Business

Trump’s Latest Tariff Setback Looms Over China Talks

Published

3 weeks ago

May 8, 2026

Trump’s Latest Tariff Setback Looms Over China Talks

A day after a federal court ruled against President Trump’s latest global tariffs, his administration returned to the drawing board on Friday, trying to preserve its powers to wage economic warfare in time for high-stakes trade talks with China.

The latest legal blow concerned the 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump imposed in late February on nearly all U.S. imports. The president unveiled that policy as a sort of temporary fix, after the Supreme Court tossed out his initial duties, but a panel of judges once again found that the White House had run afoul of the law.

The result was a familiar set of headaches for Mr. Trump, who has tried repeatedly — and with mixed success — to stretch his authority to tax imports without the express permission of Congress. By Friday, one of the president’s top aides signaled that an appeal was imminent, echoing the president, who told reporters shortly after the ruling that he would simply “do it a different way.”

Technically, the Court of International Trade only declared the president’s across-the-board, 10 percent tariff to be illegal. Otherwise, it did not issue an order forcing the government to stop collecting it from all importers, at least for now. Still, the outcome marked both a political and legal setback for Mr. Trump, who had spent much of the week issuing trade threats against Europe and preparing for talks in China.

Tariffs are expected to be a major topic on the agenda when Mr. Trump travels to Beijing to meet next week with his counterpart, Xi Jinping. Trade experts said the court decision could undercut the president’s leverage. Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University, said the ruling “severely handicapped” the administration’s ability to employ tariffs against foreign nations, leaving Mr. Trump with a “much weaker bargaining hand” when it comes to China.

“Any threats by Trump to hit China with broader and higher tariffs if Xi doesn’t bend to his will on economic and geopolitical matters now seem like empty bluster rather than credible ultimatums,” he said.

One of the president’s top trade advisers, Jamieson Greer, appeared to brush aside some of those concerns on Friday. During an interview on Fox Business, he criticized the court for ruling against the White House, claiming that some of the judges on the panel were “apparently just hellbent on importing more from China.”

Mr. Greer, who defended the president’s use of trade powers, added that the administration is “confident on appeal we’ll be successful.”

At the heart of the matter is Mr. Trump’s decision to invoke a trade power that no president had ever used. Known as Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, it permits the president to impose tariffs up to 15 percent for 150 days, but only in response to strict conditions, including a “balance of payments” crisis.

The term itself reflects a bygone concern from the time the law was adopted, when the U.S. dollar was pegged to gold, creating unique economic risks. But the Trump administration sought to argue that the law still applied today, pointing in part to the country’s persistent trade deficit, a different measurement, which reflects the gap between U.S. imports and exports.

In the end, a majority of judges on the Court of International Trade found the argument unpersuasive and sided with small businesses and states that had sued. It marked the second time that some of those challengers had prevailed against Mr. Trump, after they convinced the Supreme Court to invalidate his earlier use of emergency powers to impose withering tariffs.

The new decision raised the odds that the administration could soon have to pay back the billions of dollars collected from its 10 percent tariff, on top of the $166 billion that the government already owes to U.S. importers from its last legal defeat. But the fight appeared far from over, and much remained uncertain by Friday — not just for American businesses, which paid the cost to import goods, but for the Trump administration itself.

“President Trump has lawfully used the tariff authorities granted to him by Congress to address our balance of payments crisis,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “The Trump administration is reviewing legal options and maintains confidence in ultimately prevailing.”

For one thing, the court only appeared to bar the collection of the president’s 10 percent tariff for some of the plaintiffs that sued, many legal experts said. That raised the odds that droves of U.S. businesses could soon mobilize and “file a court case” of their own asking for similar relief, said Ted Murphy, a top trade lawyer at the law firm Sidley Austin. He added that he also expected the trade court to pause implementation of its order pending an appeal.

The timing is important to Mr. Trump, who had always envisioned his across-the-board tariff as a stopgap that would allow the government time to prepare a set of more lasting rates using another set of authorities, known as Section 301. But that process was widely expected to take months, since the law requires the government to conduct investigations into other countries’ trade practices before Mr. Trump can apply new duties.

