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Cadbury Creme Egg Reclassified as Luxury Import, Now Ships With Customs Form and Notarized Letter of Indulgence

Tara Sparks
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Cadbury Creme Egg Reclassified as Luxury Import, Now Ships With Customs Form and Notarized Letter of Indulgence

HERSHEY, PA — In what families across the country are calling “a slightly more annoying Easter than last year,” the Cadbury Creme Egg has officially been reclassified as a luxury import under the new spring tariff schedule, and as of Sunday morning each individual egg now ships with a customs declaration, a tracking number, and a notarized letter from the manufacturer formally granting the recipient permission to enjoy it.

The single 40-gram egg, which retailed for $1.29 at most CVS locations as recently as Lent, now carries a sticker price of $14.80 plus a $9 “Confectionery Origin Verification” surcharge, payable in advance to a P.O. box in Delaware. Buyers receive the egg in a padded envelope alongside Form CE-1040, which must be signed in the presence of a witness before the foil is breached.

“What we’re seeing is the natural market response to placing a 47% duty on anything that walked through a port and a 12% duty on anything that contains fondant,” said Dr. Marcus Thiele, a trade economist at the Heritage Confectionery Institute, an organization he confirmed during the interview that he had founded earlier that morning. “The egg is doing what eggs do. It’s appreciating.”

By 9 a.m. Sunday, an unregulated secondary market had emerged in church parking lots from Toledo to Tallahassee, where children in Easter dresses were observed brokering split-egg arrangements at roughly $7 per half. Peeps, now sold individually rather than in five-packs, were being weighed on jewelry scales outside a Walgreens in Sarasota. A Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg changed hands in Akron for a working PlayStation 4.

Karen Tibble, a mother of three in Allentown, said she had budgeted $80 for Easter baskets this year and ended up with what she described as “one egg, a coupon, and the emotional damage of explaining tariffs to a four-year-old at sunrise service.” Her son Brayden, when reached for comment, was sucking on a piece of foil and declined to answer questions.

The Easter Bunny, in a statement released through a spokesperson at the National Confectioners Association, confirmed he had been forced to renegotiate his global supply chain and would this year be delivering “strategic, intentional baskets that reflect the values of a stronger domestic candy economy.” The statement included a footnote disclosing that the Bunny is now legally headquartered in Reno.

Trade officials maintain that the policy is working exactly as designed. “For decades, the American consumer has been freeloading on cheap European chocolate,” said an unnamed administration source, eating what observers described as a full-size, untaxed domestic Hershey bar throughout the briefing. “It is time for the Cadbury Creme Egg to pay its fair share, the same as any other foreign national.”

At press time, a six-year-old in Wichita who had successfully located the last untariffed jellybean in his backyard was being approached by three men in suits asking very politely if he would consider “a conversation.”

Citi Unveils $5B Earth Day Climate Pledge, Which Is Just Their Existing Loan Book Reprinted on Recycled Paper

Cody Thompson
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Citi Unveils $5B Earth Day Climate Pledge, Which Is Just Their Existing Loan Book Reprinted on Recycled Paper

NEW YORK — Citigroup unveiled a $5 billion climate commitment Friday in a pre-Earth Day livestream, a bold new sustainability initiative that several attendees noticed was the bank’s existing energy loan book printed on slightly thicker, off-white paper.

The portfolio, rebranded “Citi Forward Green,” contains the same 142 financing arrangements disclosed in the bank’s 2024 annual report, including a $400 million credit facility for a Permian Basin operator and a revolving line for an Indonesian palm oil exporter, both now categorized internally as “transition-adjacent.”

“What we’ve done is reframe these existing relationships through a more forward-looking lens,” said Margot Pell, Citi’s newly appointed Chief Sustainability Repositioning Officer, holding up a binder still warm from the printer. “Every dollar in this portfolio is a dollar we are no longer free to lend to something even worse.”

