The Scramble Is On for Businesses to Get Their Tariff Refund Checks
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What are the tariff refunds and why are businesses suddenly expecting checks?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway. Do you
think you and I are gonna start getting checks because they struck down the tariffs, right? And according to economists, consumers pay the tariff. So if consumers pay the tariffs and they strike down the refunds, shouldn't we get the money?
I have often said, Joe, I buy a lot of stuff. Yeah. Especially from abroad. A lot of weird stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm running a small logistics company. And I will say, so I know it's the importer of record who actually pays the tariffs and is supposedly supposed to get the refund. However, I've had a few instances where like the postal service will deliver something to my house, especially in Connecticut, and while they're there, we'll say you owe us like $50 in cash as a tariff payment. And I'm literally standing on my door paying out cash and it's going somewhere. So I feel very much like I actually have paid the tariffs pretty much directly to the Trump government. Like there is something Very visceral.
I have
some bad news to tell you. The person who did that is a con artist who showed it. It was it And they said and they they duped you into thinking that because I have never heard of someone having to pay cash.
You're not buy you're not buying enough from abroad. No, it's definitely true. I got the bill online and then you can either pay online or you can pay the postal guy in cash. It's very strange.
I've never heard of that. Anyway, everyone wants their money back. How that's gonna happen, what the time frame is. There's gonna be major court fights. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, and it said that the scale of the suits to recover it is gonna be, quote, the same level is at asbestos levels, which famously was, you know, multiple decades of lawsuits.
Also gave birth to an entire portion of the legal industry. Lots of mesothelioma lawyers out there.
Some time later I'll tell you I was briefly part of that industry as a data collector for it. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it's fun. Anyway, we gotta figure out how it's all gonna happen because we know all these big companies they want their money back. Of course, you know, there's new tariffs already and the like the Trump administration after losing one tariffs, they're like putting in a different one. That's probably gonna have court fights, et cetera. We also know that there was a popular secondary market in claims that Wall Street banks were facilitating. And so this is gonna be a mess. It's probably gonna stand for years. We gotta figure out how companies are actually in the process of get getting their money back and whether they'll ever see it or whether it'll go to the lawyers.
Well, this is the other thing. I know you and I live in perpetual fear of paperwork and bureaucracy. And this in particular just strikes me as like the biggest nightmare of paperwork and bureaucracy. You know, for some of the tariffs, you're like calculating them by like the proportion of like the tariffed item in the thing you're buying. So like steel and aluminum, how much of this thing is? actually steel. It just seems like a nightmare. The whole thing of customs seems like a nightmare, still very antiquated.
We gotta learn more about this nightmare, about this chaos. And who do we talk to when we want to learn more about not the theoretical stuff that about trade that you know economists talk to talk about, which I love them too, but the actual nuts and bolts of moving things.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the tariff refunds and why are businesses suddenly expecting checks?
0:01–11:52
2
How does the Supreme Court decision affect the legal process for tariff refunds?
11:52–19:07
3
Who actually pays the tariffs – the importer of record or the end consumer?
19:07–26:23
4
What steps must a company take to file a tariff‑refund claim through the ACE system?
26:23–33:51
5
How does the emerging secondary market for refund claims work and what are its prices?
33:51–40:32
6
When can businesses expect to receive their refunds and how are electronic payments changing the timeline?
40:32–43:53
7
How are companies adjusting their supply chains and pricing strategies after the refunds are announced?
43:53–45:22
8
What are the broader economic and political implications of the tariff refunds for U.S. consumers and exporters?
45:22–46:34
Speakers
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