This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, an interesting test case for cross-media storytelling of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. On Sundays, we look at the major themes of the week past and how they will define the week ahead. Sign up for the daily newsletter here.
This should be a bit embarrassing, I guess, but I’m scared of the dark. I don’t have a legitimate, diagnosable condition like nyctophobia, achluophobia, lygophobia or scotophobia. [1] Rather, it’s a childlike fear of monsters under the bed (teraphobia), serial killers in the closet (foniasophobia), werewolves at the door (lycanthrophobia) and ghosts, well, everywhere (phasmophobia). When my family abandons me at our country house, I always keep the dog close, because, yeah, a nine-pound Yorkie mix will be a match for a flesh-eating gargoyle. Needless to say, I don’t watch horror movies. I hated the slasher ones of my youth, from Friday the 13th to Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and the seven in between. (If I had known there was a Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, my life might have turned out very differently.) I won’t even watch the good ones A24 puts out today — just seeing the trailer for The Witch gave me nightmares. But you think I’d be safe at work, right? Then I check in on Bloomberg Opinion on Friday — and I’m hit by this:
OK, that might not seem all that scary to you. But CLICK HERE IF YOU DARE, see those 3-D squares start to move around, with light and shadow and texture, and beware the first pangs of apeirophobia. Who would have thought a hallway could be so scary? Our Taylor Tyson, who created the graphic, did. Now I don’t think I’ll be able to watch season three of Severance, thanks to the new film Backrooms. Natalie Schriefer explains: “Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a dark theater. You’ve just bought tickets to a horror movie. Who or what is the first creepy thing that comes to mind?” she asks. “Is it a bunch of empty rooms and never-ending hallways — liminal spaces, the eerie in-between places that feel both familiar and unsettling?” It is now. Natalie says the movie, which is based on an online “creepypasta,” [2] presents “an interesting test case for cross-media storytelling. Casual moviegoers, critics and diehard gamers will be left to vote (with their wallets and words) on whether they want the limits of horror to be expanded or conform to a specific formula.” Turns out, those limits of horror — and calamity and catastrophe and combat and crime and contagion and zombies! — were expanded, without conforming to any specific formula, across Bloomberg Opinion this week. Consider these headlines:
- Bond Market Fright May End Cheap Funds Era
- DEI Isn’t Dead. But It’s Not Really Alive, Either
- The Great Bond Car Wreck — in Slow Motion
- Ignore This Bond Market Slump at Your Own Peril
- America’s ‘Everything Is Rigged’ Era Is Toxic
- Are Dust Storms the New Hurricanes?
- Britain’s Chaos Is a Big Red Flag for Europeans
- Why Foreigners Are Fleeing the World’s Best Stock Rally
- Prabowo’s Indonesia Is Teetering Toward a Familiar Disaster
- Simple Way to Avoid Messes Like the Anthropic Shares Shock
- Trump’s Massie Smackdown May Cost Him in November
- New York City Has an Assault Problem. One Reason Sticks Out
- A Culture War Backlash Is Coming for the Mining Industry
- Containing Ebola Is Hard. The US Made It Worse
To start, let’s open our eyes and face the horror that is the bond market, which may be stuck in an alarming prequel: The Great Global Financial Nightmare of 2007-08. “It’s a while since we’ve been here, and it’s not a good place to be,” warns John Authers. Things are eerily similar to this passage John co-wrote just before the 2007 crash: “Money just seems too cheap. Bond yields are not high by historical standards, but the suddenness of their move might dislodge the financing that underpins stocks. If that scenario turns out to be true — and it is still too early to say that it will — the bond selloff might presage the end of an era for stocks.”