The accompanying ESG brief highlighted several flagship projects, among them a West Texas refinery that has committed to motion-sensor lighting in administrative wings, a Louisiana petrochemical plant whose cafeteria has switched to compostable forks, and a Wyoming coal terminal that, per the report, “now sorts its trash, mostly.”

Outside analysts were less moved. “This is the third time Citi has announced this exact loan book,” said Devon Halloran of the climate-finance watchdog Carbon Ledger. “In 2021 they called it the Sustainable Progress Initiative. In 2023 it was Pathways to Net Something. The PDF metadata on the new one still reads ‘Q4_FOSSILS_FINAL_v3.'”

Inside the bank, the rollout was reportedly a logistical triumph. An internal email reviewed by mmnn instructed associates that the new framing required no changes to client deliverables beyond updating the deck’s footer to a forest green and inserting a stock photo of a leaf onto slide three.

CEO Jane Fraser, asked at the livestream whether any new lending was involved, paused for what one viewer called a “thoughtful and Earth Day-appropriate” eight seconds before responding that the commitment “represents a continuation of the kind of capital allocation we have been continuing.” Pressed further, she clarified that the $5 billion figure was “directional.”

The bank said the initiative would be reviewed annually, ideally around the same week.

TikTok’s ‘Feral Easter’ Trend Has 26-Year-Olds Nesting in Yards With Raw Eggs and Calling It ‘Healing’

Tara Sparks
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TikTok’s ‘Feral Easter’ Trend Has 26-Year-Olds Nesting in Yards With Raw Eggs and Calling It ‘Healing’

BROOKLYN, NY — At 7:14 a.m. on Good Friday, 27-year-old branding consultant Maddie Polk lowered herself into a hand-built nest of organic raffia behind her parents’ Park Slope brownstone, tucked four unrefrigerated farm eggs against her sternum, and began the four-hour TikTok Live that her followers now refer to simply as ‘the brood.’

She is not alone. Across the country, a viral aesthetic dubbed #FeralEaster has taken hold among women aged 24 to 34, who have spent the holiday week constructing nests in their yards, drinking raw water from clay vessels labeled ‘tomb juice,’ and describing the experience to bewildered relatives as ‘rewilding the resurrection.’

The trend reportedly began on March 31, when a doula in Asheville posted a 92-second clip of herself ‘honoring the egg’ by humming a single sustained note over a brown chicken egg for an entire afternoon. The video has since logged 41 million views, prompting a content arms race in which influencers compete to appear maximally unwell in vegetation.

‘It’s about reclaiming the original spring energy before colonialism made the holiday about ham,’ explained Cassidy Veere, a self-described holistic anthropologist and host of the podcast Eat Pray Forage. ‘Also, ham is gluten. I’m not going to explain how, but it is.’

By Wednesday, the trend had escalated into what one sociologist is calling ‘phase two,’ in which participants begin ‘naming’ their eggs, refusing to leave the nest for meals, and posting tearful TikToks about the ‘unbearable patriarchy of refrigeration.’ At least three women in Sedona have been cited for ‘unattended brooding’ on public xeriscaping, and a Whole Foods in Silver Lake reports a 600% spike in raw watercress theft, all of it attributed to women in linen smocks who ‘apologized to the door on the way out.’

Predictably, brands have swarmed. Erewhon launched a $48 ‘Ritual Yolk’ smoothie containing one pasture-raised egg, crushed shell, and a sprig of thyme ‘foraged within emotional walking distance of the customer.’ Anthropologie is selling a $189 ‘Devotional Nesting Set’ that is, on close inspection, a basket. Goop released a candle called Empty Tomb that smells, according to its product copy, like ‘wet stone and the courage to begin again.’

‘Lily told me she was going home to her clutch, and I assumed she meant her purse,’ said Diane Polk, Maddie’s mother, who confirmed she has been bringing her daughter water bottles and gently pretending not to notice. ‘I asked if she wanted any of the lamb. She hissed. Not metaphorically.’

