If you’re curious, the fallout from “Liberation Day” triggered the biggest — which is to say the worst or most acute — tightening in US financial conditions since the gods visited upon humanity a plague five years ago.

This falls into the trivia category, where that means it’s not tradable nor is it eminently “useful,” per se, but it’s notable because it underscores the extent to which the combination of plunging stock prices, suddenly wider credit and, early this week, surging 10-year US yields, turned a sunny day into a hurricane pretty much overnight.

The figure below shows the rolling four-session change on Bloomberg’s gauge of US financial conditions.

That’s… well, it’s “Yikes!” for lack of a more academic description. But, hey, when you’re president “they let you do it.”

Headed into “Liberation Day,” Scott Bessent served Wall Street and the MAGA faithful a Golden Corral-style buffet of all-you-can-eat bullsh-t, which can be roughly summarized as follows: “We know what we’re doing. This is all on purpose.”

And it worked. People bought it. Everyone from smartly-dressed, Baccarat-spritzed strategists at big banks to mullet-sporting, fried bologna-scented NASCAR fans, lined up out the door and around the corner to eat Scott’s cookin’. Strange bedfellows at the Shoney’s:

“How many tonight, sir?”

“Why, good evening young lady, it’ll just be The Missus and I, and I’d like to check my coat if I can.”

“Sure whatever, it’s gonna be 45 minutes. Here’s a buzzer. It’ll vibrate when your table’s ready. Next! How about you sir, how many?”

“Well les’ see, we got me, Beau, Boone, Junior, Creestol, grandma Peggy and my wyf and seester.”

“So, eight?”

“No, sevun.”

“I’m sorry, you said –”

“Lissun’ here missy, don’t tell me how to count. It’s me, one, Beau, two, Boone, three, Junior, four, Creestol, five, grandma Peggy, six, and my wyf and seester, sevun.”

Jokes aside, Trump didn’t mean for any of this to happen, certainly not to the extent it happened. Bessent didn’t mean for this to happen either. Nor Lutnick. Peter Navarro couldn’t give a damn, nor “Ron Vara,” but as Elon Musk will tell you, they’re both “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

Outside of a scenario where inflation’s running totally rampant (and thereby demand destruction’s the only way out), no one would purposefully tighten US financial conditions by the most since bleach briefly surpassed fentanyl as the leading cause of accidental intravenous death in America. (Oops, more jokes!)

Everyone who bought Bessent’s “This is all part of the plan” bullsh-t — from Wall Street strategists with their $3,500 messenger shoulder bags to the Mountain Dew crowd with their “vintage” Earnhardt Intimidator tees tucked into denim shorts with the fly unzipped — was just made to look like an epic fool.

The saving grace for the Mountain Dew crowd is that they don’t have the first clue what just happened, so psychologically, they’re no worse for wear. By contrast, Wall Street’s gotta live, again, with the uncomfortable suspicion that “the libs” were right: “My God, maybe he is an idiot! And I voted for him again. Again, again, again, actually. What does that make me?!”

Fortunately for Wall Street, that sort of self-reflection’s short-lived, because the answer’s just “rich” — i.e., whatever you are for voting to restore General Large Brain to the highest office on Earth, you’re still rich, and isn’t that what really matters at the end of the day?

On Thursday, Kevin Hassett sheepishly confirmed that Bessent was in fact taken by surprise this week when the US long-end got away from him. “Everything was moving forward in an orderly fashion [but] there’s no doubt that the Treasury market made it so that — you know — it is about time to move with perhaps a little more urgency,” he said, of Trump’s about-face. Yes, Kevin, “perhaps” a bidless US long-end is a sign that you’ve f-cked up, and that it’s time to “urgently” backtrack.

But it wasn’t just the bonds. It was also Trump’s concern that he might’ve tipped the dominos on an actual depression, with a “d.” “He told advisers that he was willing to take ‘pain’ [and] privately acknowledged that his trade policy could trigger a recession, but said he wanted to be sure it didn’t cause a depression,” The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a bevy of people familiar with the internal deliberations at The White House. CEOs, the same article said, told Trump and Bessent in recent days that “they needed to find an off ramp.”