Wall Street keeps calm after SCOTUS strikes down tariffs
NEW YORK — Wall Street kept calm Friday after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which had triggered panic in financial markets when announced last year, and stocks ticked higher.
The S&P 500 rose 0.7%. It had been flipping between small gains and losses before the court’s ruling, following discouraging reports showing slowing growth for the U.S. economy and faster inflation.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 230 points, or 0.5%, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.9%.
Many on Wall Street were likely expecting such a ruling from the Supreme Court, according to Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management. That likely led to the relatively muted reactions across financial markets, and trading remained tentative as investors tried to suss out the long-term effects.
Tariffs also aren’t going away, even with the Supreme Court’s ruling. Trump in the afternoon said he would use other avenues to put taxes on imports from other countries after calling the court’s decision terrible.
“Just so you understand, we have tariffs, we just have them in a different way,” Trump told reporters in an afternoon briefing. He said he would sign an executive order to impose a 10% global tariff under a law that could limit it to 150 days. The president also said he’s exploring other tariffs through other avenues, ones that would require an investigation through the Commerce Department.
“During that period of about five months, we are doing the various investigations necessary to put fair tariffs – or tariffs, period – on other countries,” Trump said.
Earlier in his comments, Trump said that the Supreme Court’s ruling had other countries “dancing in the streets, but they won’t be dancing for long.”
Among the tentative moves across markets, Treasury yields edged a bit higher in the bond market.
If investors thought the tariff ruling would improve inflation significantly, it could have sent yields lower. On the other hand, if investors were worried about the U.S. government’s debt rising faster in the future because of the loss of revenue from tariffs, long-term yields could have jumped. For now, at least, yields broadly held relatively steady.
The stock price of Ralph Lauren, meanwhile, rushed from an early loss to a gain of 3.3% after investors learned of the Supreme Court’s ruling. But it quickly flipped back to a loss before finishing with a rise of 2.2%. During April last year, the stock had dropped nearly 23% in four days after Trump announced his tariffs because of worries about how they would hurt its profits.
In other markets, gold’s price slumped briefly after the ruling and then erased the loss. Stock indexes in Europe added some to their gains from earlier in the day, while the U.S. dollar’s value edged down against other currencies.
Heading into the day, the main event for markets had seemed to be discouraging reports showing slowing U.S. economic growth and accelerating inflation. They found a relatively muted response from investors.

