The Consequences of Getting on Europe’s Bad Side
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Hello! Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of Neal Times. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. We are going to talk about a piece I wrote for Axios about the potential cost to the U.S. domestic economy of America's pivot towards Russia and away from Europe. We are going to talk about

which apparently people think might be wanting to break itself up and sell itself off in pieces. We are going to talk about Quince, which is a smoother, more natural version of Shein and Timu. We have a Slate Plus segment on med spas. We have an egg watch. We have a numbers round. All manner of goodies this week. It's all coming up on Slate.

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which is an emirate. And I was just looking up all of the rich countries in the world that don't have formal US security guarantees. And there aren't very many of them. And basically, the rich Arab countries that have made all of their money from oil like Qatar and Saudi Arabia would count. But the big picture is that if you basically look around the world, and look at everyone who's rich,

It's all allies of America and everyone has done really well out of this. This kind of hegemonic, monopolar US provides sort of security to NATO and Japan and all these places, South Korea. And in return, we get all manner of trade benefits and wealth and everyone becomes rich. This has worked really well for effectively the entire post-war period.

And now I'm worried that this period is coming to an end because we had this incredible series of announcements made in Europe by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary by J.D. Burns, basically saying to Europe, yeah, about that whole security guarantee and the whole NATO thing, like, don't hold your breath. We don't really mean it. The main threat to Europe is not Russia. It's apparently Russia.

woke politics or something. And the Europeans are incredibly shocked by this. There's been a very...

explicit pivot to Russia of all places by the Trump administration, which is refusing to say anything rude about Putin and is saying lots of very rude things about Zelensky and Ukraine. And I started thinking this through a bit this week. And I wrote this piece for Axios basically saying like this thing that we've all kind of been thinking, which is, wait, are we the baddies now?

If that's the case, if the United States starts being thought of as like an enemy superpower in Europe, then that could not only really hurt the European economy, but it could really hurt the U.S. economy because so much of America's wealth and prosperity is a function of

its incredible alliances with all of the rich countries in the world. And those alliances are tied up inextricably with its security and defense power.

One aspect of that, too, is that most of the countries that are client states of the U.S., even outside of NATO or Western democracies, which is part of the reason why we give them that security guarantee. So when Vance gets up and suggests that Russia is a better partner to America than Europe is, or is denigrating the partnership with Europe, that seems to me of a piece with the general anti-democratic theme of this administration, as much as it does considerations about the economy.

Right. And I think we've heard a lot about the implications for democracy and security, basically, and, you know, whether Europe will be able to be self-sufficient on a security slash defense basis. The thing that I was trying to write about this week and the thing that I was just trying to take that extra step and say, like, it's not just bad for all of these profoundly important things that we all care about, but it's also just very selfishly bad on a domestic economic level for the United States.

So your piece in Axios I thought was just excellent. You point out like US companies employ 5 million Europeans, European companies employ 5 million Americans, 60% of foreign investment into the US comes from Europe, more than 60% of foreign investment by the US goes into Europe. It's like very beautiful economic. The two between them account for more than 50% of Europe.

entire global GDP. I mean, it's by far the richest and most prosperous relationship in the world. Yes. And the US basically built it with the Marshall Plan. We planted the seeds, we watered the earth, we did all the stuff, and it's blossomed into this incredible economic trading partnership and allyship and security. You make that really clear. And the fact that

For the past week, the Trump administration's going around and just like, I don't know, pooping on all of that is really wild. And I was on the BBC this week and the lovely announcer, his name is Roger, and he's a self-proclaimed boomer and worked for the BBC forever and is usually very level-headed and conservative. In the middle of talking about business stuff, he was like...

And the president said he was the king on truth social this week. And what's going on? He was just like, what is happening? And I was like, Roger, I don't know. As someone whose dad is an English conservative boomer named Roger, I totally get it because he's been saying the exact same thing. I was like, I don't know. I felt like I was suddenly a spokesperson for America, which I am not. Anyway, all of that said, are we sure what happens?

