A year ago, Donald Trump called it Liberation Day.

Today, 330,000 American businesses are filing to get their money back, and the President is on television telling them not to.

The refund portal opened on April 20, 2026. By that point, the Supreme Court had already ruled 6-3 that Trump’s signature trade policy was unconstitutional.

What followed is one of the stranger episodes in modern American economic history: a government simultaneously required by court order to refund $166 billion, and a president publicly lobbying companies to leave that money on the table.

How this started and who actually paid?

On April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day,” Trump announced sweeping country-by-country levies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, plus a 10% global baseline on virtually all imports.

The stated logic was that foreign countries would bear the cost.

The data demolished that claim almost immediately.

The New York Federal Reserve tracked the burden through the year. From January through August 2025, US importers absorbed 94% of tariff costs.

By November, foreign exporters had adjusted slightly, but US firms and consumers were still on the hook for 86%.

The National Bureau of Economic Research put the total domestic burden at 94%, the Kiel Institute said 96% and AlixPartners, which works directly with corporate supply chains, found that 80-85% of all tariff costs were absorbed domestically, either by companies swallowing the hit, passing it to customers, or some combination of both.

The Tax Foundation estimates the 2025 tariffs amounted to a $1,000 average tax increase per US household.

Yale’s Budget Lab put the GDP growth drag at 0.5 percentage points for the year.

Jerome Powell stated in March 2026 that tariffs were adding between half and three-quarters of a percentage point to inflation.

The largest US tax increase as a share of GDP since 1993, and the burden fell almost entirely on American businesses and the people who shop at them.

The corporate damage, by name and number

The automotive sector took the sharpest blow.

Tariffs on imported vehicles and parts have cost the industry $35.4 billion since their implementation, according to financial filings analysis.

GM, Ford, and Stellantis alone absorbed a combined $6 billion in 2025.

Toyota projected a $9.5 billion impact on its US operations for the fiscal year.

Retail was next. Gap estimated the tariff hit at $100-150 million.

Levi Strauss paid enough in duties on denim and apparel imports that its CFO publicly confirmed an expected $80 million refund.

McCormick warned investors that tariffs could cost $70 million in a single fiscal year because black pepper, cinnamon, and vanilla come from exactly the countries Washington decided to target.

Many firms delayed the consumer impact by selling through pre-tariff inventory, pricing goods based on what they paid before Liberation Day rather than what imports cost after.

That buffer ran out by year-end.

By late 2025, the Council on Foreign Relations found Americans were bearing tariff costs at rates as high as 100% for many consumer durable goods.

The SC ruling and the $166 billion question

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorise the president to impose tariffs.

The majority opinion was that the power to impose tariffs is a branch of the taxing power, and that belongs to Congress under Article I of the Constitution.

Every tariff imposed under IEEPA, including the Liberation Day levies and all country-specific reciprocal duties, was declared invalid from the moment it was first collected.

Penn Wharton projects total refunds could reach $175 billion.

CBP estimates $166 billion across 53 million shipments from more than 330,000 importers.

The refund portal, called CAPE, went live on April 20 and processes claims electronically within 60-90 days of acceptance.

Although the portal opened just days ago, as of April 14, only 56,497 importers had completed the bank registration required to receive payment, meaning the majority of eligible companies hadn’t even taken the first step toward collecting money legally owed to them.

“I’ll remember them”

A day after the portal opened, Trump appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

He was asked about Apple and Amazon, two of the most prominent companies that had not filed.

He called it “brilliant” if they chose not to. “I’ll remember them,” he said.

Apple is in active negotiations about US manufacturing commitments and cannot afford to antagonise Washington. Amazon runs one of the largest cloud infrastructure businesses serving the federal government.

For both, filing a legally valid refund claim carries real political cost.

The President was explicitly asking corporations to voluntarily forfeit money a 6-3 Supreme Court said the government illegally collected.

A Citi analysis from April 10 quantifies what is at stake by company.

Walmart is owed an estimated $10.2 billion, Target $2.2 billion, Nike $1 billion, Kohl’s $550 million, Gap $400 million, and Macy’s $320 million.

The shippers, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, all filed on Day 1 and pledged to pass refunds back to customers.

Costco had been fighting since November 2025, filing a federal lawsuit before the Supreme Court even ruled, and has committed to returning money through lower prices.

