🛑 Tariffs trumped

After the Supreme Court struck down a large portion of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, the president acted quickly to reimpose levies on cross-border commerce. Shortly after, Trump said he was imposing a 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which he increased to 15% on Saturday.

• These particular duties can remain in place for 150 days, after which time congressional approval would be required.

• Per the president, these Section 122 levies will be in addition to Section 232 and 301 tariffs that remain in effect, and his administration is also going to pursue other investigations under sections 232 and 301 that may result in more tariffs. Some of the trade deals negotiated during this administration will stand following this ruling, and others won’t, Trump said.

• “We have alternatives. Great alternatives,” he said, suggesting that even more tariff revenue would be raised through these different means. He added, “I can charge much more than I was charging.” 

• Ahead of this decision, prediction markets* ascribed roughly 80% odds to the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s levies.

The ruling impacted tariffs imposed by way of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which includes the reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2’s so-called “Liberation Day.” Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that roughly $170 billion in tariff revenues have been generated through February 20 via these policies. As mentioned, this ruling has no bearing on the tariffs instituted under Section 232, which has been used to justify levies on items from automobiles to aluminum.

The Takeaway

Samuel Rines, macro strategist at WisdomTree, previously warned that the court’s decision “doesn’t really matter for the overall tariff picture. It only changes the legal mechanisms that will be used. In fact, it takes something that companies / markets had largely dealt with and moved on from and brings them back into the narrative.”

The range of near-term discussion points for markets now includes everything from “battles to get refunds for tariffs already paid” to “whether effective tariff rates will actually go down as the administration pursues alternative measures.”

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• We’re all trying to find the guy who did this: Amazon’s recent AWS outages seem to have been caused by… its own AI tools, the Financial Times reports. Amazon has a closely tracked internal target that 80% of its developers use AI to code once a week, and in one of the cases, “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention,” according to a source. Amazon said that “in both instances, this was user error, not AI error,” but we, like some Amazon employees, are skeptical.

• X-(box)-odus: In a major shake-up, Microsoft announced the departure of gaming CEO Phil Spencer, who led the division for 12 years. It’s also game over for Xbox President Sarah Bond. The pair have overseen a shift at Xbox from standard consoles to an array of consoles, handhelds, and various devices and screens accessed via cloud gaming, but their efforts haven’t helped Xbox keep up with rivals Sony and Nintendo. Replacing Spencer is Microsoft’s president of CoreAI product, Asha Sharma, who promised great games though she is not known to be a gamer.

Like many of us who spent the pandemic frittering away our extra savings on things we simply didn’t need, Etsy seems to have a case of buyer’s remorse, offloading the final remnant from its “House of Brands” experiment to eBay at a deep discount to what it paid five years ago. It’s a sign of just how sharply the two companies that rode the e-commerce pandemic wave have since diverged.

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• 🏒 NHL: While the Olympics have concluded, fear not — you can still watch Canadian and American teams face off on in ice hockey through the end of the spring in the NHL. Olympic standout Nathan MacKinnon’s Colorado Avalanche have the best shot at the Stanley Cup, with markets pricing in a 25% chance of the cup going to Colorado. 

• 🏛️ Tariff: That Supreme Court tariff decision seems to have killed some of the chances of Americans getting the tariff stimulus check once teased by the administration, with the odds of such a payment appearing before 2027 dropping from 32% heading into Friday to just 20% by the end of the day. 

• ⚾️ MLB: Spring training has officially begun, meaning that baseball season is around the corner. The Dodgers are heading into the season with solid chances of a repeat championship, with a 32% chance of winning again. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.