cryptocurrency bloodbath, 3,315 of whom have assembled in a 'Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group' group to vent their anguish. 'I had a few people lamenting and crying,' says the group’s founder, a 30-year-old cryptocurrency investor who gives only his first name, Giulio. 'I decided not to ban them. I felt bad. They weren’t even able to scream any more. They were just sobbing.'"

 
From "‘They couldn’t even scream any more. They were just sobbing’: the amateur investors ruined by the crypto crash" (The Guardian).

You don't hear about scream therapy much anymore. It was a 1970s thing. There was a book by Arthur Janov called "The Primal Scream." John Lennon and Yoko Ono talked about it. Here's the Wikipedia article "Primal Therapy":

Janov states that neurosis is the result of suppressed pain, which is the result of trauma, usually trauma of childhood origin. 

Not so much about losing money in the financial markets.

"Poison pills have been around for decades... Netflix adopted a poison pill in 2012 to stop [Carl] Icahn from buying up its shares. Papa John’s used one against..."

"... the pizza chain’s founder and chairman, John Schnatter, in 2018. Investors rarely try to get around a poison pill by buying shares beyond the threshold set by the company, according to securities experts. One said it would be 'financially ruinous,' even for Mr. Musk. But Mr. Musk, who is worth more than $250 billion... rarely abides by precedent.... Twitter is the 'de facto town square,' Mr. Musk said, adding that 'it’s really important that people have the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.... My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization'...."

From "Twitter Counters a Musk Takeover With a Time-Tested Barrier/The company is intent on fending off the billionaire’s bid to buy it in a deal that could be worth more than $40 billion" (NYT).

The poison pill is that "if Mr. Musk bought more than 15 percent of the company, Twitter would flood the market with new stock that all shareholders except Mr. Musk could buy at a discounted price."

"Zuckerberg, in his trademark nasal drawl, seemed to acknowledge that the tide was turning against the business he has been running for 18 years as of this week."

"'The balance of content that people see in feeds is shifted a little bit more towards stuff that isn’t coming from their friends, which they may discuss with their friends, but it’s kind of shifting towards more public content,' he said. The upshot here is that the voyeuristic behaviors that made social media as we know it so profitable — what are my friends talking about? Who did my high school ex marry? — were actually starting to fade.... During the earnings call, [Zuckerberg] said he believed there was a kind of evolution of the internet, from text to pictures to short videos, and the next leap would be the kind of 3-D avatars being pushed for such thrilling things as business meetings and conference calls.... If people are buying Zuckerberg’s version of the internet’s future, they would be more excited about how he spent nearly $10 billion during the past year to build it. As of now, Facebook looks more and more like the past."

From "The Worst Day of Mark Zuckerberg’s Reign" (NY Magazine).

Big and small headlines at WaPo on crypto.

1. "Crypto collapse erases more than $1 trillion in wealth, forcing a reckoning for everyday investors." 

2. "Melania Trump auctions off her hat, and has become the latest victim of the cryptocurrency crash." 

I'm glad to see that on the "most read" list in the sidebar, the big story is ranking above the big hat story:

Actually, it's the Melania story I choose to read, because it's hard to understand how accepting cryptocurrency hurts her. It's only a hat she doesn't want that's going out in the world. What difference does it make to her — the "I really don't care, do u?" lady — how the cryptocurrency bids translate into dollar amounts? She restricted the bids to cryptocurrency — for whatever reason — but since there are different cryptocurrencies, aren't all the bids presented at the bidding site in dollar amounts? No, she's only accepting one cryptocurrencies — Solana — so that simplifies things. Its value has fallen 40% in the last week, but wouldn't that cause people with Solana who want the hat to pour a lot more of this declining stuff into the quest for the hat? How is Melania a victim? 

Oh, I'm sure people could put together a list of ways in which Melania is a victim. Make a list and rank it, with the Solana-for-a-hat problem on it. If it ranks high, then good for Melania. But I'm laughing at the Washington Post readers who are drooling over the news that Melania is suffering.

 WaPo snatches the hat and runs with it:

"Even the experts have trouble saying how to pace your spending so you can enjoy retirement without exhausting your savings before you die."

"You can’t know for sure how long you’ll live, whether you’ll suffer a costly illness or how markets will perform.... Decumulation isn’t just a tough financial problem. It can be an emotional strain to flip a switch from saving to dissaving.... Do you keep a big nest egg, or do you convert your savings into a stream of monthly checks? The smart but psychologically difficult choice is to at least partly annuitize — that is, buy a financial product that provides a monthly income. When you buy a life annuity, the seller takes on the risk that you will live to age 110. That’s a big load off your mind. What makes it hard on your psyche is that to get a decent-size annuity, you have to turn over a big chunk of your life savings to the seller, usually an insurance company. For most people, especially younger retirees, some exposure to stocks makes sense. But grasping for high returns to compensate for years of undersaving is unwise. Do you lose sleep when the market plunges — or, worse, sell your shares and lock in big losses? Then you’d be better off in something safer...."