President Trump is doing will actually have economic consequences because we can have tense relationships with other countries and still have like a big, good, profitable, revenue, GDP generating situation, can't we? I mean, China being the classic example. China and the US, we're like frenemies forever. We are mutually money making partners in

not crime or whatever, you know, like you don't have to be friends to do revenue, to do GDP, to do economy. So this is exactly the point that I was trying to make, right? Which is that the economic ties between the U S and China are tiny and frayed and thin and nothing compared to the economic ties between the U S and Europe. And there's this quote in my piece, um,

The Hank Paulson used to say quite a lot, which is that he was chatting away to a Chinese official when the Chinese official says to him, you guys have all the best allies that China is like incredibly jealous of America's relationship with Europe in particular, because that is the relationship that both of them want. And that is the relationship that America has tied up.

Yeah, sure. There are some employees of American firms in China. You know, there are some employees of Chinese firms in America. There's some investment back and forth. But it's like two orders of magnitude less than what we're seeing with Europe. Isn't China our number two trading partner after Mexico? Like they go back and forth. So yeah, in terms of like sheer goods exports and imports. Yeah, China exports a lot of goods to the United States. It exports 5%.

Very little in the way of services to the United States. And remember, the United States is now mostly a services-based economy, as is Europe. In terms of financial flows, it's tiny.

The financial flows, you know, I'm sure we have more financial flows with Belgium than we do with China. The one exception, of course, being like the one thing that everyone always talks about, which is Chinese holdings of treasury bonds. But that's a slightly separate issue. Yeah, I think whether Trump's, you know, antagonism toward Europe makes a difference really depends on how much business owners buy into it or not, or whether they sort of read it as Trump being Trump or a possibility that he might, you know, do surprise things.

things the way that he's threatened to do with tariffs with them. Because even if things are sort of stable now, and the whole theory of liberal economic interdependence is that you maintain a good state of international security and things are stable because the countries are so interdependent.

One long-term problem, though, is that if Trump keeps doing this, he will make investing in the U.S. less attractive for European counterparts because any kind of uncertainty will do that. It sort of doesn't matter what he can get done policy-wise if those relationships seem more tenuous simply because we're not a reliable partner. Yeah, it seems obvious that Trump doesn't value investment from abroad. In fact, he wants less of it by just

simple arithmetic necessity, the current account deficit is the capital account surplus, right? Like Trump hates the trade deficit. He wants it to be smaller. But the way we finance the trade deficit is by other countries investing money in the United States. So if the trade deficit gets smaller, then other countries will invest less money in the United States. And that's what he wants.

But conversely, I think, Elizabeth, the risk here is not just what Trump does, but also very much what Europe does.

If Europe starts looking at American tech giants in particular as being kind of avatars of an enemy state where the United States is becoming more of an enemy than a friend, the fines that we have seen the EU impose on Google and Facebook and that kind of thing will start looking tiny compared to what they're capable of doing. Already under EU law, I think it is premeditated

It's pretty clear that if the Europeans wanted to ban X entirely for violations of various European laws, they probably could quite easily. It's been found in violation of these laws already. They just need to work out what remedy they want. You know, if they consider Musk to be part of the Trump administration and America to be more of an enemy than a friend, then there's a huge amount of retaliatory actions that Europe can make against American companies in general and American tech companies in

particular. And that becomes this sort of terrible war of attrition that no one really wants, but I can easily see happening. Yeah. I was thinking about it this week because I'll mangle this and people can write in. It's fine. Slate money at slate.com. Canada and the US played some kind of sports game together. I want to say hockey, but I don't know. Thank you. And Canada, I want to say won. Yeah.

Yeah. And Justin Trudeau said something kind of antagonistic about. He tweeted something about you will never take our game or something. You'll never take our game. Right. So I feel like more than Europeans or European leaders or companies saying like, oh, it's very uncertain in the US and the Trump administration goes back and forth a lot. It's very uncertain. So we won't want to invest.

Instead of that, the rationale is more like, fuck those guys. And that's a real thing that could have real economic consequences for a long time and sort of only get worse and is actually really bad for the economy. My question for Felix is, is it good for Europe maybe? Because Neil Irwin had a piece just talking about Europe's twin crisis. One, its best friend is being really mean, right?

the US. And two, its economy is really sluggish. We know Mario Draghi has been talking about this for a while, has some new op-ed, talking about it even more. Is it possible that breaking up with the US will drive Europe to invest more in itself, invest more in defense, and that will drive a surge in productivity or in economic growth or things like that? Just the need to be more independent?

