Total of war

When trade tensions with China flared last year, many companies sought refuge in a country with a long, stable relationship with the United States: Mexico. Now, that alternative for production and materials may also be in jeopardy with President Trump’s threat to impose escalating tariffs on imports from Mexico, aimed at forcing action on illegal immigration. In the short term, the tariffs would mean lower profits for American importers and higher prices for American consumers on everything from avocados to Volkswagens. In the long run, they could force companies to reconsider the continent-spanning supply chains that have made North America one of the world’s most interconnected economies. That disruption, experts warn, could be far more damaging to the United States economy than the cost of tariffs themselves. The United States imported more than $345 billion in goods from Mexico last year, and shipped $265 billion the other way. But if anything, those numbers understate the … [Read more...] about As Trade War Spreads to Mexico, Companies Lose a Safe Harbor

See the article in its original context from February 9, 1986 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE ENGLISH department at Yale used to resemble a sort of English country estate. It included a great house of many wings and rooms (the Elizabethan Pavilion, the Metaphysical Poets Billiard Parlor, the T. S. Eliot Chapel and so forth) and, normally, one entered this house via certain well-marked paths and avenues that ran through a spacious park. The park looked as though Nature had … [Read more...] about THE TYRANNY OF THE YALE CRITICS

AN ASSASSIN IN UTOPIA: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder, by Susan Wels What do an experiment in free love, a renowned newspaper editor with a penchant for the occult, and a dour — then murdered — president have in common? That’s the question that the prolific historian Susan Wels poses in “An Assassin in Utopia,” which explores the interwoven fates of the radical preacher John Humphrey Noyes, the media impresario Horace Greeley and the doomed James A. Garfield, who was shot four months into his tenure as president of the United States and died of infection two months later. It spoils none of the rollicking pleasures of the book to reveal that the answer is a proto-incel named Charles Julius Guiteau, so let’s set him aside for the moment. Instead, we can start as Wels does, with the spiritual awakening of Noyes and his ensuing desire to establish a model of communal living based on audacious religious doctrine. Among his precepts: … [Read more...] about The 19th-Century Cult That Gave Rise to an Incel Assassin

Japan’s Nikkei Asian Reviews highlighted the emergency of “virus vigilantes” in the country on Tuesday: enforcers that use peer pressure to keep people from violating lockdown restrictions without actually having any legitimate authority. Observers view the behavior as a symptom of Japanese society’s emphasis on conformity, which some argue has increased feelings of social suffocation during the pandemic, possibly contributing to recent spikes in Japan’s suicide rates. Hiroaki Murata, the owner of a bar and music club in Tokyo, told Nikkei on Tuesday that he received a warning from a virus vigilante in April at the height of Japan’s coronavirus outbreak that left him and his wife feeling “frightened.” “For safety, refrain from opening live music clubs until the state of emergency ends,” read a typed note taped to Murata’s store sign. “If I find you opening again, I’ll call the police.” The note was signed simply, “a neighbor.” On the day that Murata received the typed … [Read more...] about Japan: ‘Virus Vigilantes’ Threaten People for Coronavirus Violations

What makes Mike Pompeo run? Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images In every presidential primary that isn’t already locked down by an incumbent, there are candidates whose presence causes experts to scratch their heads. I’m not talking about totally obscure shouters and wavers “running for president” to impress their neighbors or beef up their résumé for a school-board race. No, the true, non-risible long shot is an ostensibly serious person who may well be qualified for the job but has about as much chance of getting it as I have of winning a billion-dollar Powerball drawing. The 2024 Republican presidential contest will likely include two heavyweights, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis . But there are several would-be candidates mulling a race who could be called long shots. A good example is Mike Pompeo . Pompeo is a West Point grad who had a successful business career before getting himself elected to Congress four times, then serving as CIA director and secretary of State … [Read more...] about Pompeo and Haley Are Running. What on Earth Are They Thinking?

It is impossible even to talk about the long bull market that ended in January 2022 without saying high-growth tech stocks propelled the market higher. Companies like Alphabet (Google) , Amazon , Apple, Meta (Facebook) , Microsoft , Netflix, Nvidia and Tesla dominated the headlines for years. Tech stocks and growth stocks were virtually synonymous. But not anymore. The new growth stocks, in the estimation of S&P Dow Jones Indices, an influential market analysis firm, now include fossil-fuel energy companies. The world has changed radically in the last year or two, and traditional categories, like growth and value, are topsy-turvy. S&P Dow Jones Indices handles the plumbing behind the two most famous American stock market indexes — the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average — and many other important world market benchmarks. In an annual review of the S&P 500 index, it has found that the seemingly immutable connections … [Read more...] about Value Stocks? Growth Stocks? Markets Last Year Turned Everything Topsy-Turvy.