Tariff refund system for businesses scheduled for launch on Monday
Source: The Hill News · Bias: Center
Summary
The U.S. tariff refund system is set to launch on Monday, allowing businesses to submit their claims for reimbursements after paying $166 billion on duties determined to be illegal by the Supreme Court. Customs and Border Protection will manage the online platform and provide electronic refunds in most cases when applicable, according to court filings. …
Tariff refund system for businesses scheduled for launch on Monday
Center
The U.S. tariff refund system is set to launch on Monday, allowing businesses to submit their claims for reimbursements after paying $166 billion on duties determined to be illegal by the Supreme Court. Customs and Border Protection will manage the online platform and provide electronic refunds in most cases when applicable, according to court filings. …
The Trump administration will launch new investment accounts for children on July 4, with the initiative intended to boost the financial standing of millions of Americans under the age of 18. Dubbed “Trump Accounts” by the administration, the program will be available for children who do not turn 18 before the end of the calendar…
That a court with six Republican-appointed justices could hand down such a patently un-American decision is an indictment of America's rogue legal system.
President Trump bought hundreds of stocks the day before he paused tariffs and caused the stock market to rally. Trump filed his latest financial disclosure on Monday, and it shows that he made 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million on April 8, 2025, from companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), according to an analysis from investigative outlet Sludge. The next day, Trump announced that he was pausing his sweeping tariffs for 90 days, and the S&P 500 went up by nearly 10 percent, one of its largest one-day increases ever.The timing of these trades suggests he planned to cash in, realizing that markets would rally after his announcement. Those weren’t the only suspicious stock trades he made last year, either. On August 18, Trump’s accounts bought between $250,000 and $500,000 of stock in chipmaker Intel, four days before the president announced that the federal government would take a nearly $9 billion equity stake in the company. Intel’s stock price went up 6 percent after that announcement.Trump also bought stock in defense contractor Palantir Technologies throughout the year, publicly praising the company while increasing its federal contracts, particularly those with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of his top advisers, White House deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, also owns between $100,001 and $250,000 of Palantir stock. This year, Trump singled out Palantir on Truth Social in April and sent its stock price soaring.By law, Trump and other executive branch officials are supposed to publicly disclose securities transfers, including stock purchases, over $1,000 within 45 days. Not only did Trump wait more than a year to disclose the April stock purchases, he didn’t disclose any other of the thousands of stock trades he made in 2025.In all, Trump reported $2.2 billion in income in 2025, from crypto, stock trades, foreign real estate, suing news organizations, and other grifts. His administration is openly engaging in market manipulation and insider trading without any fear of consequences.
The Fox Business team was greeted with bad news on Thursday as job numbers came in shockingly low."We came in underneath expectations," said Cheryl Casone. "We came in at 50,000 nonfarm jobs. The Street was looking for 110,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent, down from 4.3 percent, which it had been holding steady at for about three months."Furthermore, she noted, the underemployment rate, or rate that includes people who are working in lower-pay or lower-hours jobs that don't use all their skills, is 7.9 percent — and payrolls from earlier in the year were revised down by over 70,000. And health care and social assistance went up, but leisure and hospitality jobs went down.This isn't the report Wall Street wanted, Casone noted — and when Maria Bartiromo tried to spin it as a "Goldilocks story" because the Dow Jones went up slightly on the news, right-wing economic analyst and former Trump adviser Stephen Moore disagreed."Well, I'm just looking at some of the other numbers, and look, I mean I'm a little disappointed in this, frankly," said Moore. "If you look at the household survey, it showed half a million fewer Americans working. So I'm a little puzzled by this."
Russia launched a barrage of drone and missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv overnight Thursday, killing more than a dozen civilians. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 18 people were killed and injured more than 90 others in the latest round of attacks, according to The Associated Press. The strikes came after Ukrainian President…
Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal. If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than half of Trump’s $2.2 billion. Plus, I bet Mitra had to put in at least some actual work.I observed a year ago that Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is someone who makes his money through the possession of assets rather than the exertion of labor. Rentiers are capitalism’s nepo babies. Prior to Trump, the main rentier occupations were real estate and finance. Trump himself was a classic rentier capitalist, a rich kid who joined the family real estate business, exaggerated his success to a credulous tabloid press, and inherited $413 million from his more successful father. Trump moved the family business from dowdy apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens to luxury apartments and hotels in Manhattan and beyond, but many of these went bankrupt. In 2018, The Economist concluded Trump would have made more money had he been a more conventional rentier and invested daddy’s money in index funds. The rentier presidency is a much more lucrative proposition than rentier capitalism, and one with which index funds can’t possibly compete. Crucially, there is no index fund that lets you acquire a stake without investing money or labor. During the 2024 presidential campaign the Trump family acquired a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and was granted 75 percent on net revenues from token sales. (The Trump family stake in the company, the less valuable part of this deal, has since fallen to 38 percent.) Trump did not pay for these privileges, yet last year he earned more than $594 million from them. Neither is there any evidence, according to Reuters’ Bergin, that Trump ever paid for his stakes in the crypto firms ALT5 Sigma, American Bitcoin, or Celebration Coins. This last alone netted Trump more than $636 million last year. The business press often notes these days that Trump has become less a real estate investor than a crypto investor. But to call Trump a crypto investor is a misnomer because investors, um, invest. Trump doesn’t invest. He receives. Nor should we call Trump a media investor, because Trump didn’t pay one cent to acquire his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group. This company owns Truth Social, on which Trump posts his late-night rants, and “has engaged,” Michael Hiltzik observed last March in The Los Angeles Times, “in a number of baroque financial transactions.” It works out well for Trump that he didn’t put money into Trump Media & Technology Group because it lost $715 million last year on revenue of $3.7 million. Yet Trump’s stake in this money-losing venture somehow remains, according to his latest filing, worth more than $50 million. Nice work if you can get it.The business model for a rentier presidency might puzzle the untutored, given the extensive losses involved. Why would anyone invest with the president of the United States? Some of them are just suckers, still bedazzled by the phony business-genius image he created during 14 TV seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” But others derive value in other ways.