As of Friday afternoon, Polk had not broken the eggs and said she did not intend to. ‘I’m just letting them go on their own journey,’ she explained, adjusting a flower crown of curbside dandelions. ‘If one hatches, it hatches. If it doesn’t, that’s also a kind of Easter.’

First Methodist’s Easter Tomb-Stone Mechanism, a Lazy Susan Repurposed in 1987, Has Finally Failed in a Way the Deacons Cannot Pray Away

Hal Cranston
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First Methodist’s Easter Tomb-Stone Mechanism, a Lazy Susan Repurposed in 1987, Has Finally Failed in a Way the Deacons Cannot Pray Away

CLAYBORN, MO — The mechanical apparatus that has rolled away the foam-and-chicken-wire stone at First Methodist’s annual Easter Resurrection Pageant since the second Reagan administration began emitting a sound described by witnesses as “an electrical scream” during Tuesday’s dress rehearsal, prompting an emergency deacons’ meeting and the first serious theological argument the church has had since the folding chair question of 2003.

The mechanism — a 1978 Lazy Susan removed from the Halverson family Christmas dinner table after a divorce, modified with a garage-door opener and a length of nylon rope — had functioned without complaint for thirty-eight Easters, a run church historian Vera Lindquist called “longer than most marriages, and all of mine.”

“It’s been struggling since 2019,” said Deacon Earl Pemberton, who has personally maintained the device since inheriting it from his late father-in-law, who built it in a garage that has since been condemned. “But this is different. This is the kind of sound a thing makes right before it stops being a thing.”

Pageant director Marlene Guthrie confirmed that a backup plan exists, in the sense that two seventh-grade boys have been asked to push the stone manually while wearing brown bedsheets, which she described as “scripturally defensible if you don’t think about it too hard.”

The mechanical crisis arrives on top of an already trying production season. The actor originally cast as Jesus accepted a forklift position in Lincoln on Monday, the backup pulled out citing concerns about the sandals, and the third candidate — Larry Doerr’s nephew, visiting from Topeka — agreed to the role only after being assured he would not have to grow a beard before Sunday and could keep his glasses on.

Mrs. Peterson, who has attended every First Methodist Easter pageant since 1971 and rates them on a private spreadsheet she will not share, called the mechanical issues “regrettable but not unprecedented,” citing the 1994 production in which the stone rolled the wrong direction and pinned a wise man — a detail she conceded was from the Christmas pageant, but stood by on principle.

First Baptist, located across the street and operating a competing 9 A.M. service, declined to comment on the situation, though Pastor Doug Reesman was reportedly seen smiling in the IGA parking lot Tuesday afternoon in a manner several parishioners described as un-Christian.

As of Wednesday evening, the mechanism had been disassembled on a tarp in the fellowship hall, where Deacon Pemberton was sorting screws into a coffee can while quietly mouthing what observers believed to be either a prayer, a list of swears, or both in alternation.

The pageant is scheduled for 10 A.M. Sunday. Mrs. Peterson plans to arrive at 9:15.

Clayborn County NAPA Counterman Ron Halverson Has Spent More Time This Week Explaining Tariffs Than Selling Brake Pads, Is Considering a Cover Charge

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County NAPA Counterman Ron Halverson Has Spent More Time This Week Explaining Tariffs Than Selling Brake Pads, Is Considering a Cover Charge

CLAYBORN, IA — Ron Halverson, who has manned the parts counter at the Highway 14 NAPA for nineteen years and is generally regarded as the closest thing Clayborn County has to a working economist, told a customer Tuesday morning that he could either ring up the radiator hose or walk her through the current state of U.S.-China trade relations, but not both inside the half-hour she had before her hair appointment.

The customer, who had come in for a $14.99 hose and stayed forty-eight minutes, left with the hose, three pamphlets Ron printed off the internet, and a working but bitter understanding of the phrase ‘reciprocal.’

