(Zero Hedge)—Trump’s tariffs have injected a large measure of chaos into the markets – so much so that JPMorgan sees only four potential off-ramps to right the ship;
(i) Series of Trade Deals – the key being that one or more need to be completed across the G8 with a China deal being the most impactful
(ii) Another Trump Pivot – this could look like a delay/reduction for China to the 10%, perhaps with Trump’s commitment to fostering a business-friendly environment
(iii) A Legal Injunction – about 2 weeks ago a Charles Koch-backed legal group initiated a lawsuit against Trump challenging Presidential authority over tariffs (BBG)
(iv) Congress Passes a Veto-Proof Law – we have seen two initiative with Republicans crossing the aisle to join Democrats in attempting to halt the trade war but, as of now, the 2/3 necessary in both parts of Congress has not been attained.
While (i) is allegedly in the works, and (ii) could happen depending on which way the wind is blowing at Mar-a-Lago, we’ve now we’ve got (iii) in the works – as five companies have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its decision to tariff nearly every country in the world – arguing that Trump has overstepped his authority.
As Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times notes on April 2, Trump announced that he would impose 10 percent baseline tariffs on nearly every country and higher rates for nations with which the United States is at a significant trade deficit. A week later, the president paused the reciprocal tariffs for dozens of countries, but not for China, for which he raised the tariff rate to 145 percent.
The libertarian-aligned Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of five companies in the U.S. Court of International Trade, alleging that a statute that Trump invoked “does not authorize the President to unilaterally issue across-the-board worldwide tariffs.”
“His claimed emergency is a figment of his own imagination: trade deficits, which have persisted for decades without causing economic harm, are not an emergency. Nor do these trade deficits constitute an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat,’” the group’s lawyers said.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of alcohol company Vos Selections, sportfishing e-commerce business FishUSA, toy manufacturer MicroKits, pipe manufacturer Genova Pipe, and cycling apparel brand Terry Precision Cycling.
Liberty Justice Center’s senior counsel, Jeffrey Schwab, said in a statement that the president lacks the “power to impose taxes that have such vast global economic consequences.” The plaintiffs argue that only Congress, not the executive branch, can set tax rates.
Trump said in an April 2 executive order that the initial swath of tariffs is needed to bolster national security with regard to supply chains and because U.S. trading partners have engaged in “economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits.”
Trump’s announcements have caused fluctuations in the stock market this month, with indexes dropping before the partial tariff pause. On April 14, the three major stock indexes saw increases. By 3:30 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up by more than 400 points, while the Nasdaq increased about 1 percentage point.
On April 13, Trump said that he would be announcing tariffs on imported semiconductors over the next week, adding that there would be flexibility with some companies in the sector.
“We wanted to uncomplicate it from a lot of other companies, because we want to make our chips and semiconductors and other things in our country,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled back to Washington from his estate in West Palm Beach.
Trump declined to say whether some products, such as smartphones, might still end up being exempted.
“You have to show a certain flexibility. Nobody should be so rigid,” he said.
Earlier on April 13, Trump wrote in a post on social media platform Truth Social, “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations.
“What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States, and that we will not be held hostage by other Countries, especially hostile trading Nations like China.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ABC News on April 13 that Trump will set up a “special focus-type of tariff” on smartphones, computers, and other electronics within several weeks alongside tariffs for semiconductors and pharmaceutical drugs.
The Trump administration has not responded to the group’s lawsuit in court. The Epoch Times contacted the White House for comment on April 14.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.