Latest news with #USSupremeCourt
Business Times
a day ago
- Business
- Business Times
Trump's tariffs, ‘big beautiful Bill' may do more for the Singapore market than the MAS review group
[SINGAPORE] When news broke early last Thursday (May 29) morning that a US federal court had struck down most of President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, I was almost done selling a portfolio of US stocks that I had held since the global financial crisis. With a tinge of seller's remorse, I watched markets in Asia react positively and waited for what I assumed would be a strong rally in the S&P 500 when the US market opened. The rally never really came. The S&P 500 closed on Thursday at 5,912.17, just 0.4 per cent higher than the previous day's close of 5,888.55. On Friday, the benchmark US stock index closed less than 0.01 per cent lower at 5,911.69. One possible reason for the muted market reaction is that many investors were already expecting that Trump would somehow suspend the tariffs as soon as they begin causing significant damage to the US economy and corporate sector. Indeed, Trump has repeatedly postponed or pulled back tariffs he has announced since his inauguration, causing the market to quickly rebound after big sell-offs. Market watchers have recently begun referring to this as the 'Taco trade', where Taco means 'Trump always chickens out'. One could also argue that the ruling by the US court that most of Trump's tariffs are illegal, rather than being positive for the corporate sector and investors, actually creates more uncertainty for them. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Tuesday, 12 pm Property Insights Get an exclusive analysis of real estate and property news in Singapore and beyond. Sign Up Sign Up The Trump administration has said it will fight the ruling, and indicated that it may ultimately have to take the matter to the US Supreme Court. In the meantime, a federal appeals court has allowed Trump's tariffs to remain in place. This puts America's trading partners in a tricky situation. Should they quickly offer concessions to get the US to lower its 'reciprocal' tariffs? Or should they slow-walk the negotiations in the hope that the courts eventually force a full rollback of the tariffs? For companies, this uncertainty could complicate long-term decision making. Should companies exporting to the US market take immediate steps to cope with the tariffs, perhaps by downsizing or relocating their business operations? Should US companies turn to alternative, but less efficient, global supply chains? Or should they all just wait for their respective governments to sort everything out? The way I see it, protracted uncertainty surrounding Trump's tariffs may end up causing just as much harm to companies than the tariffs themselves, by paralysing spending and investing decisions. Taco trade crowded While I firmly believe in long-term investing, unloading most of the US stocks I owned over the past couple of weeks was a no-brainer. In the first place, the S&P 500 had rebounded strongly from its post-'Liberation Day' lows, thanks in large part to Trump pausing his tariffs only hours after they had gone into effect, plainly demonstrating that he did not have the stomach for the economic and financial market fallout that would have followed. The benchmark US stock index is now more than 4.2 per cent above its Apr 2 close, and only 3.8 per cent below its 52-week high of 6,147.43. There could well be more volatility ahead as Trump continues his tariff antics. In the past week alone, he has walked back his threat to slap a 50 per cent tariff on the European Union; proposed to double tariffs on steel and aluminium to 50 per cent; and grumbled that China is violating its trade truce with the US. Given the extent of S&P 500's recovery, however, the notion that Trump's tariffs will ultimately be watered down may not drive the benchmark index much higher. The Taco acronym might only just have gone viral, but the Taco trade is already looking very crowded. Another factor that could cap further gains in the S&P 500 is growing concern about the rising level of US government debt. Trump is pushing a tax and spending Bill through the US Congress that will add more than US$3 trillion to the federal government's debt levels over 10 years. This could exacerbate upward pressure on US Treasury bond yields, especially after Moody's cut its credit rating on the US last month, from 'Aaa' to 'Aa1'. Then, there is the risk of the Trump administration hitting global investors with higher taxes on their US assets – either to gain leverage in trade negotiations or to simply reduce its debt costs. Over the past week, some market watchers have been pointing out that Trump's 'big, beautiful Bill' includes a small, ugly clause that would allow the US government to raise tax rates on interest and dividends earned by investors from countries with 'discriminatory' tax policies. Penalising foreign investors in this manner makes about as much sense as threatening one's trading partners with punitive tariffs, of course. But it is consistent with the 'America first' philosophy of the Trump administration – with voters at home baying for tax cuts as well as wider social safety nets, surely it is time for foreign investors to take a haircut. A more vibrant Asia? Is there an alternative to the US market for nervous investors? This column has previously said that dysfunction in the US is encouraging the flow of global capital to Europe and Asia. My instinct is that sustained increased investor demand in these markets will gradually fuel a virtuous cycle of capital raising and stronger growth. This trend could dovetail nicely with the efforts of the equities market review group formed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). While