‘I had a guy in here Monday wanted to know if his serpentine belt was Chinese,’ Halverson said, ringing up an air filter without looking down. ‘I told him the belt was made in Tennessee and the rubber was from Malaysia and the box was printed in Kentucky and the truck it’s going into is a 2003 Silverado, so at some point you have to decide what counts as American and what counts as a hobby.’

By Wednesday afternoon, Halverson had instituted what he is calling, with the flat affect of a man who has not slept well, a five-dollar geopolitics surcharge, payable at the counter and applicable to any question that begins with the words ‘now is it true that.’ He has so far collected forty-five dollars and one homemade rhubarb pie from Marlene Voss, who said she didn’t have cash but felt bad taking up his time.

Mrs. Peterson came in Tuesday to ask whether the tariffs would affect the price of the wiper blades on her 1998 LeSabre, which she has owned since the wiper blades were installed at the factory and has never replaced. Halverson confirmed they likely would, at which point Mrs. Peterson said she supposed she’d just keep driving slower in the rain, the same solution she has applied to most of the last twenty-seven years.

Dr. Pritha Saldana, an applied economist at Drake University who agreed to take Halverson’s call Tuesday after he found her on the school’s faculty page, said the situation at the Highway 14 NAPA was ‘a more honest seminar than most of the ones I teach,’ and added that Halverson had grasped the concept of input-cost pass-through faster than her graduate students, though she noted he kept calling it ‘getting screwed downstream.’

Store owner Dean Brockhauser, asked whether he supported Ron’s surcharge policy, said he supported anything that got the line moving, and noted that the counter had become ‘a little bit of a town square situation’ since early April, with retirees stopping in to argue about steel without buying anything and one man, identified by other customers only as ‘the guy with the Bronco,’ staying for three hours Monday to deliver what witnesses described as ‘a real strong opinion about Vietnam.’

Across the highway at the Hen House Diner, waitress Carla Bemis confirmed that Halverson had eaten lunch at the counter Wednesday in complete silence, ordered the meatloaf without commentary, and tipped in exact change. ‘He looked,’ Bemis said, refilling a coffee, ‘like a man who had explained one too many things to one too many people, for free, in a building he does not own.’

My Sister-in-Law Who Does Reception at H&R Block Told Me to Never File Before 4:11 PM on Tax Day and the Reason Is Honestly Beautiful

Brooke Ellery
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My Sister-in-Law Who Does Reception at H&R Block Told Me to Never File Before 4:11 PM on Tax Day and the Reason Is Honestly Beautiful

It’s Tuesday morning at the farmhouse and Garrett has the W-2s spread across the kitchen table like he’s about to perform surgery on our marriage. He’s already opened TurboTax. He has the little progress bar going. And I am physically blocking the laptop with my body, because Marlee called.

Marlee is my sister-in-law. She works the front desk at the H&R Block in the strip mall next to the Asheville Tractor Supply, which means she has been within ten feet of more 1099s than any CPA in Buncombe County. She is basically a CPA. When she calls during tax season, you pick up. When she says “do not submit before 4:11,” you do not submit before 4:11.

The reason is simple if you let yourself hear it. The IRS mainframe — and yes, it is one mainframe, Marlee has seen the diagram — does what she calls an “energetic exhale” between 4:00 and 4:15 PM Eastern. Returns sent in before that window get sorted into the morning queue, which is the audit queue. Returns sent in after 4:11 fall into what she calls “the soft pile.” She did not invent the term. A man who left her a Vanguard pamphlet in 2019 invented the term, and Marlee has been testing it against her clients ever since.

I know how this sounds. I also know that the year I filed at 9:14 AM the IRS sent us a letter saying they needed “clarification” on a $42 charitable deduction we’d taken for a goat. The year I filed at 4:38 PM we got our refund in eleven days and the goat was never mentioned again. Tell me the timing isn’t doing something.

And I’m not saying the time of day is the only piece. You also have to file on paper. I will not be e-filing this year for the same reason I will not microwave water for tea: there is a vibration that gets stripped out in the conversion and we are not getting it back. My return is going in the mail in an envelope made of unbleached hemp paper I bought from a woman at the Weaverville farmer’s market who only accepts cash or eggs. She wouldn’t take a card if you held it in front of her face. I respect that.