These companies calculated that the legal and reputational cost of not filing outweighed the political risk.

What this means for investors?

Most companies that reported earnings recently left refund income entirely out of their forward guidance, and that is the right call for now.

The administration has signalled it will contest refunds aggressively.

Trump pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, the same day the Court ruled, attempting to reconstruct tariff authority through a different legal mechanism, and that is already being challenged in court.

Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminium, autos, copper, and lumber remain fully intact and are not part of this refund process at all, so the automotive industry’s cost structure has not changed.

The refund, if and when it flows, represents a one-time balance sheet event for retailers. That means potential cash for buybacks, debt repayment, or price reductions.

Investors pricing in refund windfalls before the legal picture settles are getting ahead of themselves.

A trade policy that cost the domestic industry tens of billions, added nearly a percentage point to inflation, and was struck down by the Supreme Court still permanently altered the supply chain landscape.

Companies rerouted sourcing, built new supplier relationships, and restructured procurement. Some of that rewiring is irreversible regardless of what happens in court.

The full cost of Liberation Day will never appear in any refund figure.

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KPMG is cutting around 10% of its US audit partners, marking a significant step in efforts to improve productivity after years of unsuccessful attempts to encourage voluntary retirements.

The move was disclosed during a meeting on Wednesday, where attendees were told the size of the audit partnership had become misaligned with the firm’s business needs, according to people familiar with the matter.

The reduction is expected to affect several dozen partners, although KPMG did not disclose an exact figure.

The decision comes as the firm seeks to streamline operations under new leadership, following the appointment of Tim Walsh as chief executive of the US business nine months ago.

Walsh, a long-time veteran of KPMG’s audit division, has since introduced changes to leadership within the audit and assurance practice.

Partnership size under scrutiny

The cuts reflect broader concerns about the scale of KPMG’s audit partnership relative to both its business volume and its competitors.

The firm’s audit unit has been viewed as larger than those of rival Big Four firms, including Deloitte, EY, and PwC.

KPMG’s most recent transparency report shows it has around 1,400 partners and managing directors in its audit and assurance division, though the firm does not break out the number of partners specifically.

Despite the reductions, KPMG emphasised that its audit partner base remains strong and positioned for future growth.

“This action is connected to a multiyear strategy to align the size, shape, and skills of our team to the power of our audit platform to best serve our clients and protect the capital markets,” KPMG said.

“Our audit partner complement remains robust, and we are in a better position to welcome more people into our partnership over time.”

Voluntary exits fall short

The decision to proceed with cuts follows years of efforts to reduce partner numbers through voluntary retirement programmes.

Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the situation, that those initiatives consistently failed to attract the level of participation needed to achieve the firm’s restructuring goals. 

As a result, the firm has opted for a more direct approach to recalibrate its workforce.

Social media forums used by KPMG employees indicated that members of the audit and assurance partnership were informed of the cuts during the Wednesday meeting, with affected individuals notified the same day.

Partners leaving the firm will receive compensation and support as part of their exit.

Partners who are leaving will receive financial packages and placement support, “reflecting the value they have delivered for KPMG and our clients”, the firm said. 

KPMG remains the smallest of the Big Four accounting firms, but has modestly expanded its presence in the US audit market.

The firm audited 9.8% of US-listed companies in 2025, up from 9.2% the previous year, according to Audit Analytics.

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Prediction markets are supposed to turn public information into prices.

In the case now unfolding around Polymarket, prosecutors say the opposite happened as a US Army soldier allegedly used classified knowledge about a secret military operation to bet on the outcome.

According to Thursday’s unsealed indictment and the CFTC’s civil complaint, Gannon Ken Van Dyke staked about $33,034 and allegedly walked away with roughly $409,881 after wagering on Venezuela-linked event contracts tied to Nicolás Maduro’s capture.

When a classified operation becomes a trading signal

The government says Van Dyke was not an outside spectator.

Prosecutors allege he was involved in the planning and execution of “Operation Absolute Resolve,” the US military mission to capture Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

The indictment says he had access to sensitive, nonpublic, classified information from at least Dec. 8, 2025, through at least Jan. 6, 2026, and that he signed nondisclosure agreements covering Western Hemisphere operations.

Officials say he was stationed at Fort Bragg and had been an active-duty Army soldier for years.

That access, prosecutors allege, became the basis for trading on Polymarket.

