Business

There’s a ‘decent chance’ the Supreme Court will OK Trump’s global tariffs: former USTR official

Published

3 months ago

November 2, 2025

President Donald Trump sees tariffs — or the threat of them — as a powerful tool to bend nations to his will.

He has used them in an unprecedented way, not only as the underpinning of his economic agenda, but also as the cornerstone of his foreign policy in his second term.

He has wielded the import taxes as a threat to secure ceasefires from countries at war. He has used them to browbeat nations into promising to do more to stop people and drugs from flowing across their borders. He has used them, in Brazil’s case, as political pressure because its judicial system prosecuted a former leader who was a Trump ally, and in a recent blowup with Canada, as punishment for a television ad.

This week, the Supreme Court hears arguments on whether the Republican president has overstepped federal law with many of his tariffs. A ruling against him could limit or even take away that swift and blunt leverage that much of his foreign policy has relied on.

Trump increasingly has expressed agitation and anxiety about the looming decision in a case he says is one of the most important in U.S. history.

He has said it would be a “disaster” for the United States if the justices fail to overturn lower court rulings that found he went too far in using an emergency powers law to put his tariffs in place. Trump has suggested he may take the highly unusual step of attending the arguments in person.

The Justice Department, in its defense of the tariffs, has highlighted the expansive way Trump has used them, arguing that the trade penalties are part of his power over foreign affairs, an area where the courts should not second-guess the president.

Earlier this year, two lower courts and most judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that Trump did not have power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to set tariffs — a power the Constitution grants to Congress. Some dissenting judges on the court, though, said the 1977 law allows the president to regulate imports during emergencies without specific limitations.

The courts left the tariffs in place while the Supreme Court considers the issue. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to wield them as he has tried to pressure or punish other countries on matters related — and unrelated — to trade.

“The fact of the matter is that President Trump has acted lawfully by using the tariff powers granted to him by Congress in IEEPA to deal with national emergencies and to safeguard our national security and economy,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “We look forward to ultimate victory on this matter with the Supreme Court.”

Most presidents haven’t used tariffs as a foreign policy tool

Modern presidents have used financial sanctions such as freezing assets or blocking trade, not tariffs, for their foreign policy and national security aims, said Josh Lipsky, a former Obama White House and State Department staffer who is now the international economics chair at the Atlantic Council.

There are other laws that presidents can use to impose tariffs. But they require a monthslong process to justify the rates.

Trump, citing the IEEPA, moves faster and more dramatically. He signs executive orders imposing new rates and fires off social media posts threatening additional import taxes, as he did in late October when he was angered by an anti-tariff television ad aired by the province of Ontario.

“Presidents have typically treated tariffs as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” Lipsky said.

In contrast, Trump has used tariffs as the backbone of his national security and foreign policy agenda, Lipsky said. “All of it is interconnected and tariffs are at the heart of it,” he said.

For example, earlier this year Trump had threatened a 30% tariff on European imports, a major increase from 1.2% before he took office. Seeking to secure Trump’s support for the NATO military alliance and for security guarantees for Ukraine in its war with Russia, the European Union struck a deal to settle for 15% tariffs.

The EU Commission faced criticism from businesses and member states for giving away too much. But Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič argued the settlement was “not only about the trade. It’s about security. It’s about Ukraine.”

Trump has been able “to use it in specific circumstances to get better deals — not just trade deals — but better deals overall than he might otherwise,” Lipsky said. “On the other hand, you would say there’s probably some backlash.”

Supreme Court decision could rattle geopolitics — and wallets

Trump’s tariff strong-arming has rattled relationships with America’s friends and foes. Some have responded by becoming more protectionist or looking to foster relations with China, which has tried to be seen as a promoter of free trade.

There also is the impact on pocketbook. Some businesses have passed on some of the costs to consumers by raising prices, while others have waited to see where tariff rates end up.

Tariffs traditionally have been used just as a tool to address trade practices.

“There’s literally no precedent for the manner that President Trump is using them,” said Emily Kilcrease, who was a deputy assistant U.S. trade representative and earlier worked on trade issues at the National Security Council as a career civil servant during the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.

