This week in the saga

Wednesday morning the futures are still falling and the thirty-year is doing something the thirty-year is not supposed to do — selling off in a panic, which means the one buyer the country has always been able to count on is walking away from the table. At 9:37 he posts that this is a great time to buy. At 1:18 in the afternoon, in one paragraph, he raises China to a hundred and twenty-five percent and gives every other country on the board ninety days at ten. The board was three weeks in the making and it lasted five days. He does not use the word stop. He does not use the word retreat. The paragraph is written so that the ninety days arrive as a reward for good behaviour — they have not retaliated, at my strong suggestion — and the market takes the largest single-day gain in sixteen years, which he cites all week as proof that the plan is working. At a quarter to one that night he posts four words about what a day it has been. By Sunday the exemptions on phones and chips are being described as no exemption at all, just a different bucket, and by Monday he has settled on the only lesson he intends to draw from any of it.