I Picked The Wrong Month To Stop Sniffing Glue

A letter from Newsletterland

Back when I was in elementary school in the late 1970s, what my friends and I wanted to be when we grew up came up from time to time. The number one answer by far was “photographer for Playboy,” followed by drummer for KISS. A few degenerates wanted to be lawyers.

Now that I’m middle-aged, I understand that the best job in the world is one that provides a decent living without feeling like work—one you’d still show up to do tomorrow if you won the lottery. “Not feeling like work” doesn’t mean not being a lot of work, though, and boy has this past month been taxing.

I liked my old job, which I had for nearly 10 years, but earlier this year I got the chance to go back to what I love—writing a regular column of my own instead of mostly editing those written by others. This one is daily, which is tough, and it involves getting up really early to finish the newsletter it’s part of. I’m happy with my decision, though.

The irony of doing something like this is that it’s hardest to appreciate just when I really should. The month since “Liberation Day” has seen more chills, spills and thrills than a typical year. More than once I’ve had to tear up what I thought was a perfectly nice newsletter essay because it would have been tone deaf given the latest Truth Social post or market ruction.

I’m struggling to find the right words here given the anxiety many people reading this are feeling about their retirement savings, but I keep reminding myself to slow down and enjoy the madness—to remember how I felt and what smart people were saying during each twist and turn.

The last two times markets got this crazy were in March 2020 and September 2008. Like most of you in 2020, I was trying hard to keep my family virus-free and stocked with milk and toilet paper. I was also figuring out how to edit and manage people on three continents via Zoom meetings and Google docs.

And in 2008 I had just started a new job writing the Lex Column at Britain’s Financial Times. My first day at work was when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the U.S. government and I was just trying to learn how to file stories and deliver what my editors wanted.

In the next several days banks and insurers were being rescued and Lehman Brothers, located a couple of blocks away, went bust. I don’t think I even walked over there until months after they had taken down the sign—it was a Barclays office by then and I had a meeting with their strategist. I asked to see Dick Fuld’s office and was told it had been dismantled.

In both cases the market history being made hour-by-hour felt like a blur. When I read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big To Fail” two years after Lehman’s collapse, it filled in the details of an event to which I supposedly had a front-row seat. And when I did the research for my second book, the one about the origins of WallStreetBets and GameStop mania, I found I had missed many of the crazier details of the rush of dumb money into the market.

There’s another challenging thing about this particular gig: I don’t expect it to last forever, but it’s very hard not to delve into politics given the constant stream of market-moving pronouncements coming out of the White House. The Wall Street Journal’s readership spans the political spectrum, but it skews conservative, and there’s been a fair bit of hate mail for focusing so much on Donald Trump.

I really don’t know what to say because it would be weird not to, and sometimes it feels like I’m walking on eggshells. There was one day last month when the Dow had a 3,500 point swing during the afternoon—the sort of change that would be typical for an entire year—because of the Oval Office intervention that Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick staged.

If being a financial columnist is the best job I can imagine, being a politics reporter is close to the opposite for me. People who work in finance might not all be the loveliest, but politicians manage to be both boring and awful—a rare combo. Reporting on it regularly would make me want to gouge my eyes out. It would make me want to gouge their eyes out too, which would bring a visit from the Secret Service.

Anyway, I didn’t write this to complain, and I really shouldn’t. Some people get their stimulation from bungee-jumping. I’m most-excited when the market is doing that, my dented retirement nest egg notwithstanding.