Those inquiries targeting dozens of countries are well underway, and the president at times has suggested the final rates could be set at new highs. Some experts believe the tariffs imposed using Section 301 could be more legally durable, though the administration could still face lawsuits over his aggressive use of the law.

Michael Lowell, the chair of the global regulatory enforcement group at the law firm Reed Smith, said the White House probably would not have to worry about “a broad attack on that authority.” But, he said, the courts had recently drawn something of a line in the sand, suggesting they would be “very skeptical of the administration looking to the past and finding and repurposing” other powers to advance its trade agenda.

Unlike the president’s other trade gambits, he has successfully applied tariffs in the past using Section 301, including on China. That left some analysts to conclude that Mr. Trump, while blemished, would still retain some leverage ahead of his trip to Beijing next week.

“Unless they have amnesia, China should remember quite vividly how during Trump’s first term, the U.S. imposed multiple rounds of tariffs under Section 301 on China during negotiations,” said Sarah Schuman, a former U.S. trade official who is now managing director at Beacon Global Strategies.

The administration still had multiple options “to increase tariffs on China in pretty short order,” she added.

Mr. Trump’s trip to China had been scheduled for April, but was delayed because of the war in Iran. U.S. officials have said their goals for the visit include establishing a “board of trade,” which would oversee commerce between the countries in an effort to balance trade and reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China

On Friday, Mr. Greer sketched out a long list of concerns that the administration planned to raise with its Chinese counterparts, from its adherence to past purchase agreements to its approach to artificial intelligence.

“There’s not really a situation where we go, we get China to change the way they govern, the way they manage their economy; that’s all baked into their system,” he said. “But I think there is a world where we find out where we can optimize trade between China and the U.S. to achieve more balance.”

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Business

Another tech company says it will cut hundreds of jobs amid pivot to AI

Published

2 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Press Room

Another tech company says it will cut hundreds of jobs amid pivot to AI

Layoffs have continued with another tech company saying it was cutting people to enable it to use more artificial intelligence.

Groupon announced in a security filing this month that it will cut up to 400 jobs, or nearly 25% of its worldwide workforce, as part of a broader restructuring plan to make the platform AI-native. The Chicago company plans to carry out the layoffs in the coming months.

Earlier the company’s Chief Executive Officer Dušan Šenkypl had said the company “fell short of our expectations” last quarter.

Since 2022, more than 800,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts.

The surge in pink slips started in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April this year, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Groupon said in the filing that the decision to shift toward an AI-based company is to “better deliver on our mission, serving both customers and merchants.”

The company said the layoffs will cost it as much as $13 million, but save it more than $20 million per year.

This announcement comes as many e-commerce companies are shifting their business models to AI to reduce costs by automating many roles.

Artificial intelligence has also triggered fierce competition for top talent and is also fueling tens of thousands of layoffs this year. The result is that the class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees are landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work.

The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, while others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired.

Groupon shares, which have fallen 27% over the last 12 months, slipped 1% on Thursday to $21.20.

Business

ABC files applications ‘under protest’ for early renewal of TV station licenses

Published

14 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Press Room

ABC files applications ‘under protest’ for early renewal of TV station licenses

Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.

The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”

“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”

The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.

The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.

Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”

In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”

“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”

“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

Business

The Google Insider Trading Case Hits Polymarket

Published

1 day ago

May 28, 2026

Press Room

The Google Insider Trading Case Hits Polymarket

Andrew here. Warning: If you bet on prediction markets about things you could know about from your work, it may be insider trading. That’s the lesson from new charges against an employee of Google.

Also, Jamie Dimon is thinking about spending $20 billion on acquisitions; we go through some possible targets. And take our quiz about the U.F.C. fight scheduled to take place at the White House.

Gaming prediction markets

In the public’s view, prediction markets are a way to bet on the N.B.A. playoffs, the Texas Senate race or what Costco executives will say on their next earnings call.

They’re also often seen as a hive of insider trading, a view reinforced by charges filed on Wednesday against a Google employee who made more than $1 million on Polymarket. The case raises more questions about how these platforms are policed — and who should do the policing.

