Trump’s legal loophole around the Supreme Court is keeping inflation alive – and trapping Bitcoin in the Fed’s crosshairs

The Supreme Court gave Donald Trump a pretty direct answer in February: the emergency law he had used to tax imports from nearly everywhere didn't give him the authority to impose tariffs.However, Washington didn't see that as a locked door and treated it more like a disappointing result from a key-cutting machine. The administration returned to the federal statute book, found several older trade powers that the Court had left untouched, and spent the next five months rebuilding the tariff system on a completely different foundation.By July 24, goods from 60 trading partners were again passing through an American tariff barrier. Most received an additional duty of either 10% or 12.5%, though exemptions and existing trade agreements made the actual bill far less uniform than the headline rates suggest.The White House had lost its giant emergency tariff button, so it replaced the button with investigations, hearings, country files, product schedules, legal findings, and hundreds of pages of customs instructions. The resulting system looks more tedious than its predecessor and may be much, much harder to remove.It also creates a familiar problem for Bitcoin investors. An import policy...