I would say the exact opposite, to be honest. If European governments need to borrow more in order to spend more on defense because they no longer have the U.S. security guarantee, or they can no longer count on the U.S. security guarantee, then that exacerbates their already pretty bad fiscal situation.

increases their debts. Defense spending, especially by Europeans is never like it doesn't have a great sort of GDP multiplier, especially given that so many of the big defense contractors are American, you know, if they're going to buy a whole bunch of like American aircraft carriers or something that's not going to help the European economy very much.

There are a whole bunch of things that Mario Draghi thinks that the European Union should do in order to become more competitive. And lots of talk about structural reforms, which is the most boring phrase in the world. But I feel like spending more money on guns

It's just like not one of those things. So American, though, and our economy is pretty good. We make all the war machines and guns. How are people going to live without us? So, yeah, I mean, to be clear, this is all very sort of hypothetical. It hasn't happened yet. But my point really is that it's an absolutely unfathomably enormous risk that Trump is running in this kind of pivot to Putin situation.

And the downside, even if we realize only like 1% of the downside, the downside here to America is so much bigger than any conceivable upside of having improved relations with Russia. Because, you know, as we are about to find out on an upcoming Money Talks that I have already recorded with Eddie Fishman,

The U.S. is very good at turning off trade with Russia, but it's basically incapable of turning it back on. We discovered this in 2016 when we lifted all the sanctions on Iran and the number of American companies that came rushing back in to do trade with Iran was basically zero. You know, you can lift sanctions officially, but that doesn't mean that trade is going to come back.

And even if it does come back, you had numbers in your story, it's not that much. It's not worth the trade. You don't want to trade Europe for Russia. The relationship between the U.S. and Europe is measured in the trillions. And with Russia, even at the best of times, it was like, you know, a thousand. As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24-7.

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trial balloons that has been floated over the past week is that Intel might break itself up into two. So there would be the bit of Intel that designs chips and then the bit of Intel that manufactures chips. And then it would take the designy bit and sell it to Broadcom and it would take the manufacturing bit and sell it to TSMC, which according to Bloomberg is quite likely and possibly even being supported by the Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal, not

Not so much. But this, of course, is just so fraught from a regulatory perspective. The idea that TSMC, this like Taiwanese company, would basically take over the fabs of Intel. It may or may not make sense from an economic perspective. But in order for those kind of deals to happen, and Intel stock went up a lot on this news.

You really do need all of the regulatory bodies in sort of Western allied countries to be on the same page and say, oh yeah, we're all friends, so we have nothing to worry about in terms of geopolitics. And that just doesn't seem likely to me. I don't really understand why the Trump administration would be supporting this, especially given Trump's rhetoric about bringing more manufacturing to the United States or keeping it here. Well, the idea would be that...

TSMC would take over Intel's fabs and would invest more. And maybe if they were being run by TSMC, then they might actually be good rather than kind of not so good as they are right now. And so you would have better fabs in the United States than you do right now.

None of this makes any sense. Quartz had a really good piece I thought we read in the prep about why it doesn't make any sense. TSMC is like real good at what it does. It's the best and Intel has been not the best for a super long time.

The fashion is now in chips to be like TSMC, which is like you're kind of like neutral. You make chips for whoever asks you to make the chips. And Intel didn't go that route. It makes the chips and designs the chips. It's trying to be more like TSMC in the making of the chips. And it does make sense to split the company in two. It's been struggling for so long.

What also never made sense to me, just as I learned more about chips over as they become like the cool thing to talk about in business journalism, right, since the 2020s, that the Biden administration had invested so much money in Intel and like bet billions of dollars that they could like become like...

the TSMC of the US. That probably didn't make sense. You probably shouldn't give billions of dollars to a company that's like really struggling to remain relevant. That was kind of a bad idea. And the company has been not doing well. So it does need probably a buyer or it needs to do something. But I don't think TSMC like

They have no incentive to like put their thumb on the scale to do a US chip deal in any way. It's very not obvious that TSMC actually particularly wants to buy Intel's fabs or that, you know, it wants to take on those employees or that it could bring those employees into the TSMC way. I think it would rather just build its own. Yeah. At some level, if the price is good and attractive enough, then maybe it'll do that deal. But TSMC has never been a company that has

particularly by acquisition. You know, it's been a very much a kind of like, we're just going to build it and grow organically kind of company.