The DOJ says Van Dyke created an account around Dec. 26, 2025 and made about 13 bets from Dec. 27 through Jan. 2.

His bets were on the “Yes” side of markets, including “Maduro out by January 31, 2026,” “US forces in Venezuela by January 31, 2026,” “Will the US invade Venezuela by January 31, 2026,” and “Trump invokes War Powers against Venezuela.”

The total outlay was about $33,034, according to the indictment.

The bet paid off as soon as the raid became public

The timing is the heart of the case.

Prosecutors say that in the predawn hours of Jan. 3, 2026, US special forces apprehended Maduro and Flores in Caracas, and hours later the president publicly announced the operation.

After that announcement, Polymarket resolved several of the relevant contracts to “Yes,” including “Maduro out by January 31, 2026” and “US forces in Venezuela by January 31, 2026.”

The DOJ says Van Dyke’s profits totaled about $409,881.

The complaint adds a detail that makes the trade look less like luck and more like advanced positioning.

It says Van Dyke used the Polymarket handle “Burdensome-Mix” and bought more than 436,000 “Yes” shares in the Maduro-out contract between Dec. 30 and Jan. 2.

The CFTC says those trades generated more than $404,000 in profit.

Read more- Inside $170M Iran ceasefire bets: Polymarket faces scrutiny surge

Regulators are treating this as a market-structure case

The enforcement response is broader than one trader.

The DOJ charged Van Dyke with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.

The CFTC filed a parallel civil complaint seeking restitution, disgorgement, civil monetary penalties, trading and registration bans, and a permanent injunction.

The CFTC said this is its first insider-trading case involving event contracts and its first use of the so-called “Eddie Murphy Rule” for misuse of government information.

A concealment narrative strengthens the fraud case

Prosecutors also say the story did not end once the contracts were settled.

The indictment alleges Van Dyke withdrew most of the proceeds, moved about 437,859 USDC.e to a foreign cryptocurrency vault.

He then shifted roughly 444,209 USDC.e into a newly created brokerage account.

It further says he later asked Polymarket to delete his account and changed the email on his crypto exchange account to obscure his identity.

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“What is said in the room stays in the room.” That’s the unwritten rule of diplomatic talks.

But the US President has a different approach. He posts about it. A lot.

In the past two weeks, as American and Iranian delegations worked through Pakistani mediators to put a formal peace framework in place, Trump published over 900 words about the war on Truth Social in a single morning.

He contradicted his own senior officials on live television. He told reporters details of a nuclear agreement that Iran immediately denied ever agreeing to.

And on Thursday, he ordered the US Navy to “shoot and kill any boat” laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.

The talks are now in limbo.

The post that broke the room

The clearest picture of how the posts are affecting diplomacy came not from Iran but from inside Trump’s own administration.

Multiple senior officials spoke anonymously to the Wall Street Journal and CNN this week, describing what one source characterised as the president’s “leadership and decision-making pathologies.”

That kind of language, from officials inside the White House, is extraordinary.

The specific incident that triggered the alarm was when Trump told reporters that Vice President JD Vance would not be travelling to Islamabad to lead the next round of talks, citing unspecified security concerns.

At the same moment, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were on separate television programs saying the opposite.

Eventually, Vance did make the trip. Trump was wrong, and his officials had to publicly clean it up in real time.

That same week, Trump claimed publicly that Iran had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei denied it within hours in a statement to Iranian state broadcaster IRIB.

Whatever the actual state of the negotiations at that moment, the public denial handed hardliners in Tehran a domestic gift they did not have to work for.

“No pressure” with a blockade running

On April 20, Trump published a series of posts on Truth Social.

He covered comparisons to previous US conflicts, dismissed suggestions that Israel had pushed the US into the war and declared that his eventual deal would be “FAR BETTER” than Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement.

He wrote that he is “under no pressure whatsoever,” which may be true politically, but sits oddly next to a US naval blockade of Iranian ports that remains in full effect.

The blockade is the part that is doing the most economic damage and the least diplomatic work right now.

Bloomberg reported this week, citing two US officials familiar with the matter, that the blockade — combined with Trump’s social media posts — has been directly “detrimental to ongoing negotiations.”

The Pakistanis, who have invested significant political capital in positioning themselves as the trusted go-between, are finding it harder to keep both sides at the table when the American president is publicly escalating between sessions.