there has been no let-up in the pace of Singapore-listed companies going private, the overall tone of the market has been turning increasingly positive. The Straits Times Index (STI) is up 2.8 per cent so far this year. Leading it higher are companies reporting solid financial numbers and taking steps to deliver shareholder value – including ST Engineering (up 67.8 per cent), Singtel (up 23.7 per cent), Sembcorp Industries (up 19.9 per cent), DFI Retail (up 19.5 per cent), and Hongkong Land (up 16.2 per cent). Even among counters that have lagged the STI this year, positive news has not gone unnoticed. Notably, Sats rose 3.7 per cent last week after reporting strong results for its financial year to March 2025. The STI climbed 0.3 per cent during the week. CapitaLand Ascendas Reit ended last week up 2.3 per cent, following a S$500 million placement that was 4.1 times subscribed, to fund the acquisition of a data centre in Tai Seng and a building in Science Park. As Trump's tariffs and the 'big, beautiful Bill' continue to frighten investors out of US financial assets, he might end up doing more for the Singapore market than the MAS review group.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Stakes are high for US democracy as conservative supreme court hears raft of cases
A year has proved to be a long time on the scales of US justice. Less than 12 months ago, the US supreme court was in serious disrepute among liberals following a series of ethics scandals and a spate of highly contentious, conservative-leaning rulings. It culminated in a ruling last July vastly expanding a president's immunity from prosecution, virtually guaranteeing that Donald Trump would escape criminal censure for the 6 January 2021 insurrection and retaining classified documents. So far had the court's stock with Democrats fallen, that Joe Biden called for radical reforms on how the court was run and a constitutional amendment asserting that no president was above the law or immune for crimes committed in office. Now, with a re-elected and vengeful Trump having run rampant over democratic norms by issuing a fusillade of often illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, the same court – with the same nine justices on the bench – is being cast in the unlikely role of potential saviour of American democracy. Critics who once derided the judicial consequences of the court's six-three conservative majority hope that the justices will show enough fealty to the US constitution to mitigate the effect of Trump's all-out assault on a range of rights, from birthright citizenship to basic due process appeals against deportation, and preserve the constitutional republic's defining contours. 'The court is certainly a very important institution at this moment since Congress is completely pliant and not asserting its own prerogatives and the executive branch doesn't seem to be guided by any internal legal constraint,' said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University and a former high-ranking justice department official in the Biden administration. The court has already adjudicated in several high-profile cases since Trump's return – notably ruling against the administration in ordering it to 'facilitate' the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador. But it has ruled in Trump's favour, at least temporarily, in several others. The stakes are about to be raised further still as a spate of cases arising from rulings against the administration by lower judges awaits the supreme court's final say before its current term ends this month. These include: the rights of lower courts to issue injunctions against Trump's efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the constitution; an attempt by Tennessee to ban or limit transgender care for minors; a complaint by parents in Maryland against allowing LGBTQ+ books in elementary schools; the need for insurers to cover preventive healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act; and attempts to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood. Added to that daunting schedule, the justices can expect additional unaccustomed summer workload in the shape of seemingly unending emergency cases wrought by Trump's no-holds-barred attempt to transform government. Most experts believe the court will ultimately rule against Trump's attempt to undermine birthright citizenship rights, given that they are so clearly defined in article 14 of the constitution. Yet the devil may be in the detail. Some analysts believe the court has already lent the administration's case unwarranted credibility by agreeing to consider its challenge against lower courts' powers to issue nationwide injunctions on the subject. Perhaps tellingly, the court has not called for a supplemental briefing on whether Trump's 20 January executive order was legal. Hopes that the current court can act as a brake on Trump seem forlorn given its conservative majority and the fact that three of its members – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed to the bench by Trump himself. In addition, justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito consistently take hardline positions that seem predisposed to favour Trump. Yet speculation that the chief justice, John Roberts, and Coney Barrett have become disenchanted by the brazenness of Trump's actions has fueled optimism. Some believe they could vote with the court's three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who consistently issue dissenting opinions on rightwing rulings – frequently enough on key occasions to form an effective bulwark. But Leah Litman, a law professor at Michigan University and author of a book on the court entitled Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, is sceptical. A recent ruling upholding the president's firing of the head of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, and overturning a 1935 precedent known as Humphrey's Executor – which gave Congress the power to limit a president's ability to remove officials from independent agencies – shows the conservative justice's reverting to type, she said. 