Court-ordered tariff refunds have taken over the second-quarter earnings calls. Big consumer-products groups and retailers are reporting large net income beats, and the refunds, not their operations, account for all of the gain.
The Treasury has updated its borrowing plans, and they make for sober reading. Paying the court-ordered $166 billion in tariff refunds will mean a large and immediate increase in net Treasury bill issuance for the rest of the fiscal year.
US Customs and Border Protection said on 22 May that it has paid out roughly $35.5 billion in court-ordered tariff refunds to importers.
The Treasury switched on the Customs Automated Protest Entity (CAPE) on 20 April.
On Tax Day 2026 millions of American households sent their annual returns to the Internal Revenue Service.
Washington ran two stories side by side on 10 March. The administration announced plans to raise Section 122 tariffs to the legal maximum of 15 per cent.
With the IEEPA tariffs struck down, boardrooms have started fighting over $166 billion in refunds.
More than $130 billion of emergency IEEPA customs duties hang on the Supreme Court's tariff ruling, and company accountants and the Big Four audit firms are busy drafting contingency disclosures.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on 5 November in the landmark challenge to the administration's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose across-the-board tariffs.
In mid-October the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) kept printing above the Interest on Reserve Balances (IORB) rate.
The OBBBA, signed into law on 4 July, contains one corporate tax provision that deserves more attention than it has had.
A new legislative draft on Capitol Hill proposes a withholding tax surcharge of up to 20 per cent on the dividends and interest paid to foreign holders of US corporate equity and debt.
The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the administration's tariffs have raised the effective national tax rate by about 22 per cent.
The administration now formally classes foreign Value-Added Taxes (VAT) as discriminatory non-tariff barriers, and that classification underpins much of its new trade doctrine.
The suspension of the US debt ceiling agreed in May 2023 ends on 1 January 2025.
The Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) has started jumping about again as the year ends.
Donald Trump has formally restated his plan for a sixty per cent tariff on all imports from China, a shock without modern parallel for US trade.
The Federal Reserve cut rates by 50 basis points, and long-term borrowing costs promptly went up.
April's tax receipts give the bond market its clearest read of the year on federal revenue, which is why Tax Day matters more to Treasury desks than to accountants.
America's biggest banks are paying the last of the bill for the regional banking panics of early 2023.
While equity investors enjoyed eggnog and a holiday rally, money market desks were dealing with the annual squeeze that comes with year-end balance-sheet reporting.
Forty-three million Americans must start repaying federal student loans again on 1 October, ending a three-year pandemic holiday.
Two-year gilt yields have risen above five per cent because UK core inflation will not come down, and mortgage rates have followed them to levels last seen in the global financial crisis.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reckons that about $500 billion of the $2.1 trillion in excess pandemic savings is left, and that it will be spent by late summer.
Millions of Americans filed their federal income tax returns by 18 April, and money market desks on Wall Street spent the day doing sums of their own.
March payrolls rose by a healthy 236,000, but the Federal Reserve's weekly H.8 release showed deposits still pouring out of small and mid-sized banks.
Assets in US money market funds (MMFs) rose past $5.1 trillion in March 2023, a record, after taking in more than $300 billion in a few weeks.
Consumer spending held the US economy up through 2022, in the face of the fastest monetary tightening in forty years.
The shelter index in the US consumer price report rose 0.8 per cent in October, its steepest monthly rise in more than three decades, and no single line in the American economic data is doing more to mislead.
Britain's defined-benefit pension industry spent the past week learning the difference between being solvent and having cash.
The 30-year gilt yield shot above 5 per cent in late September and sterling fell towards 1.035 against the dollar after the government unveiled a fiscal package with no funding attached.