And it has like cutting edge equipment. It has the best people working for it. And they've talked about and it's like widely known the U.S. doesn't have the people needed to staff a foundry to make the chips. That's like part of the issue. So why would TSMC want to? I just don't I don't understand. It would also just it goes against the intent of the Chips Act, which was heavily subsidized.

worded on a bipartisan basis, one of the few things that was. And under the CHIPS Act, if Intel does break off a piece of its business, it is still required to retain a majority share of it, which means that Intel would be controlling it. TSMC would just be responsible for operating it, which if you're TSMC, there's zero incentive to do it under those circumstances. The logic here, frankly, like

as Elizabeth quite rightly points out, it doesn't align with the logic of the CHIPS Act. It doesn't align with sort of American first rhetoric either. The,

The only thing it aligns with is simple share price maximization of the chairman of Intel running around going, hey, if I break up the company and sell off the parts, then I get more money per share than if I don't do that. So let's see if I can do that. But I feel like there's much bigger forces at play here. And I can't remember which article was saying that basically every single

single proposed semiconductor merger in living memory has failed in one way or another because of regulatory problems. Like, it's almost certainly not going to happen, except, and then I'll just put a massive asterisk here, if the market actually believed that it was almost certainly not going to happen, which seems to be the logical thing that all of us have concluded, then we wouldn't have seen that massive spike in Intel's share price. So like, there's got to be something, someone is believing something here. Well,

Well, do you think it's possible that the share price is just a reaction to some sense of urgency that Intel has to do something and that management is looking for a new CEO and exploring options now, maybe in a way that they weren't last year? I would say the exact opposite. There's a very well-documented phenomenon whereby...

If management starts becoming preoccupied with strategic M&A stuff, that generally means it starts taking its eye off the ball in terms of what it's actually doing its day-to-day operations. And that would be bad for Intel as a business, even if it's good for Intel itself.

shareholders should it succeed. Intel used to be so amazing, right? It was cutting edge chips. Remember Intel inside? The age of personal computers? Yeah, it just really didn't make the transfer. Their competitive advantage has always been chip design, you know, and so it seems like part of what they're trying to do here is offload the manufacturing component, which makes sense if they really believe that they want to stick to what they've historically been good at. Yeah, they should have done that years ago. Well, I mean, you know, the most valuable chip

company in the world is Nvidia, which is a chip design company. And in fact, if you look at a bunch of the value of Google and Amazon and Apple, they are in very large part chip design companies too. Now, Apple famously designs pretty much all of its own chips. Now, Google is designing its own AI chips. Amazon is designing its own AI chips. Their AI chips might not be quite as state-of-the-art amazing as Nvidia's chips, but

But since they come at like a hundredth of the cost and they do like 80% of the benefit, like it's an easy trade for them to be making. And so, yeah, chip design is a highly competitive space that all of the big players are really playing in right now. It's not just NVIDIA. And even on that front, it's not clear that Intel has any particular competitive advantage. Maybe.

Maybe the stock went up because of what Elizabeth pointed out about the CHIPS Act and the fact that the company has to do something. We know that some kind of deal has to happen. Is that kind of it? Yeah, there is this kind of weird market logic of if Intel's share price has been languishing at an incredibly low level for an incredibly long amount of time, then just the sheer market logic dictates that something has to happen. Something has to happen.

which I'm not sure is true, but it's an interesting concept. It's also kind of a market superstition, I think, that movement or momentum trumps stasis in any way. So if nothing seems to have been happening with Intel and they haven't made any significant moves to fix their problems, a big drastic solution can be attractive even if it's not the right one. ♪

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Let's switch gears here and talk about, I believe my favorite phrase of the week is bourgeois normcore. And quints, which we've talked about

Sheehan and Timu quite a lot on this show and the idea that there's a lot of money to be made in manufacturing cheap items in China and shipping them one at a time to the United States in order to take advantage of the de minimis, like there's no tariffs on items under $800, this rule. And now there's this American company called Quince. Sheehan and Timu are not American and Quince is American, but

Really, that's just a question of ownership. Broadly speaking, the model is very similar, which is make things in China, sell them cheap in America, ship them one at a time, and then, you know, make some changes at the margins insofar as you have to. But the big difference is that Quince is like a brand, right?