Most of this framework I picked up in a Facebook group called “Soft Filers of the Southeast (Tax Sovereignty, No Sovereign Citizens Plz),” which has been very firm since 2022 that you cannot mix the two energies. We are not anti-tax. We are pro-rhythm. There is a difference and the mods will remove you for not knowing it. They removed a man last week for posting a YouTube link with the word “REDEMPTION” in all caps and honestly, fair.

My kids have a Tax Day routine now. At 3:30 Ember draws a salt bath — salt is a mineral, not a food, which is a separate column — and Wren lights the beeswax taper we only burn on the equinoxes and on April 15. Sage reads the first page of the return out loud, because numbers spoken into the air are harder for the system to misread. Beck, who is two, mostly throws Cheerios at the dog. We are working on Beck.

At 4:11 exactly, Garrett walks the envelope down to the mailbox at the end of our gravel road and raises the little red flag. We don’t talk on the way back. Marlee says reverence matters in this part. The man with the Vanguard pamphlet apparently said the same thing, more than once, in a parking lot.

I’ll let you know how the refund lands. But if you’re reading this at 8 AM with your finger hovering over Submit, I am begging you. Make a tea. Sit on the porch. Let the IRS exhale. Your return will still be there at 4:11, and so will your refund, and so, God willing, will the goat.

RTX Investor Deck Lists ‘World Peace’ as Principal Risk, ‘Sustained Conflict’ as Forward-Looking Tailwind

Cody Thompson
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RTX Investor Deck Lists ‘World Peace’ as Principal Risk, ‘Sustained Conflict’ as Forward-Looking Tailwind

ARLINGTON, VA — Slide 14 of RTX Corporation’s Monday investor presentation listed “outbreak of durable global peace” as a principal risk factor and “sustained multi-theater conflict” as a forward-looking tailwind, a juxtaposition that drew no questions from analysts until roughly the forty-fifth minute of Q&A, and even then only because someone wanted clarification on whether Taiwan was modeled separately or folded into the broader Indo-Pacific assumption.

The presentation, delivered ahead of formal Q1 results next week, came as the White House’s pause on Ukraine aid disbursements entered its sixth week, a development the deck classified as “transitory” in 11-point font and footnoted to a McKinsey study nobody asked to see.

“We feel very good about our positioning regardless of what shape any individual conflict ultimately takes,” said RTX EVP and Chief Financial Officer Margaret Voss, walking analysts through a chart titled Conflict-Agnostic Revenue Diversification. “Whether Ukraine continues, pauses, restarts, freezes, partitions, or somehow concludes, our exposure is structured to remain flat to slightly positive. We’re a backlog story, not a headlines story.”

A subsequent slide offered scenario modeling for a hypothetical Ukrainian ceasefire, projecting it as a “moderate near-term headwind” of approximately 3% to consolidated revenue, “more than offset by replenishment cycles, Taiwan readiness expenditures, and what we’re internally calling Generalized Middle East.”

Pete Donegan of Talcott Capital, who initiated coverage at Buy in February, said the deck reflected “exactly the kind of all-weather operational discipline” the sector has been waiting for, and that RTX’s willingness to publicly characterize peace as an 8-K-worthy event “shows real maturity from a company that, ten years ago, would have buried this in the appendix between the pension footnote and the auditor’s letter.”

Asked at a midday press gaggle whether the language risked appearing tone-deaf, Voss said the company’s investor relations team had run the deck past a values consultant who flagged only one slide — a footnote thanking the Houthis for “sustained relevance of the destroyer platform” — which was subsequently moved to the appendix without further edits.

Pressed on whether RTX had a contingency in place should multiple conflicts resolve simultaneously, Voss called the scenario “mathematically possible but not something we’re underwriting,” and noted that the company’s five-year strategic plan assumes “a baseline of human nature.”