“The use of tariffs the way that President Trump is using them is like — just broadscale attack on an economy as a way to incentivize a foreign government to change their posture,” said Kilcrease, now a director at the Center for a New American Security think tank.

But she said the case is not clear-cut. Kilcrease said she thinks there is a “decent chance” the Supreme Court could side with Trump because IEEPA gives the president “broad, flexible emergency powers.”

The case is also coming before a Supreme Court that has thus far been reluctant to check to Trump’s wide-ranging use of executive powers.

If the court constrains Trump, it could leave foreign governments questioning whether to try to renegotiate trade agreements recently struck with the Trump administration, experts said. But there are political realities at play too, because reneging on deals could affect other foreign policy or economic priorities.

The administration could pivot to try to use other laws to justify the tariffs, though that could mean a more complex and bureaucratic process, Kilcrease said.

“It certainly doesn’t take tariffs off the table,” she said. “It just makes them a little bit slower.”

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Why Jollibee is turning to a U.S. IPO to fuel global growth

Published

21 minutes ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Good morning. Chickenjoy—its crispy, juicy fried chicken—and Jolly Spaghetti are signature menu items at Jollibee, a Filipino fast-food chain that is building a growing fan base in the U.S. Now, the company is setting its sights on Wall Street.

The Philippines-based Jollibee Foods Corporation (JFC), the restaurant’s parent company, disclosed earlier this month that it plans to spin off its international operations and pursue a U.S. initial public offering for that business. The contemplated spin-off and listing are targeted for late 2027, leaving “quite a bit of time ahead of us for the work to be done,” Jollibee Global CFO Richard Shin said during a Jan. 14 media roundtable.

JFC, which includes restaurant brands such as Smashburger and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, is currently traded as a single group on the Philippine Stock Exchange and operates in 33 countries. Over the past 15 quarters, JFC’s international network has posted a 26.7% compound annual growth rate, outpacing the group’s overall 15.1% rate of expansion. The separation reflects increasingly distinct strategic profiles for the domestic and international businesses, Shin said.

In March 2025, Jollibee launched its first U.S. franchising program. After opening its first North American location in 1998 in Daly City, California, the brand has since expanded to more than 100 locations across the U.S. and Canada as of early 2026.

Why go the route of a U.S. IPO? “I think there’s a fact that we can all agree on: the U.S. capital markets have deep investor-based experience in valuing global consumer and restaurant growth companies,” Shin said on the call.

Many such companies are still growing into their potential yet are often rewarded with higher multiples and valuations, he said. While that outcome is not guaranteed for JFC, a U.S. listing offers greater capital depth, liquidity, and broader analyst coverage, with any final decision subject to valuation and required approvals, he added.

The IPO market in the U.S. is heating up again, Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts writes in a new feature article. “While 2026 will almost certainly not match the banner year of 1999, which saw 476 companies go public, investors should have far more choices than they did four years ago, when just 38 firms held an IPO,” he writes.

Shin also framed the separation of JFC in terms of simplifying how investors assess the corporation, noting the group includes businesses at different stages of their life cycles, with varying returns and opportunities. Distinct domestic and international entities, he suggested, could offer investors clearer, more targeted investment options as the strategic profiles of the two segments continue to diverge.

Reasons for pursuing the separation include improved transparency, discipline in capital allocation, execution against the growth strategy, and the ability to attract an investor base aligned with the risk–return profile of each business rather than being judged solely on short-term financial metrics, he said.

“The transaction is aligned with the Jollibee Group’s long-term value creation strategy,” Shin said.

With its eyes on Wall Street, Jollibee is betting that global taste and investor appetite, will be on its side.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Helen Cai was appointed senior executive vice president and CFO of Barrick Mining Corporation (NYSE: B), effective March 1, following the departure of long-serving finance chief Graham Shuttleworth, who will be leaving the company after its year-end results. Cai has served on Barrick’s board since November 2021 and brings more than 20 years of experience in equity research, corporate finance, capital markets, and M&A at firms across the mining, industrial, and technology sectors, primarily with Goldman Sachs and China International Capital Corporation.