And it makes a lot of different things. It doesn't just make cashmere sweaters. It makes bedding. It makes knives. It makes pots and pans. But I mean, really, it doesn't make anything at all. It outsources all of the manufacturing to various different companies who you've never heard of. But it has, it feels like a brand. It has a nice clean website. Everything is branded quince. And it talks a lot about sustainability. It talks a lot about natural fibers, um,

It doesn't feel like a sort of bargain basement kind of thing. It feels like a very sort of, hey, you get good quality, middle class, normcore, stealth wealth looking game.

consumer goods at a significant discount to how much you would normally pay for them. And given that all of these things are made in China in one way or another, like ultimately the thing you're getting is basically the same. So why not just get it for less? This piece we're talking about was in New York Magazine from Slate Money, Friend of the Pod, Chantel Fernandez. And it's fun to read. And she describes all the bougie things that you can buy on quince in her lead, which I really liked.

Morning light shines through your flax-colored curtains made from 100% European linen. You jump out of your dusty mauve sheets, also linen, slip into an ivory robe, bamboo jersey. After showering, drying off with ivory bath towels, Turkish cotton, and so on and so on. You pull out a pan, non-toxic ceramic, fry some eggs, slice your toast with a serrated knife, Damascus steel. It's like Quince reminds me of...

Like every, there's always a quince. There was the gap. There was J crew. There's always like, you can get your like American preppy basics here, kind of a store, but they also sell sheets and caviar and towels. And it's just such a random thing.

selection, but it somehow still hangs together as a brand and makes sense? I think it has a lot to do with this sort of stealth wealth aesthetic that people now sort of understand to be the way that rich people live. One of the things that they made a dupe of was the Laura Piano baseball cap that all the kids were wearing in succession that has no logo, no branding. It's very minimalist. And

And I think that's most of what, you know, especially the sort of fashion influencers consider new preppy, new waspy, as Felix put it, bourgeois normcore. Yeah.

And the understanding underneath all that is just that, you know, if you're paying up for Laura Piano or one of these luxury products that isn't bedecked with logos everywhere, it's because you understand that there's a fundamental quality of craftsmanship. There are better materials. And so I think what Quince is doing is saying, you know, we're going to give you better materials than you would get from the obvious Amazon cheapo dupe. And so you're essentially getting the underlying value of a luxury product without it being, you know,

super all the way high end or insanely expensive or prohibitively expensive, but you're essentially getting a similar product. Or sometimes like the exact same product. Like, I mean, Chantal didn't manage to get to the bottom of this entirely, but I would not be surprised at all to learn that sometimes Quince is selling products that are made by the exact same company and

but just without the massive markups that you get in standard retail. You know, you don't know. This is the thing about contemporary retail, right? Is that no one really knows who makes your stuff, where it comes from. And this idea that the more expensive brand is always going to be higher quality is just, that's not true anymore.

Well, two points. First, I don't know if the quality thing you're saying is true because at one point in the piece, she takes a cashmere quince sweater and a bunch of other cashmere sweaters to some fabric expert somewhere downtown Manhattan and they weigh the sweaters and they figure out that the J.Crew sweater is actually the best of the bunch. Which is not the most expensive of the bunch, right? No, but it's not the quince one. No one is saying that quince is the best, but it is definitely...

And I think for the cashmere in particular, one thing we saw with Uniqlo and then with Quince is that cashmere, they start competing very much on price, which means you do wind up using less and you get thinner, less good quality. I think once you move away from the cashmere in particular and you start talking about things like, you know, Turkish cotton or...

linen or steel or ceramic or whatever, then at that point, it becomes much harder to make a case that the quince quality is lower. Okay. The other thing I would say, and maybe this is true, like you're saying, it's hard to distinguish between fashion brands and retailers. The methods it seems like quince uses to keep its prices low sounds even more cutthroat than usual, the way she's describing them.