The presentation closed with a single slide reading Thank You superimposed over an F-35 catching golden-hour light, and a Q&A in which the only ESG-related question concerned whether the company’s munitions were now classified, technically, as transitional fuels.

Man Scales Fence, Breaks Window, Lobs Molotov Into Governor’s Residence; Pennsylvania State Police Praised for Arriving Eventually

Nash Grayson
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Man Scales Fence, Breaks Window, Lobs Molotov Into Governor’s Residence; Pennsylvania State Police Praised for Arriving Eventually

HARRISBURG, PA — At approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, a man hopped a fence, smashed a window, and hurled an incendiary device into the official residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro while the governor, his wife, his four children, and his dog slept upstairs, an episode authorities are now describing as ‘a wake-up call,’ which it was, in the most literal possible sense.

The Pennsylvania State Police, charged with protecting the residence around the clock, confirmed that the suspect successfully cleared the perimeter, traversed the grounds, breached the building, started a fire, and then exited the same way he came in before being apprehended later, a sequence of events the agency characterized as ‘an active and ongoing investigation,’ the standard phrasing for ‘we have questions too.’

‘The perimeter held in the sense that it is still there, physically,’ said Bram Doloway, director of the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Executive Residence Security, an organization he founded after concluding that no one else was going to. ‘The fence is intact. The cameras recorded the entire incident in beautiful 4K. At every stage of this event, the relevant equipment performed exactly as designed. The man simply walked past it.’

Officials confirmed the suspect scaled an iron fence in plain view of the residence, carried what investigators described as a ‘gas-can-and-bottle-based homemade arrangement’ across the lawn, and ignited the first floor of a building with a permanent state-funded protective detail, all without triggering any response from said detail until after the fire was already in progress and a smoke alarm — purchased, like the ones in everyone’s apartment, at a hardware store — had done the job the State Police were technically being paid to do.

Governor Shapiro, addressing reporters Sunday morning while standing in front of a charred section of his own dining room, said his family was safe and thanked first responders, an act of public grace that was almost immediately undercut by the dawning realization, visible on his face, that ‘first responders’ had in this case included him, personally, waking his children up and walking them out of a house that was on fire.

‘We are taking this very seriously,’ said a spokesperson for the State Police, deploying the phrase that institutions reach for when ‘we noticed’ is unavailable. The agency declined to specify how a man with a duffel bag full of accelerant cleared a guarded residence in the state capital, citing the integrity of the investigation, which now appears to consist primarily of asking the cameras what they saw.

The suspect, who turned himself in hours later, reportedly told investigators he was motivated by a list of grievances which authorities are still reviewing, parsing, and trying to fit into any recognizable ideological category, a process complicated by the document apparently containing several. The list, sources said, will eventually be assigned to whichever agency is least busy.

Asked whether the breach would prompt a review of executive residence protocols nationwide, the governor’s office said it expected ‘a thorough conversation’ in the coming weeks, a timeline that puts the formal hardening of the nation’s governors’ mansions somewhere on the calendar between now and the next time someone walks into one carrying a gas can.

Memecoin Day Trader Realizes Saturday Morning That Each of His 8,400 Trades Was, Technically, Its Own Taxable Event

Cody Thompson
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Memecoin Day Trader Realizes Saturday Morning That Each of His 8,400 Trades Was, Technically, Its Own Taxable Event

HOBOKEN, NJ — Three days before the federal filing deadline, 28-year-old retail investor Brendan Mosley sat down at his kitchen table Saturday with a cold brew, a printout from Coinbase, and the dawning realization that the IRS does not, in fact, view his year of frantic memecoin swapping as ‘basically one big thing.’

According to the spreadsheet Mosley generated at 9:14 a.m. and immediately closed at 9:14 a.m., he executed 8,431 separate trades in 2024, each one a discrete capital gains event requiring its own cost basis, holding period, and disposition value, a fact he learned from a Reddit comment titled ‘lol you’re cooked.’

