| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today, on the Sunday before Election Day, we're actually featuring two stories from this past year that examined the policy differences between the two presidential candidates. For the August cover story, Businessweek editor Brad Stone and Nancy Cook, Joshua Green and Mario Parker went to Mar-a-Lago to interview former President Donald Trump about his vision for business and the economy if he's elected to a second term. For the October cover story, Vice President Kamala Harris declined to do an interview, so Josh Wingrove, Karen Breslau and Akayla Gardner looked at her history and past interviews, and talked to people she's worked with and who've opposed her, to get a sense of what a Harris presidency would mean for Wall Street and Main Street. You can find the whole Trump story online here and the Harris story here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. It's late June, and Donald Trump is plotting his next presidency in the gilded offseason isolation of the Mar-a-Lago Club. The adoring club members may have decamped to cooler climates, but Trump is still in a good mood. Polls show a very tight race between him and President Joe Biden, but his fundraising is through the roof. It's also now clear his 34 felony convictions haven't upended the race. A big shock will come two days later, at the first presidential debate, and it will be Biden who's left reeling. Then a bigger one will arrive on July 13, when Trump narrowly dodges an assassin's bullet. The Mar-a-Lago sitting room features a soaring red balloon tower dotted with giant gold ones reading "47," shorthand for the next president—a gift from a local admirer who affixed a card gushing over "the best commander in chief America has ever known." At Trump's insistence, a staffer fetches the hot new fashion item he enjoys showing guests: a red MAGA-style cap emblazoned with "Trump Was Right About Everything." Outside Mar-a-Lago's gates, the rest of the world isn't so sure. There's worry about what another Trump presidency could portend. Wall Street firms from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to Barclays have begun warning clients to expect higher inflation as Trump's odds of recapturing the White House and imposing protectionist trade policies have risen. Giants of the American economy such as Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm are grappling with how further confrontation with China could affect them and the chips everyone relies on. Democracies across Europe and Asia worry about Trump's isolationist impulses, his shaky commitment to Western alliances, and his relationships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And while polls universally show that American voters favor Trump's stewardship of the economy over Biden's, it's unclear to many exactly what they'll get if they opt for another round with him. He waves away such concerns. "Trumponomics," he says, equates to "low interest rates and taxes." It's "tremendous incentive to get things done and to bring business back to our country." Trump would drill more and regulate less. He'd shut the Southern border. He'd squeeze enemies and allies alike for better trade terms. He'd unleash the crypto industry and rein in reckless Big Tech companies. In short, he'd make the economy great again. That's the sales pitch, anyway. The plain truth is that no one really knows what to expect. So Bloomberg Businessweek went to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, to press Trump for answers. Keep reading: Trump on Taxes, Tariffs, Jerome Powell and More  Photographer: Victor Llorente for Bloomberg Businessweek ****** As she finished laying her trap for Donald Trump on the night of Sept. 10, Kamala Harris turned to offer her pitch to Americans for why she, not he, would be the best person to hold the office of president of the United States. At Trump's rallies, she told viewers, people leave "early out of boredom and exhaustion." But while you're there, "The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your desires," she said. "You deserve a president who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will." When the debate ended, talk centered on how she'd provoked Trump into attacking her over crowd sizes instead of the question's subject, immigration. How it had led him to invoke a racist hoax that immigrants in Ohio were eating pets. And how it had all presaged a night on which she'd gotten under his skin. Harris spent much of the debate making the case that the election is fundamentally about character and temperament and that she represents an opportunity to turn the page from Trump, now in his third consecutive presidential race. The sentiment has great appeal for Democratic loyalists, who aren't overly burdened by questions of what she'd do in office. For many of them, she's simply the woman who's standing between Trump and another term and who could shatter the ultimate American glass ceiling in the process. But for swing voters who don't reflexively hate the former president or are just tuning in to the race now, Harris' policy agenda, and especially her economic agenda—on inflation, taxes, tariffs, China—may resonate more. A Sept. 8 New York Times/Siena College poll showed that almost 30% of likely voters wanted to know more about her—and that 66% of those people wanted to learn about her policies, eight times the share who wanted to know about her character. Harris describes herself as an underdog, but she's campaigning like a front-runner. She's given only a handful of interviews since becoming the nominee, betting that being pinned down on policy may not be to her advantage. (Her campaign didn't agree to interview requests for this story.) But she's been in public life for decades, and her history offers some indication of how a Harris term might play out. For additional insight, Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with people who've worked with or opposed her over the years, and dug into several interviews dating to 2005 that Bloomberg News' Karen Breslau conducted with Harris, her mother and other family members. Keep reading: What Kamala Harris means for Wall Street and Main Street  Illustration: PS Spencer for Bloomberg Businessweek | 
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