Latest news with #Maley
Sydney Morning Herald
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'
The Age
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'
San Francisco Chronicle
25-05-2025
- General
- San Francisco Chronicle
Golden Gate Park's WWI monument finally gets recognition, a century after armistice
Heroes Grove, the World War I monument hidden in a redwood grove in Golden Gate Park, has always been impossible to find. But everybody can find the Rose Garden next to it, and now Ken Maley, a non-veteran San Francisco parks devotee, has found a way to link the two attractions. Maley, who is 80 and lives across town on Telegraph Hill, arranged to have a one-ton granite boulder trucked in to the entrance to the Rose Garden at John F. Kennedy Drive. It is engraved like a tombstone with the words 'Heroes Grove' and inlaid with a QR code that he says is a first for any monument or memorial in the park. The QR code works through a smartphone to access the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department website, which then gives a detailed history and description of the World War I memorial along with a park map and walking directions to the monument. The stone marker, which was trucked in from a quarry just last week, was installed in time for Memorial Day, and on Sunday morning Maley was sitting discreetly on a green park bench near it, waiting to see if it would attract enough attention to send people up the trail behind it and onto a 10-minute nature walk through redwoods to Heroes Grove. 'I've watched people look at the QR code and walk up the trail,' said Maley, who is project director of the Veterans Commemorative Committee and has put 10 years and a $50,000 budget into installing the first signage to Heroes Grove since it was dedicated on Memorial Day 1919. 'I just felt that 100 years after the war people should understand that we have this living memorial to it.' Heroes Grove, which began as public sentiment for planting a grove of coast redwoods to those who served, predates the city's main monument to the Great War — the War Memorial War Memorial Veterans Building and Opera House. Its grand opening in 1932 was to feature a granite monument in the courtyard between the two buildings, contributed by the Gold Star Mothers. The 9-foot pillar was engraved with the names of 820 men and women from San Francisco. But the big oblong rock was judged to be incompatible to the Beaux Arts elegance of the Opera House and Veterans Building, so it was banished to the park, where it went completely unmarked for 100 years. Among those who did not know Heroes Grove existed was Maj. Gen. Mike Myatt, a longtime member of the Board of Trustees for the War Memorial, who served on Maley's board. Myatt was president and CEO of Marines Memorial when Maley drove him out on a field trip. 'It really moved me when you started looking at the names,' Myatt said, 'But I could see how nobody could find it and if they found it they wouldn't know what it was.' On Memorial Day 2019, Maley and his committee got a boulder that is 5 feet wide and 3 feet tall installed along JFK Drive in a ceremony that included a color guard and veterans in World War I uniforms. The rock is easy to spot from JFK Drive, but there has never been an arrow or obvious path from there to the grove itself, and most people who see it are on bikes or running down the path toward Ocean Beach and not inclined to stop and investigate. 'It is amazing and so peaceful here, but I never see anyone looking at the monument,' said Julie Purnell, who lives in the Richmond District and runs her dog along the pathway. 'It is right off Fulton Street, and nobody knows it is here.' In hopes of applying a lure, Maley last week had that stone marker on JFK also embedded with a QR code that was drilled into the rock and is the size of a compact disc. 'It's the new wave of 'interpretive' in our park system,' Maley said. 'This is the pilot project.' It worked with Sunset District resident James Larkin and his wife, Felicia Lee. 'When we saw the stone marked 'Heroes Grove,'' Larkin said, 'I thought, 'What heroes are we talking about? Is it 9/11? World War II?' They were intrigued enough to investigate and follow the path in from JFK Drive, through the memorial and down to the Rose Garden where the path delivered them next to the bench that Maley was sitting on. 'It's spectacular,' Lee said. 'We loved walking through there and getting a hit of nature and a hit of history.' While conducting his surveillance, Maley overheard one couple look at the rock in passing and exclaim 'Oh, it's called Heroes Grove.' That made it all worthwhile. 'For 100 years, people didn't call it anything,' Maley said. Bruce and Kerry Grigson, visitors from Australia, knew all about Gallipoli but not about American involvement in the Great War or that they happened to be visiting on Memorial Day weekend. They felt compelled to follow the path from the Rose Garden to Heroes Grove. 'It's a bit of a privilege to be here on memorial weekend,' Grigson said, while standing at the memorial reading the engraving. 'It's amazing. I didn't know any of this.' Maj. Gen. Myatt, who is 84 and retired in Sonoma, plans to come down with his iPhone and activate the code next week when has a medical appointment at the VA hospital. 'Then I can show it to my wife and anybody who comes along,' he said. 'It's a piece of history that says something about the people of San Francisco.'