‘The thing he doesn’t understand,’ said Eliza Hartwick, a CPA at Manhattan tax boutique Linnaker & Voss who specializes in distressed crypto returns, ‘is that swapping FartCoin for ToiletCoin and then ToiletCoin back into Solana an hour later is, from the agency’s perspective, three taxable events. He thinks it’s vibes. It is not vibes. It has never been vibes.’

Mosley’s situation is reportedly complicated by the fact that roughly 1,200 of the trades occurred on a decentralized exchange that issued no 1099, exists on a blockchain he can no longer remember the name of, and was last seen in November 2024 announcing a ‘strategic pivot’ before the website became a single GIF of a frog.

‘He keeps asking me if he can just put down a number,’ said Hartwick, who has now received 14 voice memos from Mosley, the most recent of which is 41 seconds of him saying the word ‘okay’ at increasing volume. ‘I told him the IRS would prefer the correct number. He asked if there was a range. There is not a range.’

Mosley, who netted approximately $312 in actual profit for the year after fees, gas, and one rug pull involving a token that promised to ‘tokenize friendship,’ is expected to spend roughly 60 hours reconstructing wallet histories in order to report a tax liability his accountant estimates at $84.

As of press time, Mosley had filed for a six-month extension, opened a second cold brew, and was staring at a browser tab containing IRS Form 8949 with the expression of a man who has just been told the ocean is, technically, also paperwork.

JPMorgan Posts Record Q1 Trading Revenue, Asks Staff to Please Stop Mailing the White House Edible Arrangements

Cody Thompson
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JPMorgan Posts Record Q1 Trading Revenue, Asks Staff to Please Stop Mailing the White House Edible Arrangements

NEW YORK, NY — JPMorgan Chase reported its highest quarterly trading revenue in company history Friday morning, prompting an internal compliance memo politely reminding employees that gratitude toward the current administration’s tariff policy must, under no circumstances, be expressed in writing, on social media, or via the gift-basket vendor whose order volume has reportedly tripled since February.

The bank pulled in $9.7 billion from its markets division, a figure executives credited to what CFO Jeremy Barnum described as “unprecedented client engagement,” a phrase Wall Street uses when retail investors are panic-selling into a bid the trading desk is happy to provide.

“Volatility is, technically, our product,” said Hollis Reaver, a senior markets strategist at Cohen-Bergmann Advisory, speaking from a desk that visibly contained three monitors and one bottle of champagne still in its box. “When the tape moves four percent in either direction because someone tweeted at 6:42 a.m., we don’t applaud. We bill.”

Internal documents reviewed by associates of associates suggest that JPMorgan’s equity derivatives team has begun referring to the April 2 tariff announcement as “the gift,” the April 9 pause as “the gift that keeps on giving,” and the subsequent China escalation as “please, sir, we couldn’t possibly.” One trader has reportedly named his second boat “Reciprocal.”

The compliance memo, distributed Thursday, asked employees to refrain from any public expression of enthusiasm regarding U.S. trade policy, including but not limited to LinkedIn posts, charitable donations made in the name of the United States Trade Representative, and the catered fruit arrangements that have, per building security, been arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with return addresses traced to a Midtown floor that does not officially exist on the building directory.

Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, which also reported Friday, posted similarly strong trading numbers and similarly muted public commentary, with Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick describing the quarter as “constructive” — a word that, in banking, can mean anything from “fine” to “we made so much money the legal team asked us to pick a different word.”

Reached for comment, a small-business owner in Ohio who manufactures auto components and has spent the last week trying to figure out whether his March order from a supplier in Ontario is now subject to a 10%, 25%, or ‘pending clarification’ tariff said he was “glad somebody’s having a good quarter.” He then asked if this reporter knew anyone at JPMorgan, because his line of credit was up for review.

At a small ceremony Friday afternoon, the JPMorgan trading floor reportedly observed a moment of silence for the 60/40 portfolio, followed by a moment of much louder noise for everything else.

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