Then on Thursday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he has ordered the Navy to “shoot and kill any boat” laying mines near the Strait of Hormuz, adding that minesweeping operations would continue “at a tripled up level.”

Oil markets, which had started to price in a diplomatic resolution, moved sharply on the news.

Iran’s own dysfunction is real, but it is not the whole story

It would be incomplete to frame this as entirely a problem of Trump’s making. Iran’s government is genuinely fractured on how to respond.

Trump described it as “seriously fractured” in his ceasefire extension post on April 21, and he is not wrong. Different factions inside the Iranian system are pulling in different directions, and the absence of a unified proposal from Tehran is a real obstacle.

Mahdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf, who has led the Iranian negotiating delegation, did not help matters when he said publicly that “the losing side cannot dictate terms” and that the ceasefire extension “means nothing.”

Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, speaking at an event in Jerusalem, cautioned that no agreement would change Iran’s “fundamental ambitions.”

The ceasefire extension Trump announced last week did not include an end date, which removed one source of pressure on Iran.

His advisers warned him privately that an open-ended extension could allow Tehran to run out the clock. There is no public indication that the warning changed anything.

The market signal worth watching

When the first ceasefire was agreed in early April, international oil prices fell 13% almost immediately, and S&P 500 futures pointed to a 2% open.

That is how sensitive energy markets are to every word out of this process. The “shoot to kill” post this week reversed a portion of that move.

What is becoming clear is that markets are essentially trading Trump’s Truth Social feed, with the Strait of Hormuz as the underlying asset. Every post that sounds like escalation pushes oil up.

Every post that sounds like a deal pushes it down.

The problem is that neither movement is necessarily connected to what is actually happening in the negotiating room, because the posts themselves have become part of the negotiation, and not in a way that is helping.

Trump still insists time is not his adversary.

The ceasefire, extended without a deadline, is beginning to look like proof of exactly that.

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The European Union has partnered with financial institutions to launch the Global Green Bond Initiative Fund, aiming to mobilise up to €20 billion ($23.43 billion) in private capital for sustainable infrastructure projects in low- and middle-income countries.

The initiative reflects the EU’s broader push to expand climate-focused financing while supporting economic development in emerging markets.

The bloc confirmed the development on Friday, outlining the structure and objectives of the fund.

Focus on least developed economies

The EU said the fund would allocate at least 20% of its investments to the world’s least developed countries.

These investments will be made through euro-denominated bonds as well as bonds issued in local currencies within those countries.

The approach is designed to deepen financial access and strengthen domestic capital markets.

Green bonds, which are issued to finance environmentally sustainable projects such as renewable energy, form the backbone of the initiative.

The European Commission stated that the structure of the fund would help create long-term financing channels for projects that contribute to climate and environmental goals.

Strengthening euro’s global role

The European Commission said the initiative would also support the international standing of the euro.

“This will help strengthen local capital markets and promote the international use of the euro,” the Commission said in a statement.

By encouraging euro-denominated issuances alongside local currency bonds, the EU aims to position its currency more prominently in global sustainable finance markets while supporting financial stability in partner economies.

Fund management and execution

The Global Green Bond Initiative Fund will be managed by French asset manager Amundi (AMUN.PA).

The involvement of a major European asset manager is expected to support the fund’s operational efficiency and investor outreach.

The EU highlighted that collaboration with financial institutions would play a key role in mobilising private capital at scale.

The structure is intended to attract institutional investors seeking exposure to sustainable assets in emerging markets.

Europe underscores sustainable finance leadership

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasised the strategic importance of the initiative.

She said the fund demonstrates Europe’s continued leadership in sustainable finance.

“We will mobilise billions in private investment into our climate and environmental goals,” von der Leyen said.

Her remarks underline the EU’s commitment to aligning financial systems with climate objectives while driving investment into underserved regions.

The Green bond market faces a recent slowdown

The launch comes at a time when the global green bond market has shown signs of weakness.

A report last year indicated that green bond issuance by governments, banks, and companies declined in 2025 compared to the previous year.

The slowdown was attributed to policy rollbacks on climate initiatives in both the United States and Europe.

Despite this trend, the EU’s new fund signals an effort to reinvigorate investor interest and expand sustainable financing channels.

By targeting both private capital mobilisation and market development, the Global Green Bond Initiative Fund represents a renewed push by Europe to accelerate climate-focused investments globally.

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