Matthew Gardner

FACT FOCUS: Trump says tariffs can eventually replace federal income taxes. Experts disagree President Donald Trump has long praised tariffs as key to increasing wealth in the United States, idealizing Gilded Age policies that preceded the implementation of a modern federal income tax.

Why does "we can replace the federal income tax with tariffs" have to be fact checked, you might ask. It's so deliriously wrong that it's more a fever dream than a proposal. But the thing does need to be explained, so snaps to @melissagoldin.bsky.social of AP for doing it.
apnews.com/article/fact...

What the Wal mart guy means by "we want to play offense" is "because we have $9 billion cash on hand, we're going to eat every last cent of the tariffs for now, to keep prices low because we know our mom-and-pop competitors don't have that luxury."

seekingalpha.com/article/4849...

Here's a recent Wal-Mart exec's take on how they approached tariffs:
"We have seen over the last several years that as we've gained share, the retention of those share gains has been greater than at any time in history. And so that told us that we want to play offense in this environment."

... which means the tariffs on Sharpies & Papermates all got paid by American consumers. Not the narrative we've been sold by the Trump admin.
While this obviously sucks, I found it less fundamentally chilling than Wal-Mart's take on the tariffs. They're using them to crush their competition. (2/3)

One of the things Newell sells that has been hit by tariffs is writing implements. Sharpies, Papermate. They say RE the tariffs on those products that "we took 3 rounds of pricing, and we took pricing early and pretty aggressively ..which fully priced for the current tariff environment."

Really enjoying the thing in corporate quarterly earnings calls where analysts ask "how are you dealing with the tariffs" and the CEO guys use whatever code they can to avoid directly saying "we hiked retail prices."
The most common phrasing is "we took pricing."

seekingalpha.com/article/4849...

Reversing the Stricter Limit on Interest Deductions: Another Huge Tax Break for Private Equity Private equity is doing fine on its own and does not need another tax break. Congress should keep the stricter limit on deductions for interest payments —one of the few provisions in the 2017 tax law ...

Here's an @itep.org piece on why making the interest deduction limits less effective was a bad policy move.
itep.org/reversing-th...

This means the previously-existing limits on the interest deduction, which were enacted as one of the Potemkin revenue raisers in Trump's 2017 tax cut, were putting UGI in a place where they thought they weren't going to be able to use all their interest deductions. And now they think they can.

Starting to see corporate disclosures of the effect of OBBBA interest deduction limitation changes. UGI's annual report for the year ended 9/30/25 discloses a $31 million tax benefit related to this new tax cut. Mechanism is reducing their valuation allowance. www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Arch...

John Deere, a U.S. Icon, Is Undermined by Tariffs and Struggling Farmers

It's hardly news that a beloved US manufacturer is getting hit hard by tariffs. @kevindraper.bsky.social reported on Deere's tariff woes months ago. But that a doubling of that effect is seen for 2026 and that they will fully "capture back" the cost-- seems like news.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/b...

Deere response: "If you look at our price/cost expectation for 2026, inclusive of tariffs..., we expect to be price/cost positive. So we'll start to capture back -- we'll capture the incremental exposure this year and some of the exposure that we saw in 2025."
Translation: higher tractor prices.

John Deere's latest earnings call shows the firm continuing to take huge hits from Trump tariffs and passing them on to consumers. FY25 estimate is $600 million, doubling to $1.2B in 2026. Sensible Q from analyst: "how are you thinking about offsetting that?" (1/2)
seekingalpha.com/article/4848...

Mood

Aftermath.

Photo h/t @arpcomplex.bsky.social

GILTI corporate tax changes in the new OBBBA tax law are a mixed bag-- some tax hikes, some cuts. So it's always fun* to see specific companies making disclosures of the net effects of these changes. Analog Devices does so in its new 10-K, taking a $153 million tax hit.
www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Arch...

Still thinking about this amazing play from #washingtonspirit match.
1) the whole thing was set up by a towering Hal Hershfelt header off the corner kick.
2) yeah Kouassi's blazing fast here, but what we saw all day long from her was great footwork. She did whatever she wanted. game MVP no doubt.

Did feel bad for Coffey, Moultrie and the Thorns. They're a good, well-organized team that had a great season and played a clean game-- Spirit were just firing on all cylinders today.

Sellout crowd at Audi for @washingtonspirit.com . Kouassi’s lung-bursting run down the right side to set up the opening (and, as it turns out, winning) goal was one of the more amazing things I’ve seen on a soccer field.

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCL) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCL) Q3 2025 Earnings Call October 28, 2025 10:00 AM EDTCompany ParticipantsBlake Vanier - Vice President of Investor...

So we can look forward to getting more disclosures of the sort we recently saw from Royal Caribbean, who "expect[s] the global minimum tax policy updates beginning January 1, 2026, to impact us by an incremental couple of hundred basis points," or 2% of WW income. seekingalpha.com/article/4834...

This is true even though the Trump administration has informally gotten an agreement w/ OECD that the tax won't apply to US corporations. What matters for accounting purposes is what the actual laws of these other countries say, not what's been agreed on by Trump/OECD.

Bloomberg's Lauren Vella has a fun* financial accounting article today: US multinationals that are subject to the global minimum tax are going to have to report their tax expense in quarterly reports in a way that assumes it's really going to happen. (1/x) www.bgov.com/news/T5LXRVG...

Call me a romantic. But the “sad story” of CAMT is still being written, and the sentence most recently put to paper in this yarn is "and then the big bad tech corporation had $16 billion of its tax cuts taken away by Little Red Biden Hood." Not the most exciting story, but not the saddest either.

Lest we forget, here's a 1994 transcript of then Rep. Ron Wyden asking the 7 tobacco CEO's to say whether they believed tobacco was addictive: senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-....

My son's sensible question afterwards was whether any of the 7 tobacco company CEO's who, in 1994, brazenly lied to Congress about whether nicotine was addictive ended up going to jail. And of course the answer I had to share is that none of them even got charged with perjury.

I couldn't place the actor who knocked it out of the park playing 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace and had to look it up after-- Christopher Plummer in a totally riveting performance.
But the real star is the story itself-- the mendacity of big tobacco, the gigantic tobacco settlement that resulted.

Director Michael Mann is aptly named, as his films always feel about 110% male-- this one features Pacino and a young Russell Crowe facing off all the way thru-- and the few female characters usually aren't much more than cardboard cutouts. With that caveat, Pacino & Crowe were fantastic.

Re-watched "The Insider" (25 yrs later!) on a whim this weekend; seemed appropriate as my kid and I were lodging in a Winston-Salem neighborhood of former tobacco warehouses. What a great film. Simultaneously a valentine to the heroism of the news media and a foreshadowing of future failures.

I say this with love, as someone ecstatic about the win: @washingtonspirit.com should pay us to go thru such excruciating games, not the other way around. Will be there with bells on for semis next week, but games like that reduce your lifespan.

FIFA to award new peace prize at World Cup draw in Washington FIFA has announced the creation of a peace prize, which it plans to award for the first time at the World Cup draw on Dec. 5 in Washington.

Honestly I just think it's so nice these two found each other. It's as symbiotic a relationship as you'll ever see.
www.pbs.org/newshour/wor...

Is That All There Is?

Spare a thought for the anti-tax guys in Texas who, having just shepherded through a constitutional ban on financial transaction taxes this week, are now left wondering "what taxes are there left for us to constitutionally prohibit?"
open.spotify.com/track/0TLD1R...