'Some people wondered: 'Was the court going to have second thoughts about, for example, their immunity decision giving Donald Trump such leading powers, including powers to act outside of the law and above it?'' Litman argued. 'I think the Wilcox ruling underscored that the answer is definitively no.' Underpinning the conservative justices' approach is the unitary executive theory, which posits that the president has sole authority over government's executive branch, allowing him to fire members of nominally independent agencies without cause. 'They have been pushing this theory for over three decades and now they have a chance to make a pretty muscular version of it the law,' Litman said. 'Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett understand that the court can't let Donald Trump get away with everything, including usurping Congress's power or obviously depriving individuals of due process. But short of that, I don't think they are having any kind of second thoughts about their own views of executive power or about the law more generally.' The few cases of the court standing up to Trump, argues Litman, have been 'overplayed' and pale in importance compared with other rulings that have emboldened the president, including upholding the stripping of temporary protected status from about 300,000 Venezuelans. Greene defined the court's approach as 'formalist' and ill-suited to counter Trump's lawbreaking. He contrasted it with the much bolder ethos under Chief Justice Earl Warren's leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, when the court became renowned for creatively enforcing racial desegregation and civil rights orders in the south. 'Trump's modus operandi is to exploit what he perceives as weaknesses in the system of enforcement and accountability,' Greene said. 'If he thinks that courts are not going to be able to step in, he will try to exploit that as much as he can, unless and until he's stopped by some political actor or an actor with more power. 'The Trump administration is exploiting the formality and the lack of creativity of courts in general, but the supreme court in particular.' The court's writ has already been exposed as limited by Trump's failure to comply with its order to facilitate the return of Ábrego García to the US. According to Greene, the White House's failure to police its own actions to ensure they are in line with the law and the constitution already amounts to a constitutional crisis, because the courts lack the time and resources to counter unbridled violations. That puts added onus on the supreme court to fulfill its role as ultimate arbiter, argues Litman. 'We should continue to demand that they actually do uphold the law,' she said. 'I don't think we should just give up and give in to their inclination to not enforce the law and allow Donald Trump to get away with legal violations. If they don't, force them to expend the capital and pay a price in their public approval rating.'
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- General
- Boston Globe
Today in History: June 1, priceless recordings destroyed in Universal Studios fire
Advertisement In 1774, in response to the Boston Tea Party, General Thomas Gage, the newly appointed governor of the Massachusetts colony, closed Boston Harbor to all trade, following the orders of the British Parliament. In 1813, the mortally wounded commander of the USS Chesapeake, Captain James Lawrence, gave the order, 'Don't give up the ship,' during a losing battle with the British frigate HMS Shannon inthe War of 1812. In 1916, the Senate voted 47-22 to confirm Louis Brandeis as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, the first Jewish American to serve on the nation's highest bench. In 1943, a civilian flight from Portugal to England was shot down by German bombers during World War II, killing all 17 people aboard, including actor Leslie Howard. Advertisement In 1957, Don Bowden, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, became the first American to break the four-minute mile during a meet in Stockton, Calif., with a time of 3:58.7. In 1962, former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was executed after being found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his actions during World War II. In 1980, Cable News Network, the first 24-hour television news channel, made its debut. In 1990, US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed an agreement to stop producing and reduce existing stockpiles of chemical weapons held by the two Cold War superpowers. In 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shot and killed nine members of the Nepalese royal family, including his parents, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, before mortally wounding himself. In 2008, a fire at Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed 3 acres of the studio's property, including a vault that held as many as 175,000 irreplaceable master audio recordings from hundreds of musicians including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, and Nirvana. In 2009, General Motors filed for Chapter 11 reorganization, becoming the largest US industrial company to enter bankruptcy protection. In 2020, police violently broke up a protest by thousands of people in Lafayette Park across from the White House, using chemical agents, clubs, and punches to send protesters fleeing. The protesters had gathered following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a week earlier. Later that day, President Trump, after declaring himself 'the president of law and order' and threatening to deploy the US military in a speech, walked across the empty park to be photographed holding a Bible in front of St. John's Church, which had been damaged a night earlier. Advertisement