Business Recorder
19-05-2025
- Business
- Business Recorder
Wall Street Week Ahead: Retailers set to give tariff view as US stock market roars back
NEW YORK: A batch of US retail earnings reports in the coming week is set to shed more light on the economic fallout from the shifting tariff backdrop and test the stock market's sharp rebound. Results from retailers including Target, Home Depot and Lowe's arrive as investors have become less worried that US President Donald Trump's tariffs will send the economy into a recession, particularly following the recent US-China trade truce between the world's two largest economies. But a warning from Walmart on Thursday that the world's largest retailer will have to start raising prices due to the high tariffs is putting other retailers in the spotlight, as investors watch how they are reacting to a trade backdrop that remains in flux. 'Retailers are going to be incredibly important, especially after what happened with Walmart's announcement,' said Matthew Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak. Maley said it was notable that Walmart's warning followed news of the US-China truce, in which both sides are reducing their extra tariffs that had exceeded 100% for 90 days. That Walmart is 'still warning about the tariffs that will be put in place, even though they won't be some of the most severe ones that everybody was worried about, obviously that raises some concerns,' Maley said. The potential for tariffs to raise prices that could slow consumer spending or drive up inflation has worried investors, particularly since Trump's April 2 'Liberation Day' announcement of sweeping levies on imports. The retailers' quarterly reports also will offer the latest glimpse into the health of consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of US economic activity. Data on Thursday showed US retail sales growth slowed sharply in April as the boost from front-loading purchases ahead of tariffs faded, while consumer sentiment and other surveys have been weak. 'Sentiment is pretty sour,' said Jack Ablin, founding partner and chief investment officer at Cresset Capital. 'But what we have to do is find out if households are really following through and pulling back on spending.' Results in the coming week also include apparel maker Ralph Lauren and off-price retailer TJX Cos, with the various reports offering insight into a number of consumer segments, investors said. One topic of interest is whether shoppers will 'trade down' to less expensive items 'because people are nervous about rising prices,' said JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America and president of online broker Tastytrade. Stocks have staged a massive recovery since Trump's April 2 announcement set off extreme volatility and sent stocks plunging. The benchmark S&P 500 index is up over 18% from its April closing low and has erased its losses for the year. The stock market 'just continues to bounce back,' Kinahan said.
Time of India
17-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Wall St Week Ahead: Retailers set to give tariff view as US stock market roars back
A batch of U.S. retail earnings reports in the coming week is set to shed more light on the economic fallout from the shifting tariff backdrop and test the stock market's sharp rebound. Results from retailers including Target , Home Depot and Lowe's arrive as investors have become less worried that U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs will send the economy into a recession, particularly following the recent U.S.-China trade truce between the world's two largest economies. But a warning from Walmart on Thursday that the world's largest retailer will have to start raising prices due to the high tariffs is putting other retailers in the spotlight, as investors watch how they are reacting to a trade backdrop that remains in flux. "Retailers are going to be incredibly important, especially after what happened with Walmart's announcement," said Matthew Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak. Maley said it was notable that Walmart's warning followed news of the U.S.-China truce, in which both sides are reducing their extra tariffs that had exceeded 100% for 90 days. Live Events That Walmart is "still warning about the tariffs that will be put in place, even though they won't be some of the most severe ones that everybody was worried about, obviously that raises some concerns," Maley said. The potential for tariffs to raise prices that could slow consumer spending or drive up inflation has worried investors, particularly since Trump's April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement of sweeping levies on imports. The retailers' quarterly reports also will offer the latest glimpse into the health of consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. Data on Thursday showed U.S. retail sales growth slowed sharply in April as the boost from front-loading purchases ahead of tariffs faded, while consumer sentiment and other surveys have been weak. "Sentiment is pretty sour," said Jack Ablin, founding partner and chief investment officer at Cresset Capital. "But what we have to do is find out if households are really following through and pulling back on spending." Results in the coming week also include apparel maker Ralph Lauren and off-price retailer TJX Cos, with the various reports offering insight into a number of consumer segments, investors said. One topic of interest is whether shoppers will "trade down" to less expensive items "because people are nervous about rising prices," said JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America and president of online broker Tastytrade. Stocks have staged a massive recovery since Trump's April 2 announcement set off extreme volatility and sent stocks plunging. The benchmark S&P 500 index is up over 18% from its April closing low and has erased its losses for the year. The stock market "just continues to bounce back," Kinahan said.