What happened: The Google employee, Michele Spagnuolo (who used the handle AlphaRaccoon), was accused of betting on what people were searching for on Google — wagers he was sure to win because he had access to internal search data.

“Spagnuolo correctly predicted virtually all of the outcomes on these positions,” the Commodity Futures Trading Commission wrote in its complaint.

A Google representative said in a statement that using confidential information for making these kinds of bets was “a serious breach of our policies.”

Spagnuolo isn’t the only person charged with insider trading on Polymarket. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last month accused Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, of betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, an operation he participated in.

Insider trading is an increasing problem for prediction markets. Polymarket has faced significant scrutiny because its unregulated offshore platform has long made it easy to bet anonymously. (Kalshi, which is regulated in the U.S., has also suffered from insider trading.)

Polymarket has started clamping down on that practice, according to The Information — though some longtime users have chafed at those efforts. “Polymarket will go down the drain if they make KYC mandatory,” one user wrote on the company’s Discord discussion forum, referring to “know your customer” practices.

What are policymakers doing? Critics have accused the C.F.T.C., the primary American regulator of prediction markets, of failing to adequately police the industry. (Mike Selig, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News that his agency actively patrolled for wrongdoing.)

Some lawmakers are seeking to crack down on insider trading, including Representative James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and several bipartisan groups of senators.

Why it matters: Prediction markets have become big businesses. (Kalshi was most recently valued at $22 billion.) But a growing perception that they’re rife with cheating could threaten their popularity.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to fund U.S. drone companies. Shares in Unusual Machines, a drone start-up in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor and advisory board member, are soaring in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported on the potential investments. (The Times hasn’t independently confirmed the report.) The deals, aimed at bolstering domestic production, are still in the negotiation stage — equity stakes are a possibility — as the Pentagon vets the companies, The Journal adds.

Investors brace for Thursday’s inflation data. The Personal Consumption Expenditures report for April, which will be closely watched by the Fed, is expected to show on Thursday that headline inflation hit a three-year high of 3.9 percent. The wartime energy spike is a big culprit, and that’s likely to tie the Fed’s hands on interest rates. Lisa Cook, a Fed governor whom President Trump has tried to fire, is the latest policymaker to say that there’s even a rate increase in the cards.

Jensen Huang reportedly agrees to join the board of a Chinese university. Huang, the Nvidia C.E.O., is expected to be the latest U.S. business leader to join the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, The Financial Times reports. Tim Cook, Apple’s departing C.E.O., is the chairman, and Michael Dell and Elon Musk are members. (Nvidia is trying to jump-start business in China as the Washington-Beijing trade war continues.) Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator, quickly seized on the Huang news, calling it “a massive scandal!!!!” on social media, and a national security risk.

What might Dimon buy?

Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is sitting on a pile of cash and says he’s open to a deal. He even put a number on it: up to $20 billion.

While that’s not a big sum relative to the bank’s assets, it got us thinking: Where could JPMorgan, whose last major acquisition was First Republic during the 2023 regional-banking crisis, go fishing for a company to buy? Brian O’Keefe asked Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at Wells Fargo.

Here are three possibilities:

Wealth management. Driven by solid margins and lucrative high-net-worth customers, this area of finance has experienced an M.&A. boom in recent years. (The First Republic deal already bolstered JPMorgan’s wealth-advisory ranks.) Such a move would tick a lot of boxes, Mayo said, adding, “It could be a high-end private bank, it could be kind of a mass-affluent brokerage firm, it could be wealth advisory.”

Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s wealth management division, told analysts in February that her unit had reviewed 25 potential deals last year and passed on all of them.

Payments. JPMorgan has invested heavily in new payment platforms, including in JPM Coin, a digital token it has tested with Coinbase and Mastercard. The bank handles between $5 trillion and $10 trillion in transactions daily, Mayo said. “There could be more opportunities to enhance the efficiency, the effectiveness, the timeliness or the geographic reach in the payments area,” he added.