Express Tribune
2 days ago
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Judge blocks Trump move to invalidate work permits of 5,000 Venezuelans
Venezuelan migrants arrive after being deported from the United States, at Simon Bolivar International Airport, in Maiquetia, Venezuela April 23, 2025. Photo:REUTERS Listen to article A federal judge prevented the Trump administration from invalidating work permits and other documents granting lawful status to about 5,000 Venezuelans, a subset of the nearly 350,000 whose temporary legal protections the US Supreme Court last week allowed to be terminated. US District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco in a Friday night ruling, concluded that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem likely exceeded her authority when she in February invalidated those documents while more broadly ending the temporary protected status granted to the Venezuelans. The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued that prevented the administration as part of President Donald Trump's hardline immigration agenda from terminating deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program. Judge Edward Chen is preserving TPS for a limited number of Venezuelans who received documentation on or before February 5th, when Sec. Noem formally terminated 2023 Venezuela TPS. — Armando Tonatiuh Torres-García (@GarciaReports) May 31, 2025 But the high court stated specifically it was not preventing any Venezuelans from still challenging Noem's related decision to invalidate documents they were issued pursuant to that program that allowed them to work and live in the United States. Such documents were issued after the US Department of Homeland Security during former Democratic President Joe Biden's final days in office extended the TPS program for the Venezuelans by 18 months to October 2026, an action Noem sought to reverse. TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. Lawyers for several Venezuelans and the advocacy group National TPS Alliance asked Chen to recognize the documents' continuing validity, saying without them migrants could lose their jobs or be deported. Chen in siding with them said nothing in the statute authorizing the TPS program allowed Noem to invalidate the documents. Chen, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, noted the administration estimated only about 5,000 of the 350,000 Venezuelans held such documents. "This smaller number cuts against any contention that the continued presence of these TPS holders who were granted TPS-related documents by the Secretary would be a toll on the national or local economies or a threat to national security," Chen wrote. Homeland Security Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin in a statement said the "ruling delays justice and seeks to kneecap the president's constitutionally vested powers." Chen ruled hours after the US Supreme Court in a different case on Friday allowed Trump's administration to end the temporary immigration "parole" granted to 532,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants under a different Biden-era program.
AsiaOne
2 days ago
- Politics
- AsiaOne
Trump gets key wins at Supreme Court on immigration, despite some misgivings, World News
The US Supreme Court swept away this week another obstacle to one of President Donald Trump's most aggressively pursued policies — mass deportation — again showing its willingness to back his hardline approach to immigration. The justices, though, have signalled some reservations with how he is carrying it out. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, the court already has been called upon to intervene on an emergency basis in seven legal fights over his crackdown on immigration. It most recently let Trump's administration end temporary legal status provided to hundreds of thousands of migrants for humanitarian reasons by his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden while legal challenges in two cases play out in lower courts. The Supreme Court on Friday (May 30) lifted a judge's order that had halted the revocation of immigration "parole" for more than 500,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants. On May 19, it lifted another judge's order preventing the termination of "temporary protected status" for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. In some other cases, however, the justices have ruled that the administration must treat migrants fairly, as required under the US Constitution's guarantee of due process. "This president has been more aggressive than any in modern US history to quickly remove non-citizens from the country," said Kevin Johnson, an immigration and public interest law expert at the University of California, Davis. No president in modern history "has been as willing to deport non-citizens without due process," Johnson added. That dynamic has forced the Supreme Court to police the contours of the administration's actions, if less so the legality of Trump's underlying policies. The court's 6 to 3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump during his first term as president. "President Trump is acting within his lawful authority to deport illegal aliens and protect the American people. While the Supreme Court has rightfully acknowledged the president's authority in some cases, in others they have invented new due process rights for illegal aliens that will make America