Good morning: Imagine on Saturday night, you went to bed. You went to bed without setting an alarm because of something Mike Tirico said at the Olympics… you thought the Men’s Hockey game yesterday was at 1 pm EST… Not 1 pm Milan time (which was 8 am on the East Coast). You sleep late, hear the USA won the gold medal, and just move on with your day. But you never… ever… see any highlights of this incredible victory.... You just have yourself a nice Sunday. Then, you turn on the television on Monday morning, and the first play-by-play insight comes from Barry Melrose or Steve Levy. It comes from CNBC’s Joe Kernen on Squawk Box… If that were the case, you would still have very little understanding of what happened. You’d have received a report I can only describe as a wild, mixed bag of recollections from a man who might have watched the game… but might also have been watching an old war movie while the game was on a different television with the sound off… I’ve been getting up at 5:30 every day and putting Squawk Box on because the first 15 minutes of it carry an incredible same pre-coffee energy that must be experienced. I used to watch it each morning and write a blurb in an old letter called “Because You Missed Squawk Box…” that tracked the show’s first 15 minutes until the wheels fell off. Kernen always reads what’s on the teleprompter for about 7 seconds, then freelances with the same feel of Gene Hackman in the Birdcage talking about his drive to Florida and seeing the leaves change colors…  He spent some time getting the timing of Jack Hughes's cross-check injury wrong and rattling on for a bit about the player’s missing teeth, while the camera pans out to Andrew Ross Sorkin looking off-screen with a “Where is he going, should I do something?” look...
This is Not Sportscenter… He tries to remember who scored the winning goal, only to realize it was Jack Hughes, he thinks… but he’s still not sure? God, this show is so much fun… Then Sorkin… saved the segment… I guess… by changing the subject to FBI director Kash Patel at the Olympics? Because we needed a little moral outrage at 6:15 am? The first 15 minutes of this show are always just wild… It’s like they all sleep in the studio, gather from under the desk, and just all wake up on camera in front of you. I love it… It’s as if they had a camera on back in the day when a bunch of us would show up to trading floors hung over as can be… and someone screams “ACTION!” Everyone on the set starts to wake up over the next 45 minutes… and the show finally hits its groove around 6:50… I’ve usually flipped over to BBC by then, though. I can’t imagine doing a show at 6 am each day… I give them credit. It’s bad enough trying to get it together for a one-man show at 8:45 ET each day… Oh yeah… I’ll be live in 45 minutes. I’ll be talking about hockey… and tariffs.
The KickoffThe weekend brought another round of tariff escalation from the White House, with global duties bumped to 15% from 10%, effective immediately. So… we’re gonna start that today… That’s nudging us down a bit… Our reading has just been choppy for the last few weeks. That’s normal from a seasonality perspective. But as I’m about to show you… It feels like things are about to get quite bumpy… and the institutions agree... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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