| We’re still nine days away from Oct. 31, but Spirit Halloween has already pivoted to gingerbread mode with its spinoff — Spirit Christmas — which, yes, you can actually shop at right now. At first, it’s like: pick a lane!!!! Spirit can’t be hawking the Grim Reaper and Ebenezer Scrooge at the same time. But then again … maybe it can? At this point, I’m thinking we should just combine Halloween and Christmas. The logistics are all there. We could call it Hallomas or Chrisoween and Hallmark could run festive specials for months on end — a thing it already does, but it would be less weird this way. And we could normalize writing wishlists in October. Here, I’ll start with my very own Chrisoween List: - One pair of fuzzy Crocs. [1]
- The Stevie Nicks Barbie doll.
- Two Labubus. (You can’t have one — they need friends.)
Now, you may be wondering: Jessica, you have the taste of a TikTok-pilled 12-year-old, what is going on? To which I say: Maybe I fudged my list! Maybe Bloomberg Opinion just so happened to publish three columns today — one about Crocs, another about Barbies and a third on Labubu. Would that be so bad? Let’s start with the shoes. Juliana Liu says Crocs have become “the surprising shoe of choice for Chinese hipsters.” In recent months, Gen Zers have been filling their online shopping carts with the goofy plastic clogs, and sales in China are up 30% in the most recent quarter. “Crocs is one of the few American companies in that mix as an emotional consumption play,” she writes. “That’s unusual in a country feuding nearly daily with Washington over tariffs and where consumers are increasingly seeking cultural authenticity in the things they buy.” Which brings us to Barbie. Unlike Crocs, Mattel is feeling the tariff whiplash. Sales are down, shares are slipping and Andrea Felsted says retailers are delaying holiday orders amid the trade war uncertainty. “Toys, which light up children’s holiday, are one of the goods most exposed to higher import costs, as the majority of supply comes from China,” she writes. Is Pop Mart, the manufacturer behind Labubu, faring any better? For now, yes, but Shuli Ren sees cracks forming in its quirky facade. Shares are down 25% from an August peak, and some worry that the toymaker created a one-trick pony. “Can it come up with another product as viral as the toothy Labubu?” she asks. And, “if Labubu is the only intellectual property that can turbocharge growth, does it have lasting power with consumers?” This chart suggests no: You might see a lot of Labubu costumes this Halloween, but by the time Christmas rolls around, who knows. Maybe those little monsters won’t be under the tree after all. Here’s a horrific story about a young woman in South Korea who thought it’d be a good idea to use an “an improvised flamethrower” to kill a cockroach. She ended up setting her apartment on fire and inadvertently killed her neighbor — a mother of a two-month-old baby — who failed to escape the fifth-floor blaze. I — and my landlord, surely — much prefer the pacifist’s method of critter abatement. You know, the one where you lie down next to the roach and sing it a sweet lullaby so that it can go gently into the night. It’s a shame that Jamie Dimon seems too skittish to partake in such activities — it sounds like he has a real problem: Perhaps you’ve heard JPMorgan’s CEO warn about an incoming infestation: “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” he told investors on a call recently. But his talk of cockroaches was merely a metaphor for a different kind of creepy-crawly within the banking sector: auto-loan credit fraud. After the twin bankruptcies at Tricolor and First Brands, the financial world is on thin ice. Well, save for Barclays. (Paul J. Davies says the CEO doesn’t fancy himself an entomologist.) As concerns mount around regional banks, Robert Burgess wonders: “Are more Tricolors lurking, and can they be stopped before inflicting pain on vulnerable households, the banking system and the economy? We may not know before it’s too late,” he writes. Still, Robert says it’d be a mistake for the Trump administration to nix the CDFI program, which allowed Tricolor to inject credit into underserved areas. “Rather than gut a program that is clearly helping the financially disadvantaged at a time when inequality has never been greater, it’s better to make sure it has an adequate and properly trained staff to detect and address problems before it’s too late,” he argues. With more precautionary measures in place, maybe Dimon won’t need to call the exterminator at all. | 