They don't do a mass order from a manufacturer in China where The Gap or J.Crew or something will go and say, we're going to take 100 of these sweaters. Quince is just like, we want one for now. We'll want two. We have an order for five, so we'll take five. And somehow they've strong-armed all these manufacturers into deals like this, which sound kind of not great for the manufacturers, which maybe that's fine. I don't know. And that helps keep prices low. And then the other thing, which I think is

I mean, it's really common, of course, in fast fashion is just the ripping off of other people's items and brands, the constant stealing of designs and things like that, which is like technically legal, but sometimes gets dicey. There are a lot of dupes. And one of the things that Quince does is that on every single product page,

they link to a much more expensive version of the same thing and say, look at this. This is much more expensive and it's basically the same thing. And they are front and center saying like, we have basically duplicated this thing, which costs like $600 and we are selling it for $200. Wouldn't you rather have the $200 version? And I kind of, I mean, yeah, they definitely, you know, they have much than a profit margins than the brands are much more aggressive in terms of how they're dealing with their suppliers and,

And they are leaning into this idea that the consumer is price sensitive in the way that J.Crew does not. J.Crew doesn't lead front and center all day, every day with, look how low our prices are. J.Crew is trying to build up something. They want you to want to pay a premium for their product. And so it is a new model in that sense, like this idea that a sort of

affluent middle class consumer will be just looking for the cheapest possible price, but it seems to be working. Yeah, that's such a great point. It's like, it's doing two things at once. It's like doing like the everyday low prices Walmart thing at the same time it's doing like, look at our classy products thing, which is, yeah, that's not something you see very often.

I also think there's been kind of a sea change in the way people think about dupes now. They're not stigmatized the way that they once were, you know, where if you had a dupe and somebody thought you bought it on Canal Street or whatever, that would be considered gauche. Now I think it's considered smart shopping and you can have taste and still buy dupes. Yeah, it's the difference between dupes and fakes, right? The fakes were considered, you know, counterfeits. They were considered déclassé, whereas dupes...

Yeah, especially once you start realizing how high quality they are these days. People are like, well, why would I pay three times as much for the same thing? I read...

like maybe like three stories about dupes also I think they were all in New York magazine about how popular dupes are now to the point where everything is a dupe like you go on TikTok and everyone's like this lipstick is the perfect dupe for that lipstick these shoes are the dupe for that shoes like no one's wearing anything that's not a dupe the interesting question here is like what's the end game here like we're in I feel like we might be in sort of peak quince right now but

But maybe not. I guess the real question is, does Quince establish itself as a desirable brand that people think to themselves, this is high quality, this is cheap, I'm just going to become a Quince buyer. And that starts becoming a real brand value to Quince. Or does Quince always need to sort of win that comparison every time? And it's always just going to be like,

the cheaper version of something else. I think there's something kind of interesting about the model where basically, you know, in some cases they're using data to scrape from like anthropology or whatever so that they can figure out what the best selling dress is and then make a dupe of it. And I think what they end up with is this overall home and apparel aesthetic. It's basically reflective of whatever the zeitgeist is at any point without creating any in-house design themselves. Yeah.

And so the overall product offerings look like they're current, but it's kind of a mirage because everything on the site is just representative of smaller trends that other companies are driving. But I'm not sure it matters for their long-term business model if they just keep doing that.

That's actually great because then you can always look contemporary. You're not like married to any specific kind of look or style or anything like a typical brand would be. Yeah, you're free riding on whatever works. You let every other brand hire a whole bunch of different designers to come up with ideas. And then whichever one of those ideas works, you just do that and you don't need to pay any designers and you don't need to have any failures.

It's an amazing model. I mean, it's terrible for the brands that are being cannibalized, but it seems to be working for quints. Is it terrible for those brands? I mean, the people who are going to buy the $600 Laura Piano hat are not the same people who are going to buy the $50 one from Quince.

Quinns or are they? Is that what Felix, is that what you're saying before? I think it depends on the brand. You know, there was a, there was a great feature and team magazine this weekend about the 50 most iconic bags and shoes. And they're all things that you would recognize, even if you didn't know specifically what the original was, you've seen it, you know, played out and later, uh,

models of fashion. And one of the things about that is just that the reason why these things get duplicated so much or their influences on later designs is that it's sort of hard to nail down what makes them unique in a lot of cases.

