Investors are shuddering on concerns of renewed trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.
Stocks fell sharply on Friday, with the S&P 500 shedding 183 points, or 2.7%, to close at 6,553 in what was the index’s worst day since April. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 879 points, or 1.8%, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 3.6%.
The selloff affected a wide range of stocks, from Big Tech companies like Nvidia and Apple to stocks of smaller companies looking to get past uncertainty about tariffs and trade.
“Investors still think the tit-for-tat between the U.S. and China these last few days is mostly posturing (the consensus view is that tariffs won’t go up, and that Trump and Xi will still meet in South Korea), but trade-related risks have certainly risen after being dormant for the last several weeks,” Wall Street analyst Adam Crisafulli, head of Vital Knowledge, said in a report.
Stocks had been heading for a slight gain in the morning, until Mr. Trump said on his social media platform said he’s considering “a massive increase of tariffs” on Chinese imports. He’s upset at restrictions China has placed on exports of its rare earths, which are materials that are critical for the manufacturing of everything from consumer electronics to jet engines.
“We have been contacted by other Countries who are extremely angry at this great Trade hostility, which came out of nowhere,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Our relationship with China over the past six months has been a very good one, thereby making this move on Trade an even more surprising one. I have always felt that they’ve been lying in wait, and now, as usual, I have been proven right!”
Mr. Trump also threatened to call off a planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month.
Primed for a slide?
The market may have been primed for a slide. U.S. stocks were already facing criticism that their prices had shot too high following a nearly relentless 35% run for the S&P 500 from a low in April to record heights.
Critics say the market looks overpriced after prices rose much faster than corporate profits. Worries are particularly high about companies in the artificial-intelligence industry, where pessimists are making comparisons to to the 2000 dot-com bubble that ultimately imploded. For stocks to look less expensive, either their prices need to fall, or profits need to rise.
Other factors also weighed on investor sentiment Friday, including the ongoing U.S. government shutdown and fresh data showing that consumers are anxious about the economy.
The University of Michigan’s preliminary October sentiment index, released Friday, shows consumer sentiment fell 0.1% on a monthly basis, from 55.1 points in September to 55. While the drop was nominal, it represents the third consecutive month the confidence measure, which is closely watched by investors, has declined.
“Pocketbook issues like high prices and weakening job prospects remain at the forefront of consumers’ minds,” Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.
The job market has slowed so much that the Federal Reserve cut its main interest rate last month for the first time this year. Fed officials have penciled in more cuts through next year to give the economy more breathing room. But Chair Jerome Powell has also said they may have to change course if inflation stays high. That’s because lower interest rates can push inflation even higher.
At the Eureka Innovation Lab in San Francisco, testing is underway, but you won’t find a white coat in this laboratory. Here, you’re more likely to find a pair of jeans – denim jeans, loaded into tumbling machines with pumice stones, or set on fire with lasers.
Setting a pair of blue jeans on fire. It’s science.
CBS News
“Levi’s, to me, is kind of the birth of cool,” said Levi’s design director Paul O’Neill. And protecting that “cool” is his mission. He considers himself a custodian of the company’s many legendary styles, including one superior fit: the 501. This year that iconic pair is celebrating 150 years.
“We try not to touch the 501 so much,” O’Neill laughed. “From its beginnings in 1873 up until the late 1940s, all of the changes that happened were practical.”
Compared to other Levi’s jean styles, the 501, said O’Neill, “is always a straight blue jean. When we look at other fits, we’ve got, like, skinnies, flares, bell bottoms, you know, all bells and whistles. But the 501 always just remains very simple and classic.”
Finding a reliable and durable pair of pants was the goal of businessman Levi Strauss and his tailor, Jacob Davis. Levi’s historian Tracey Panek said those trusty pants weren’t possible until Davis added a rivet, creating the modern-day blue jean. “He came up with the idea of adding a little bit of metal in the pockets, where your hands are going in and out, to stop them from ripping,” Panek said.
Levi’s blue jeans with their distinctive pocket rivets were introduced in 1873.
CBS News
But why the number 501? “It’s simply a lot number,” she said. “501 is the best, top of the line.”
Top of the line, but the 501 was made for everyday blue-collar workers. Panek said, “At the time, they were called overalls, ’cause you’d pull them up over your clothes to have this protective outer garment.”
Nowadays, just about everyone has worn a pair of Levi’s, from presidents to hippies to Hollywood. They were even part of Steve Jobs’ uniform, though he added buttons himself, to attach his suspenders.
Steve Jobs’ bespoke jeans.
CBS News
As for the most efficient way to break in a new pair of 501s? Paul O’Neill has the secret: “You can sit in the bathtub in them. If you buy a pair of jeans that are the right size for you, but maybe a bit too long in the leg to allow the shrinkage, if you sit in the tub, the jeans will mold to your body shape. So, you’ll truly get a unique pair of 501s.”
For more info:
Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Remington Korper.
Pulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, work pants that auction officials describe as the oldest known pair of jeans in the world have sold for $114,000.
The white, heavy-duty miner’s pants with a five-button fly were among 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for a total of nearly $1 million in Reno last weekend, according to Holabird Western American Collections.
In this undated photo provided by Holabird Western Americana Collections are miner’s work pants with a five-button fly, recovered from the 1857 sinking of the S.S. Central America, that may have been made by or for Levi Strauss during the California Gold Rush-era.
