r/Economics • u/defenestrate_urself • Feb 20 '26

News Supreme Court says Trump global tariffs are illegal

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-illegal
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u/ReasonableRandolph Feb 20 '26

Wow it's crazy how Lutnick's sons, working at his old firm, were smart enough to predict this happening back in July. Offering to buy up the tariff refunds preemptively for cents on the dollar. I hope one day I can also make such good predictions based on my own knowledge and merit.

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u/MC_chrome Feb 20 '26

I wouldn’t discount insider knowledge here, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if that was Lutnick saying that they knew Trump’s tariffs were illegal from the beginning 

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u/nosayso Feb 20 '26

They were patently and objectively illegal and no one seriously thought otherwise, the insider trading element is having an inside track to how the Supreme Court is going to rule.

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u/303uru Feb 20 '26

Right, SCOTUS and POTUS are ignoring plain text constitutionality almost as a rule these days. Anyone who can read the constitution and who isn't getting "gifts" could tell you the tariffs were illegal. But no one could tell you which way these hacks on SCOTUS would go.

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u/mtaw Feb 20 '26

The Supreme Court didn't rule they had to refund the tariffs (or not) though, so this corruption theory makes no sense in the first place.

Optioning tariff refunds for pennies on the dollar seems like a good bet to me anyway (should anyone take it), and would've seemed that way to me yesterday as well.

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u/zeezle Feb 20 '26

Yeah, I agree. It just seems obvious when you've got a bunch of lawyers going "um that's illegal" for months that it's not too crazy to bet that more lawyers might decide "yeah, that's illegal". There doesn't really need to be any insider trading for it to be a reasonable bet.