There are plenty of factors at play, but Bill Dudley eyes the wrecking ball in the Oval Office. “The US remains on an unsustainable fiscal path and the situation is worsening. On the expenditure side, the Iran war is boosting defense outlays, with President Donald Trump seeking a $500 billion increase to defense spending in fiscal 2027 at the same time higher interest rates are pushing up the government’s debt service costs,” he writes. It’s not just a macro maelstrom: Paul J. Davies looks at how a single company is sending shivers up the spine: “Even if armchair investors are fleeing private credit or panicking that their unlisted shares in Anthropic PBC are now invalid, the long-term trend is clear: Public markets keep losing ground to private funds.” Politics are always scary, but David M. Drucker is particularly worried about the spread of a “toxic” trend. “Everything, it seems, is rigged these days. Unhappy with the economy? That’s because it’s rigged. Fed up with your healthcare? It’s rigged, too. Frustrated with elected leaders in Washington, Sacramento, Austin or Albany? Rigged, rigged, rigged and rigged,” he writes. “President Donald Trump arguably kicked off this populist trend of referring to everything voters find wrong with the country as the deliberate work of vampiric forces intent on accruing wealth and power at ‘our’ expense.” Vampiric forces don’t seem all that scary anymore — I credit Tom Cruise’s absurd blond wig. Today, it’s atmospheric forces we should be worried about. “The weather you might typically associate with Fargo, North Dakota, is whiteout-level snow blowing across an empty, frozen landscape,” writes Mark Gongloff. “But last week, Fargo, along with stretches of the rest of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Montana, spent days blanketed in vast dust clouds, kicked up by winds gusting to 70 miles per hour. Some of these turned into swirling ‘dirtnados,’ another fun new weather term we get to learn these days, like firenado and flash drought.”
So, in horrorland, which of these is the scariest five-letter word: Jason, Myers, Bates, Orlok, Pearl, Thorn? Actually, I’ll go with e-b-o-l-a! “A rapidly unfolding Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a reminder of the value of maintaining robust global disease surveillance and response systems — and the dire consequences of weakening them,” writes Lisa Jarvis. “It has all the ingredients of a disaster — one that seems likely to get much worse.”
Source: New Line Cinema, Wikimedia Commons, Paramount Pictures, Amazon MGM Studios, Bryanston Pictures, Compass International Pictures
Finally, Jason may have taken Manhattan (or not, I wouldn’t know), but all of New York City is facing a scary sequel. And, as with much of the horror genre, much of the peril emanates from the darkness below. “If during the troubled 1970s and 1980s New York City’s signature crime was a mugging, the 2020s equivalent is the deranged punch or shove or thwack. Punches, shoves and even thwacks with hard objects are seldom fatal,” writes Justin Fox. “But non-firearm assaults sometimes do end tragically, especially in the subway system, and their persistence is the main reason New York’s violent-crime rate remains 30% higher than before the pandemic.”
The fear of trains is called siderodromophobia, of being underground is subterraneophobia, and of being trapped is cleithrophobia — given my daily commute, I guess I can add them to my list. Perhaps I’ll start bringing the dog to work. [3] Bonus Horror Business Reading:
- Cuba Is Running Out of Time to Avoid a US Strike — Juan Pablo Spinetto
- Prabowo’s Indonesia Is Teetering Toward a Familiar Disaster — Karishma Vaswani
- Trump’s $1.8 Billion Anti-Weaponization Fund Is a Sham — Barbara McQuade
What’s the World Got in Store ?
- Papal AI encyclical, May 25: The Desperation of AI Titans Is an Ominous Sign — Gautam Mukunda
- US PCE, May 28: Inflation Is a Tax on AI’s Unfettered Spending Spree — Conor Sen
- Tokyo ‘Humanoids Summit,’ May 28: I Have Seen the Future of Physical AI in Dusty West Texas — Thomas Black
Not everything was scary this week. John Authers even tells us we had one gentle “snoozefest”: the market fall of Nvidia, which reported a disappointing??? 85% sales growth and 62% margins. What could have put that story to bed? Um, you know who. “SpaceX announced an IPO in which Elon Musk keeps 85%, with plans for data centers in space and asteroid-mining,” writes John. “This sounds like hubris, if not Ozymandias. Or a Bond villain.”
Foreign policy provided another soporific. “The big meetup between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping elicited a big yawn from financial markets and a dearth of economic headlines,” writes Scott Lincicome. Let’s end with a laugh. “There’s an old joke about Andy Burnham, the Manchester mayor whose gamble to become UK prime minister from outside Parliament just might pay off. A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a pub, it begins. ‘Evening Andy,’ the barman asks. ‘What’ll you have?’” Rosa Prince recounts. “The reference is to past leaders of the Labour Party — the wealth-friendly liberal Tony Blair, the dour center-leftish Gordon Brown and the hard-socialist Jeremy Corbyn — and Burnham’s tendency to shape-shift, sniff the prevailing winds blowing through Labour at any one moment and adapt accordingly.” Burnham jokes aside, there is one really scary thing here: the future of the Labour Party. Note: Please send garlic, crosses, silver bullets and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
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