On a Wednesday in April, after breakfast,  the  Dow Jones sneezed and Mexico got pneumonia and Europe caught a fever. Meanwhile  Canada had long already passed out cold in the shower, face-first into the plummet of futures and the existential dread of another tariff tweet from the orange oracle in the gilded tower 乌鸦传媒� Donald J. Trump, economic wizard or chaos bard, depending on which news alert just popped up.
 

One morning he乌鸦传媒檚 slapping 25 per cent on steel like it乌鸦传媒檚 avocados on toast, by the next he乌鸦传媒檚 tweeting, 乌鸦传媒淭ariffs? Never met her乌鸦传媒�
The markets, poor dears, had whiplash. Traders were popping anti-acids like thrash metal drummers on a bender 乌鸦传媒� tap tap tap BUY SELL PANIC tap tap tap HOLD HOLD HOLD and then the floor dropped out like a bad date in a freight elevator. Algorithms cried out in binary anguish as the TSX  did the limbo under investor expectations and the Canadian Dollar performed interpretive dance in reverse.

See, the tariffs came in like a blizzard 乌鸦传媒� no, like a blizzard that kept checking back to see if you really meant it when you said it was over. First it was Canada, then Europe, then China and not Russia? Retaliation came swiftly, like a slap shot to the knees 乌鸦传媒� canola here,  dodge caravans there, whiskey somewhere in between. Global trade turned into a bar fight narrated by Fox Business and CNN in overlapping hysteria, with an overwhelmed  Canadian press, acting with honour, trying to stay objective.  

But then, by the following Tuesday Morning, 乌鸦传媒淭ariffs paused pending talks,乌鸦传媒� he chirped, and the stock market hiccupped upward like it just remembered it left the oven on. Economic growth and peace in our time! For maybe five hours. By Thursday, the talks were off, and the markets 乌鸦传媒� God bless them 乌鸦传媒� collapsed again like a middle-class souffle while that oligarch marching band passes by.

It wasn乌鸦传媒檛 just volatility; it was a full-blown identity crisis in pinstripes. Are we globalists? Are we isolationists now? Were we, somehow, both and neither? Is the era of global security and economic abundance over? How many hockey analogies do we have left to use?

And somewhere in the madness, a banker in Toronto took off his tie, stared at the ceiling, and whispered to no one, 乌鸦传媒淭his is fine.乌鸦传媒�

Meanwhile, the rest of us just wanted to know if tariffs applied to avocados. Because, really, priorities乌鸦传媒�.in the morning.

Douglas Zhivago