So this past week, a German court decided that Birkenstock, their designs don't constitute applied art, which makes it easier for people to make copies, which is why you do see a million different variations on the traditional Birkenstock. And the company was trying to get in front of that. And they sort of can't because you have to make an argument that there are pieces of the design that

that go beyond basic shape and form. Yeah, when we had Alexandra Roberts on that wonderful show, like, yeah, you can't copyright the design. But yeah, that's why you see so many clothes with logos all over them because you can't copyright the logo. Because the form and the function are all inextricably tied together so you can't be like, that shoe is...

I'm the only one who can make this sneaker. I am eagerly awaiting the quince Birkenstock dupe. And I have to say, I am welcoming the rise of natural fibers.

dupes and cheap things because as a long-standing person who I all I wear is natural fibers I love natural fibers I don't like stretch anything I'm like give me more of this and if Quince starts making 100% cotton trousers or 100% cotton socks I'm going to be buying them like there's no tomorrow I'm so bewildered by that how could you not like a little stretch in your pants

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Guys, do we have time for a quick egg watch? Emily, do you have an egg watch update? Shayna Roth is not here, but eggs still expensive.

Expensive. Very expensive. Went to Wegmans. Maybe readers can help with this actually. I was at Wegmans last weekend. And because they're Wegmans, which is to say they're an amazing grocery store, far superior to all other grocery stores. Come at me. I don't care. SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. Their limit on egg buying

is 10 cartons. That's 180 eggs. Like for some reason, a carton of eggs at Wegmans is 18, which is like what? They have 12 cartons too, but yeah, you max, you can max to 180 eggs at Wegmans. That's their, that's their rationing. That's how good their supply chain is. And if anyone has any insider knowledge on how it's possible that they're able to obtain enough eggs to keep their

customers just like swimming and eggs, let us know. The other thing to note on egg watch on February 22nd, 2025 is wonderful story in the wall street journal about the quote wall street of eggs.

Everyone should read it. It's an exchange where you can go and if you have eggs to sell or you want to buy eggs, you can go to the egg clearinghouse and you can bid on eggs. Used to be kind of like a quiet situation, but now busy. A lot of bidders, but not that many sellers was my takeaway from this piece. My other question for you, Emily, since we're on Egg Watch and it was in Axios Markets, now people are renting chickens.

Yes, people are renting chickens to produce their own eggs. That's true. What else do you need to know about that?

I mean, that's all you need to know, but that's glorious. I kind of want to just rent a chicken. I'm going to have a chicken wandering around my apartment laying an egg a day. I'll be like, hey, chick, give me an egg today. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be like a long-term relationship. What happens if you rent a chicken and because you're an idiot who doesn't know how to take care of chickens, you kill the chicken? Then is it like if you total your rental car? Do we know what the terms of the rental car are? You need to buy chicken insurance. You got to get the insurance. Oh, talking about insuring chickens.

Emily, last week you were laughing at the idea of vaccinating chickens. And now what are we doing? We're vaccinating chickens. Well, I'm still laughing because in my preparation for egg watch, I read that the Trump administration wants to take a new, has a new strategy to fight bird flu. And part of their strategy is vaccinating chickens. And it sounds like the reason we don't do it, there are good reasons because other countries won't buy the eggs if they come from vaccinated chickens, because there are concerns that the vaccination process

quote, masks the virus. So it could like mess up chicken trade to do it if you don't do it right. I feel like the US export market on eggs is not that big. I feel like we can lose that. Fine. But I also don't have confidence in the Trump administration's ability to like implement what according to the piece in the Associated Press said is a very complex strategy of like fencing in the birds and like fencing in the virus. Because first of all, news broke

also this week that the Trump administration and it's like firing spree had fired the people at the USDA that work on bird flu and was like, I'm sorry for this, but they were scrambling to get the people back. Yeah.

So like, okay, maybe you're right, Felix, about vaccination, but it just seems like still not a, I don't know if that's a good idea. I have every faith in RFK Jr.'s ability to safely vaccinate hundreds of millions of chickens. Yeah, I was just going to say, is the RFK Jr. policy vaccinations for chickens, but not for you? Exactly. Makes sense. He's not in charge of the USDA, just to be clear. Anyway, I think that's enough egg watch for this week.