 
From "How to Enjoy Retirement Without Going Broke The problem of decumulation is a tricky one, even for Nobel Prize-winning economists" by Peter Coy (NYT).

Of course, it's tricky. You're mixing actual finance with the most intensely personal emotions, and the biggest factors are immense and disturbing uncertainties: What will the markets do and when am I going to die?

Anyway... I learned 2 new words: "decumulation" and "dissaving."

The Washington Post publishes a long, flattering article about an astrologer.

Can anything justify this idiocy? The article is "Can astrology make sense of cryptocurrency? Maren Altman and a million TikTok followers think so," so it's in the form of a question, and maybe it's just another quirky piece about social media and cryptocurrency. 

The news is that there are people out there that consume this video, not that the answer to the question in the headline is "yes."

Let's read some of this trash:

In a typical crypto astrology video, Maren reads the birth chart of a particular currency and offers thoughts on its immediate future. She often films herself in front of a brick wall adorned with a red neon sign reading “amor fati,” Latin for “love of fate,” and her language can get pretty colorful at times, befitting her punkish vibe.

In early January, Maren read Bitcoin’s chart, using its creation date, Jan. 3, 2009. “New moon in Capricorn, January 13th, looks big for bitcoin,” Maren says in the video... Though Maren claims in the video that she isn’t offering financial advice, many of the comments on the post suggest some take it that way....

She said a misconception many have is that astrologers believe the planets cause [world] events. It’s more that they believe the celestial positions give us a head’s up as to what might happen. As Maren put it, “we aren’t positing that Jupiter’s sending out … rays to make us spend more money … It’s like how the clock on the wall isn’t making it three p.m. but it might tell us it’s three p.m.”

Yeah, just like the clock.... This could be hilarious, but it's not written as hilarious. It's written as a display of coolness. So lame. And right when it's important to get people tracked onto real science. But — oh! — there's a cute young woman with a punkish vibe being colorful! And WaPo is the dorky old man galumphing after her.

"Threw my stimmy into the stock market and damn, it’s been a beautiful morning."

Said some guy, quoted in "Recast as ‘Stimmies,’ Federal Relief Checks Drive a Stock Buying Spree/The government set out to prop up the economy. It may also be propping up the market" (NYT). 

Analysts at Deutsche Bank recently estimated that as much as $170 billion from the latest round of stimulus payments could flow into the stock market. They conducted a survey of retail traders in which respondents said they planned to put roughly 40 percent of any payment they received — or $2 of every $5 — into the stock market. Traders between the ages of 25 and 34 said they expected to put half of their stimulus check into stocks.... 

The willingness of millions of Americans to use emergency federal assistance as play money for speculation speaks to the unique nature of the current economic downturn and the government response to it.

Play money? I suppose the government expected us to buy items of merchandise and restaurant meals. I would have thought that saving your money is the most dull, conservative thing to do, and if you save, aren't you supposed to invest and not just leave your money in your bank account? 

Also, "propping up the market"? Propping? Didn't look to me like it was sagging.

"I understand perfectly why people who have treated the markets as an enormous casino for decades are terribly upset when people other than themselves treat the markets like an enormous casino."

That's the top-rated comment on "‘Dumb Money’ Is on GameStop, and It’s Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game/GameStop shares have soared 1,700 percent as millions of small investors, egged on by social media, employ a classic Wall Street tactic to put the squeeze — on Wall Street" (NYT). 

Finance is my least favorite subject, but I can't completely ignore something that feels expressive of my reasons for not engaging. I'm not even going to attempt to vaguely gesture at the briefest summary of what happened. Go read the article... or any article on the subject.

But I will quote the second highest-rated comment.

If the hedge fund managers are concerned, perhaps they should simply drink fewer cups of Starbucks. Eat less avocado toast. Do a better job at saving. Or, get a side hustle. Drive an Uber? Learn to code? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, fellas. 

"US stocks rose sharply Monday, and the Dow was closing in on 30,000, after Moderna said its experimental Covid-19 vaccine was 94.5% effective against the coronavirus."

"Last week, Pfizer (PFE) said that a vaccine it developed with German drugmaker BioNTech was more than 90% effective against Covid-19."

CNN reports.

"Oh! The market doesn't like that Biden won the debate!"/"Maybe what the market doesn't like is that all we've got now are 2 idiots."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"America is in turmoil and stocks are booming. Is the market broken?"

Asks Matt Egan (at CNN Business).

"Stocks climbed after encouraging data about the first coronavirus vaccine tested in people."

"The drug maker Moderna said Monday that the first coronavirus vaccine to be tested in people appears to be safe and able to stimulate an immune response against the virus," the NYT reports.

So good to get good news!

The Dow Jones is up 800+ points.