less safe. We are confident in the legality of our actions and will continue fighting to keep President Trump's promises," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Reuters. The justices twice — on April 7 and on May 16 — have placed limits on the administration's attempt to implement Trump's invocation of a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act, which historically has been employed only in wartime, to swiftly deport Venezuelan migrants who it has accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Lawyers and family members of some of the migrants have disputed the gang membership allegation. On May 16, the justices also said a bid by the administration to deport migrants from a detention centre in Texas failed basic constitutional requirements. Giving migrants "notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster," the court stated. Due process generally requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for a hearing before taking certain adverse actions. The court has not outright barred the administration from pursuing these deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, as the justices have yet to decide the legality of using the law for this purpose. The US government last invoked the Alien Enemies Act during World War Two to intern and deport people of Japanese, German and Italian descent. "The Supreme Court has in several cases reaffirmed some basic principles of constitutional law [including that] the due process clause applies to all people on US soil," said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School's immigrants' rights clinic. Even for alleged gang members, Mukherjee said, the court "has been extremely clear that they are entitled to notice before they can be summarily deported from the United States". A wrongly deported man In a separate case, the court on April 10 ordered the administration to facilitate the release from custody in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant who was living in Maryland. The administration has acknowledged that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported to El Salvador. The administration has yet to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, which according to some critics amounts to defiance of the Supreme Court. The administration deported on March 15 more than 200 people to El Salvador, where they were detained in the country's massive anti-terrorism prison under a deal in which the United States is paying President Nayib Bukele's government US$6 million (S$7.7 million). Ilya Somin, a constitutional law professor at George Mason University, said the Supreme Court overall has tried to curb the administration's "more extreme and most blatantly illegal policies" without abandoning its traditional deference to presidential authority on immigration issues. [[nid:718462]] "I think they have made a solid effort to strike a balance," said Somin, referring to the Alien Enemies Act and Abrego Garcia cases. "But I still think there is excessive deference, and a tolerance for things that would not be permitted outside the immigration field." That deference was on display over the past two weeks with the court's decisions letting Trump terminate the grants of temporary protected status and humanitarian parole previously given to migrants. Such consequential orders were issued without the court offering any reasoning, Mukherjee noted. "Collectively, those two decisions strip immigration status and legal protections in the United States from more than 800,000 people. And the decisions are devastating for the lives of those who are affected," Mukherjee said. "Those individuals could be subject to deportations, family separation, losing their jobs, and if they're deported, possibly even losing their lives." Travel ban ruling Trump also pursued restrictive immigration policies in his first term as president, from 2017 to 2021. The Supreme Court gave Trump a major victory in 2018, upholding his travel ban targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries. In 2020, the court blocked Trump's bid to end a programme that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of migrants — often called "Dreamers" — who entered the United States illegally as children. Other major immigration-related cases are currently pending before the justices, including Trump's effort to broadly enforce his January executive order to restrict birthright citizenship — a directive at odds with the longstanding interpretation of the Constitution as conferring citizenship on virtually every baby born on US soil. The court heard arguments in that case on May 15 and has not yet rendered a decision. Another case concerns the administration's efforts to increase the practice of deporting migrants to countries other than their own, including to places such as war-torn South Sudan. Boston-based US District Judge Brian Murphy required that migrants destined for so-called "third countries" be notified and given a meaningful chance to seek legal relief by showing the harms they may face by being send there. Murphy on May 21 ruled that the administration had violated his court order by attempting to deport migrants to South Sudan. They are now being held at a military base in Djibouti. The administration on May 27 asked the justices to lift Murphy's order because it said the third-country process is needed to remove migrants who commit crimes because their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back. Johnson predicted that the Supreme Court will side with the migrants in this dispute. "I think that the court will enforce the due process rights of a non-citizen before removal to a third country," Johnson said. ALSO READ: US Supreme Court lets Trump revoke humanitarian legal status for migrants