Elizabeth, you have a number for the numbers round? I do. It's $30,000 and that's dollars. And that's the amount of money that Delta is paying passengers of the jet that flipped over in Toronto.

And I feel like that's low. I don't really have a good empirical reason. It's a down payment. They're not asking them to sign in and things like, we're not going to ask for any more. It's a no strings attached. Like, we just want to make sure that you have $30,000, but we might well wind up giving you a lot more on top of that. But it's like, it's a goodwill gesture. It's really no strings? Are you sure? Why are they doing it? That's so nice of the airline. I don't understand. Delta, they're like, whoops.

Maybe they think like if you take the money, you'll be less apt to sue because you'd be like, that was so nice of them. Would that be why? Or maybe they just reckon that they're going to wind up paying out at least $30,000 to everyone anyway, so they may as well start getting ahead of it. But that doesn't sound like something a company would do. It's not that much.

compared to the price of the airplane. I think there probably are a lot of people who just are like, I don't want to go to court for anything. I feel like they owe me something, but I'm not going to go to the trouble to hire a lawyer. And I think maybe the 30K would take the edge off thinking that they should do that. They can get the therapy for the trauma and such. Is it correct that people weren't hurt? There's no injuries or anything? There were injuries, yeah. There were no fatalities, but there were injuries. Oh, that's awful. What's your number, Emily? My number is $5.00.

That's the cost, or was the cost reserved, just a seat at New Yorker editor Susan Morrison's event for her Lorne Michaels biography. The reply all apocalypse of the week. That's right.

That's correct. The reply all apocalypse that we all needed to hear about happened. It'll be last week now, but it's delightful story where New Yorker editor Susan Morrison sends a mass email to like all the fancy media book people about her event at McNally Jackson, which we actually talked about recently, the bookstore in the seaport. And just people started hitting reply all and they couldn't stop. Great.

Graydon Carter apparently said something like, I don't know how much more of my life I can devote to Lorne Michaels in his reply. Everyone was doing just regular reply all, but then Tina Fey jumped in and she was like, dear boomers. And she included a link to a YouTube video, which explained how to reply to emails, which

John Hamm jumped in. It was just a fun and delightful story in these times. And I haven't seen a good reply all apocalypse in a while. This is the best one because I've never seen a celebrity reply all apocalypse before. This is what we needed. It's really a window into the celebrity soul. You have Aaron Sorkin saying, how did I get involved with this? My friends, you have replied all just like everyone else. What are you doing?

I cannot decide, so I'm going to leave this one up to you, Emily. Do you want 477 or do you want 2,500? 477. Okay. 477 is the number of cat figurines that were stolen in one week from a new restaurant called Lucky Cat 22 Bishopsgate.

which is owned by Gordon Ramsay. And the theme of this restaurant is it has those lucky cats that wave with one arm. Yeah. And so these cats are everywhere in the restaurant, and apparently everyone who goes there just winds up stealing a cat, basically. And so he's losing 477 cats a week. Wow. This would seem to be evidence that the cats are not, in fact, lucky for their owners. Yeah.

I guess they're not big enough where you could just steal one and it's very inconspicuous. Yeah, you can just drop it in your dupe Birkin and no one will know. Now I want one. I bet they're for sale online somewhere. They're not expensive. But I think like if you get a genuine Lucky Cat from Lucky Cat 22 Bishopsgate, maybe that's like even more special than if you just buy one. Yeah.

at a souvenir store in Chinatown. Is he going to keep replacing them or is he going to... I think he should do bigger ones. That's what he was saying. He was like, so far I've been replacing them, but at some point maybe I can't afford to replace them anymore and I'm going to have to put them behind glass or something. I'm going to have to change the name to No Lucky Cats. No Lucky Cats.

On which note, I think we will wrap it up for this week. Thank you so much for listening to Slate Money. Thanks so much for emailing us on slatemoneyatslate.com. Thanks so much to Shana Roth and to Jessamyn Mollie and to Merit Jacob for producing. And we'll be back next week with even more Slate Money.

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I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie.

In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president?

The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.