Digital banking. Dimon recently singled out Revolut, the British banking app that is plotting expansion into the U.S., as an emerging competitive threat. “To the extent that an acquisition could help JPMorgan become the next Revolut outside the United States, that would seem to be attractive,” Mayo noted.

There are some big asterisks to consider. Because of its size, JPMorgan would most likely be barred from buying another U.S. lender on antitrust grounds. For that reason, Mayo thinks that a deal, if there is one, would probably happen abroad.

Dimon himself is being coy. The bank may have amassed ample capital for acquisitions, but “it’s not burning a hole in our pocket at all,” Dimon said on Wednesday at an investor conference. “If it sits there for a while, no problem,” he added.

Dimon did not suggest any potential targets on Wednesday.

Here are some guesses:

Aberdeen Group, Invesco or Julius Baer in wealth management?
Revolut is too big, but how about Wise or Toast in payments?
Or what about Monzo or Bunq, fintech banks that have grown rapidly in Europe?

Meta will charge for its chatbot

Meta will begin charging customers for access to its A.I.-powered chatbot, a big change for a company best known for its free products — and the latest sign that even deep-pocketed companies are wrestling with the enormous cost of artificial intelligence.

On Wednesday, we looked at how companies were reining in the costs of consuming A.I., including by switching to cheaper models. Meta’s move shows that the companies supplying A.I. models are also reckoning with ballooning costs, and seeking revenue to make up for those losses.

Meta is spending a fortune on A.I. Last month the company increased its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to as high as $145 billion, and Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, said it would spend at least $600 billion on A.I. infrastructure in the next few years.

Some investors have looked skeptically on that plan. The company’s stock is down 2.3 percent this year.

Meta will use paid subscriptions to offset some of its A.I. investment. The basic tier of the chatbot, Meta One Plus, will be $7.99 per month. A premium version, Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99. From Bloomberg, which reported the subscription news earlier:

Meta has long argued that its A.I. investments are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, which is improved thanks to A.I. models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup its A.I. spending, and consumer chatbot subscriptions have become popular with several other A.I. competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI. Both rivals offer similarly priced subscription tiers.

The company has sought to expand its subscription business, testing plans for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It has also tried to cut costs in other corners of its business. This month, Meta laid off 10 percent of its employee base, about 8,000 workers.

Investors, eager to see revenue gains from A.I., cheered Meta’s subscription-chatbot plan. The company’s stock price was up 3.7 percent at the market close on Wednesday.

Elsewhere, shares in the software maker Snowflake are soaring in premarket trading on Thursday after it reported strong quarterly results that suggested that A.I. agents weren’t clobbering its core subscription business. Salesforce’s analyst call on Wednesday, however, renewed fears that this sector was still vulnerable to A.I. disruption.

Quiz: U.F.C. on the South Lawn

This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)

President Trump is getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday — and America’s 250th — with an evening of mixed martial arts. Preparations are underway to host Ultimate Fighting Championship matches in an octagon on the White House’s South Lawn on June 14. Construction of the temporary arena, along with a 90-foot-tall arch known as “The Claw,” featuring LED lights and audio equipment, began this week.

U.F.C. plans to spend around $60 million on the event, said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, U.F.C.’s parent company, on a recent earnings call. (He added that U.F.C. would lose about $30 million on the event but that it would be “an investment for the long term.”)

The expenses include about $700,000 to repair the lawn after the fight, Dana White, the U.F.C. president and chief executive, told Sports Business Journal.

How many people will the temporary arena hold for the U.F.C. event at the White House?

THE SPEED READ

Deals

“SpaceX-Tesla Merger Is ‘Only a Matter of When,’ Early Investor Says” (Bloomberg)
Shares in the European food-delivery company Delivery Hero are down sharply on Thursday after Uber, which is pursuing a takeover bid for the company, raised its stake to nearly 37 percent. (WSJ)

Politics, policy and regulation

The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA over soaring World Cup ticket prices. (WSJ)
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he would impose a 100 percent tax on payouts to state residents from the $1.8 billion fund tied to the Justice Department’s settlement with President Trump. (Politico)

Best of the rest

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