By Howard Schneider and Ann Saphir
Feb 20 (Reuters) - The Supreme Court's ruling against a broad set of the Trump administration's tariffs poses new questions for Federal Reserve policymakers who have spent the last year trying to understand how the president's sharply higher import taxes would affect inflation and the economic trajectory.
Many of them only recently gained confidence that last year's tariff-driven price increases would soon wane. Now, they are forced to wonder whether the process might
be thrown into reverse, or put on hold while the administration looks for workarounds to reimpose the same taxes under other authority. All the while, the Fed is left guessing about the outcome, facing a more complicated decision on when or if to resume cutting interest rates.
"Is there a requirement to pay back the firms that have paid in?...If so, that's a lot of disruption," Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said at an appearance in Birmingham, Alabama. "Does this cause businesses to revert back to old business models about where they are getting their supplies?...Will there be another vehicle to put all those tariffs in at the same level or are there constraints?"
The fresh uncertainty around the Fed's outlook was evident in interest rate futures markets, where traders wager on the direction of borrowing costs. Those markets seesawed on Friday between bets that the Fed would start cutting rates again in June or would wait until July, reflecting the complications the Supreme Court ruling has introduced.
Will businesses hold off on planned price increases because of the ruling, reducing inflation? Will they delay hiring or investment because of the uncertainty, as many did last year?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the legal fight over refunds of the invalidated taxes could take "weeks, months, years" to be resolved. Meanwhile, the administration will impose alternative import levies under what Bessent called well-tested authorities to fill the tariff gap left by the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling.
"No one should expect that the tariff revenues will go down," Bessent told the Economic Club of Dallas. Responding with fury to the ruling, President Donald Trump announced on Friday an immediate new 10% tariff on imports from all countries on top of any existing levies.
If the Trump administration's new tariffs are essentially one-for-one replacements of the old tariffs imposed under emergency powers known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem told Fox Business Network that his own economic forecast would not change much.
Still, he said, he plans to talk directly with CEOs to find out how they plan to manage the switch.
"It is possible that as companies begin to think of how they're going to transition from paying IEEPA tariffs to paying a different kind of tariffs, that could introduce a period of uncertainty there for companies," Musalem told Fox Business Network's Edward Lawrence.
For Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan, the ruling also means a fresh lack of clarity. "It's something we'll be paying attention to, but I don't have any specific perspective," she said in New York.
(Reporting by Howard Schneider, Michael S. Derby, Ann Saphir and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