/ AP
There’s disagreement about whether the pricey pants have any ties to the father of modern-day blue jeans, Levi Strauss, as they predate by 16 years the first pair officially manufactured by his San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. in 1873. Some say historical evidence suggests there are links to Strauss, who was a wealthy wholesaler of dry goods at the time, and the pants could be a very early version of what would become the iconic jeans.
But the company’s historian and archive director, Tracey Panek, says any claims about their origin are “speculation.”
“The pants are not Levi’s nor do I believe they are miner’s work pants,” she wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
Regardless of their origin, there’s no denying the pants were made before the S.S. Central America sank in a hurricane on Sept. 12, 1857, packed with passengers who began their journey in San Francisco and were on their way to New York via Panama. And there’s no indication older work pants dating to the Gold Rush-era exist.
“Those miner’s jeans are like the first flag on the moon, a historic moment in history,” said Dwight Manley, managing partner of the California Gold Marketing Group, which owns the artifacts and put them up for auction.
Other auction items that had been entombed for more than a century in the ship’s wreckage 7,200 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean included the purser’s keys to the treasure room where tons of Gold Rush coins and assayers ingots were stored. It sold for $103,200.
Tens of millions of dollars worth of gold has been sold since shipwreck recovery began in 1988. But last Saturday marked the first time any artifacts hit the auction block. Another auction is planned in February.
“There has never been anything like the scope of these recovered artifacts, which represented a time capsule of daily life during the Gold Rush,” said Fred Holabird, president of the auction company.
The lid of a Wells Fargo & Co. treasure box believed to be the oldest of its kind went for $99,600. An 1849 Colt pocket pistol sold for $30,000. A $20 gold coin minted in San Francisco in 1856 and later stamped with a Sacramento drug store ad brought $43,200.
Most of the passengers aboard the S.S. Central America — known as the “Ship of Gold” — left San Francisco on another ship – the S.S. Sonora – and sailed to Panama, where they crossed the isthmus by train before boarding the doomed ship. Of those on board when the S.S. Central America went down, 425 died and 153 were saved.
The unique mix of artifacts from high society San Franciscans to blue-collar workers piqued the interest of historians and collectors alike.
Bob Evans, the chief scientist for every underwater recovery mission, said many of the items might seem ordinary, but they offer an extraordinary glimpse into the daily life of the passengers and crew, from gold-field workers to high-society San Franciscans.
“This was a largely forgotten moment in American history because a few short years after that, the Civil War broke out,” Evans told CBS News in 2018.
In this photo provided by the California Gold Marketing Group is the trunk belonging to S.S. Central America passengers Ansel and Adeline Easton that was discovered on the Atlantic Ocean seabed in 1990.
California Gold Marketing Group via AP
The pants came from the trunk of an Oregon man, John Dement, who served in the Mexican-American War.
“At the end of the day, nobody can say these are or are not Levi’s with 100% certainty,” Manley said. But “these are the only known Gold Rush jean … not present in any collection in the world.”
Holabird, considered a Gold Rush-era expert in his over 50 years as a scientist and historian, agreed: “So far, no museum has come forward with another.”
Panek said Levi Strauss & Co. and Jacob Davis, a Reno tailor, received a U.S. Patent in May 1873 for “An Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.” Months later, she said, the company began manufacturing the famous riveted pants – “Levi’s 501 jeans, the first modern blue jean.”
She said before the auction that the shipwreck pants have no company branding – no “patches, buttons or even rivets, the innovation patented in 1873.”
Panek added in emails to AP this week that the pants “are not typical of miner’s work pants in our archives.” She cited the color, “unusual fly design with extra side buttonholes” and the non-denim fabric that’s lighter weight “than cloth used for its earliest riveted clothing.”
Holabird said he told Panek while she examined the pants in Reno last week there was no way to compare them historically or scientifically to those made in 1873.
This undated drawing made available by the Library of Congress shows the U.S. Mail ship S.S. Central America.
AP
Everything had changed – the materials, product availability, manufacturing techniques and market distribution – between 1857 and the time Strauss came out with a rivet-enforced pocket, Holabird said. He said Panek didn’t disagree with him.
Levi Strauss & Co. has long maintained that up until 1873, the company was strictly a wholesaler and did no manufacturing of clothing.
Holabird believes the pants were made by a subcontractor for Strauss. He decided to “follow the money – follow the gold” and discovered Strauss’ had a market reach and sales “on a level never seen before.”
“Strauss was the largest single merchant to ship gold out of California in the 1857-1858 period,” Holabird said.
The list of the $1.6 million cargo that left San Francisco on the S.S. Sonora in August 1857 for Panama was topped by Wells Fargo’s $260,300 in gold. Five other big banks were next, followed by Levi Strauss with $76,441. Levi Strauss had at least 14 similar shipments averaging $91,033 each from 1856-58, Holabird said.
“Strauss is selling to every decent-sized dry goods store in the California gold regions, probably hundreds of them – from Shasta to Sonora and beyond,” Holabird said. “This guy was an absolute marketing genius, unforeseen.”
“In short, his huge sales create a cause to be manufactured. He would have to contract with producers for an entire production run.”
Recovery from the shipwreck site of what has been described as “America’s greatest treasure” occurred in several stages between 1988 through 1991 and again in 2014, but it was sullied by scandal in recent years.
In this November 1989 file photo, Tommy Thompson holds a $50 pioneer gold piece retrieved earlier in 1989 from the wreck of the gold ship Central America
