Sarah Gonzalez

Suddenly Wes and his colleagues start getting calls.

And do you know who has cash and who might want to buy this kind of stuff?

Hedge funds.

There are hedge funds, Wes's clients, that focus on bankrupt companies or near-bankrupt companies who are looking for ways to make bets on litigation or anything weird or risky in an odd way or overly complicated things that might make money.

And Wes's job is to call those people up and say, hey, I have this weird, risky in an odd way, overly complicated thing that might make money.

At what price would you be interested in buying it?

And I'm obviously a hedge fund.

Wes calls me and I'm like, listen, yeah, I would love to buy that potential future money.

But the Supreme Court might say it's legal and I will get nothing.

So I'm only willing to pay like 20%.

And I might get $16,000 in profit.

It's not bad.

Raise cash so they could go do normal corporate things with the cash they just got selling the tariff refund they may or may not have gotten in the future.

Like hedge funds are buying the potential refund for 40% of what it will total if it happens.

That's still a discount of 60 percent because of what a mess it's going to be to try to get this refund and how long it will take.

That's what the hedge funds are buying.

All that complexity, the uncertainty, the headache for the potential payoff.

Brett Kavanaugh summed it up as mess.

But there are other laws that give the president the power to create tariffs.

Kathleen Clausen, our trade law professor, ran through a whole list of them with us last time she was on the show.