Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Monday, April 7
11 WALL ST., 8:00 AM
One hour before Monday’s opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, a group of oily college juniors wait hungrily outside, suited and bespectacled. They seek a front-row seat for what commentators warn will be the worst stock crash in recent memory. The kids are holding Nvidia, and they all voted for Trump. They are here for a class trip. They say that despite the market implosion, they believe in the cause.
“Don’t be a panicat,” one says sheepishly. “Panican,” another corrects. This is a new derogatory term for anyone worried about the dwindling contents of their retirement accounts.
The kids are standing feet from the century-old blast marks of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, when anarchists, determined to kill the market—literally and figuratively—murdered 30 people with 100 pounds of dynamite and a quarter-ton of cast-iron shrapnel. The irony is lost on the college kids. They say anyone afraid of the stock market is “gay.”
An NYSE compliance manager smokes outside wearily. He too believes that people are maybe a bit too nervous, but volume is high. And on Wall Street proper, on the actual cobblestone road, volume is all that matters, because the real decisions are all happening uptown, where Wall Street has long since moved.
200 WEST ST., 9:21 AM (Dow Jones Industrial Average premarket -1,203.72)
I’m on the train as Twitter’s armchair analysts forecast doom and hellfire. This is our Pearl Harbor, they say, our Nagasaki, our Woodstock ’99.
I get to Goldman Sachs HQ nine minutes before the market open, and ask two chain-smoking Eastern Europeans in matching vests what the vibes are like inside. “We just move shit around for other people,” they say nonchalantly. “The other floors are shitting themselves.”
I try to get them to say it’s as bad as 2008, but they refuse, and I take this as a sign that it’s time to make my pitch. Inside Goldman, I approach the phalanx of first-floor secretaries to inquire about a meeting for my big onshoring plan. Pants are wide right now, which naturally means soon they will be skinny again. I believe this trend foreshadows a tremendous upside in the domestic garment manufacturing sector, which JD Vance and Donald Trump will soon bring upon our shores.
My pitch goes about as well as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and I’m told I need an appointment. I am laughed out of the building. But the joke’s on them. I’m going up to JPMorgan to drink while they sit at their terminals, blinking down, down, down, down.
383 MADISON AVE., 10:00 AM (DJIA -966.88)
I make it to JPMorgan HQ just after open, and I decide that with markets tanking and onshoring ascendant, maybe my pitch is ready for prime time. The secretary this time smiles and recommends I try sending an email before I cold pitch in person. I take this suggestion under consideration at Connolly’s pub and restaurant, around the corner.
121 WEST 45th ST., 10:10 AM (DJIA +214.10)
The old Irish bartender at Connolly’s asks, “Where the fuck did all this money go?” before pouring a Guinness. A money manager from Santander comes in and sits down with a Long Island iced tea. I ask how the office is doing and he says things are crazy, but he doesn’t have those bags under his eyes, and he isn’t toting around a cardboard box with snow globes and Little League photos just yet.
The news breaks on Twitter that Trump is backing away from the tariffs with a 90-day pause for every country but China. The Santander guy straightens up and doubles down on Long Islands to celebrate. Ten minutes later, $2 trillion is wiped out and the market is back down. It was fake news, a misinterpretation of a Fox & Friends interview with a Trump adviser from a couple hours earlier.
The Santander guy finishes his drink and then announces, “At least I was out of the office. Now I can pretend I knew this was bullshit all along!” Then he runs out the door.
I stay as a trader in a $400 Arc'teryx jacket sighs and stumbles into the sunlight. I have one more beer before cruising up Park Avenue to check in on the hedgies.
Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Traders on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange
425 PARK AVE., 12:11 PM (DJIA -729.27)
Outside of Citadel LLC, I decide to ask every guy wearing a green waxed hunting jacket what’s happening in there. How are those old fundamentals doing? Are you winning, son?
The hedgies are far less amused than the investment bankers, and tell me to both “bug” and “fuck” off. But even they are unslouched and clean-shaven. I retreat down Park Avenue to the Capital Grille, where inside I can see wealth percolating.
200 PARK AVE., 1:20 PM (DJIA -473.84)
At the Capital Grille bar, some commodity traders are eating salmon salads and ping-ponging Warren Buffett aphorisms off one another. “When things go on sale, Americans run like hell out the store,” the alpha of the pack smirks. He is drinking Stolichnaya on ice.
The conversation quickly moves to renovations on their Montauk homes and long-term home lending rates. “Montauk is too far out,” one contends, before being heckled off by his fellow traders. As the weakling departs, the others snicker at him for drinking soup and water.
I ask their leader where I can find blood today. “Not on Park Avenue,” he says, then leaves, paying with two crisp $100s and change.
50 HUDSON YARDS, 3:00 PM (DJIA -352.55)
I make it across town to Hudson Yards, where the monolith temples of private equity break ominously against steel hull skies. Through the BlackRock lobby, a plush velvet staircase leads to the firm’s in-house café, Bar Torino. Behind me, a set of half a dozen “rock stars” are talking about Trump, and they don’t seem concerned. One guy keeps talking about divine intervention. “That kid on the roof missed him. Divine intervention. He won the election. Divine intervention.”
Everyone has a good chortle.
Meanwhile, five blocks east, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is telling the Economic Club of New York, “Most CEOs I talk to would say we are probably in a recession right now.” But he too is not terribly worried, adding that market volatility in response to Trump is “more of a buying opportunity than a selling opportunity.”
OUTSIDE 50 HUDSON YARDS, 3:45 PM (DJIA -568.01)
As the market close looms, I step out of BlackRock to call my financial adviser, who tells me the same thing he says every time: “Max out your Roth IRA and stop calling me.” But this time, he agrees to give me his take.
“Why aren’t these guys jumping off the Vessel?” I ask.
He explains that unlike the global meltdown of 2008 and the COVID sell-off of 2020, this time the crash isn’t driven by dirty mortgages or lethal pathogens. It’s driven by one man who can slam on the brakes anytime he wants. “There’s a new God, and he’s just an asshole,” he says.
The middle-management money types of central Manhattan seem to have found, and maintained, their religion. Divine intervention waits just around the corner.
11 WALL ST., 4:30 PM (DJIA -349.26, market closed)
Thirty minutes after the NYSE shuts down for the day, I’m back where I started, down on Wall Street at The Dead Rabbit, named after the brutal downtown gang of Irishmen who fought and killed scores of nativist Bowery Boys in brazen Gilded Age brawls. As Trump celebrates the deportation of barbers to Salvadoran gulags and American tourism heads for the gutter, the stale bar air smells a century older than it is. The bartender says the real suits won’t be in until much later, when they finally talk their clients down from literal ledges.
The bar slowly fills up, and two Irish bankers in town for due diligence hunker down to drink Harps and stare at themselves in the mirror. They say they personally aren’t exposed, but their bank, relatives, and associates sure are. They ask, tired-eyed and bleary, what the endgame of all this is; their siblings work for Microsoft in Ireland. I tell them I don’t think Trump is bluffing.
I ask them where the blood is, and they say wait for the consumer shock in the grocery aisle. There will be blood, they say.
I ask the men if they think their bank would go in on a plan to reshore skinny jeans in America. “We’re still wearing skinny jeans in Ireland,” one of them says. Then a group of drunk vests in the corner start doing the John Belushi bit about potato famine, and the Irish bankers get up and leave.
It’s 5 p.m., and after a wild day of volatility, the Dow is down just 0.91 percent. Traders are coming in and smiling. No sign of blood here. But soon, they say, it could fill the streets.
