This week in the saga

Wednesday afternoon in the Rose Garden a board is carried out on an easel and set beside the podium, and on it, in two columns, is every country in the world and a number. Some of the numbers are for places with no people in them. The tariff is announced as a liberation and the audience applauds a chart. Then Thursday and Friday happen: six point six trillion dollars leaves the American market in two days, the largest two-day loss ever recorded, and the posts do not change tone by a single degree. China played it wrong, they panicked — the one thing they cannot afford to do. Job numbers are great, hang tough, we can't lose. The Fed chairman is instructed to cut and to stop playing politics. And on Monday morning, with the futures still bleeding and his own party's senators beginning to say so out loud, he names the enemy: not the Democrats, not China, but anyone frightened. Don't be a PANICAN. Two days later, without saying the word pause, he pauses it — but that is next week, and next chapter.