Meredith Peck was named CFO of Zekelman Industries, the largest independent steel pipe and tube manufacturer in North America. Peck succeeds Mike Graham, who will retire on May 15 following a planned transition period. She brings more than 20 years of financial leadership experience to Zekelman Industries and most recently served as CFO for COTSWORKS, Inc., after earlier roles as the company’s controller and then vice president of finance and administration. Earlier in her career, Peck held senior leadership roles at KeyBank and began her career in public accounting at PwC, and she is also a former U.S. Coast Guard officer.

Big Deal

In a blog post on Sunday, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar provided an update on the tech giant, including its revenue. In 2023, revenue reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue; it rose to $6 billion in 2024 and jumped to more than $20 billion in 2025.

This revenue growth closely tracked an expansion in computing capacity. OpenAI’s computing capacity rose from 0.2 gigawatts (GW) in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024 and about 1.9 GW in 2025.

Friar writes: “Compute is the scarcest resource in AI. Three years ago, we relied on a single compute provider. Today, we are working with providers across a diversified ecosystem. That shift gives us resilience and, critically, compute certainty.”

In an accompanying LinkedIn post, Friar said that from a finance perspective, demand is real and growing at rates never seen by any company previously, and that customers are paying in proportion to the value delivered. She added that capital is being deployed deliberately into the constraints that actually matter, especially compute.

Going deeper

ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) and IMA (Institute of Management Accountants) have published a Global Economic Conditions Survey, based on the results of their Q4 2025 poll. Members from around the world share their views on the macroeconomic environment.

Confidence among CFOs improved somewhat, but remained below its historic average, and the key indicators point to caution at their firms, according to the findings. Accountants flagged economic pressure, cyber disruption, and geopolitical uncertainty as the top risk priorities, underscoring that risks are increasingly complex and interlinked.

“Accountants remain cautious entering 2026, amid a highly uncertain global backdrop,” Jonathan Ashworth, chief economist of ACCA, said in a statement. “The global economy performed better than expected in 2025 and looks set to remain resilient in 2026 amid recent monetary easing by central banks, stock market gains, supportive fiscal policies in key countries, and the ongoing global AI boom.” However, there remains significant uncertainty, amid a wide range of risks, “not least on the geopolitical front, which are more heavily skewed to the downside,” he said.

Overheard

“We are entering an IPO ‘mega‑cycle’ that we expect will be defined by unprecedented deal volume and IPO sizes.”

—Goldman Sachs’ global co-head of investment banking, Kim Posnett, recently told Fortune. Posnett discussed how she sees the current business environment and the most significant developments in 2026 in terms of AI, the IPO market, and M&A activity. Posnett, named among the leaders on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, is one of the bank’s top dealmakers and also serves as vice chair of the Firmwide Client Franchise Committee and as a member of the Management Committee.

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Business

Khosla-backed Formulary raises oversubscribed $4.6 million seed round for its AI-powered private fund manager software

Published

52 minutes ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Alfia Ilicheva came from the world of public markets, including four years at one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater. But when she transitioned over to the private side, including serving as the CEO of an Apollo-backed investment platform, she realized the difficulty of fund administration for operations like private equity and venture capital. Instead of having access to real-time and accurate data like at Bridgewater, which can rely on publicly available information, this new world was filled with manually compiled and fragmented data subject to human error and inconsistent metrics. “How could it be that hedge funds are so into the future and private capital markets are so backward,” she remembers thinking.

As private markets explode and AI makes automation increasingly possible, Ilicheva saw an opportunity to build the next generation of fund administration software for everyone from venture capital outfits to PE giants like Apollo. After initially planning to bootstrap the project, which she named Formulary, Ilicheva was introduced to Hari Arul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, who immediately saw the appeal of the idea. Khosla is leading Formulary’s $4.6 million seed round, which Ilicheva says is three times oversubscribed, with participation from Human Ventures, Serena Williams’s venture firm, and others.

In the red-hot field of private investments, buoyed by the rise of private credit and massively valued companies like SpaceX and OpenAI, fund administration may not be the most alluring area for innovation. But the ability to track investments, returns, and performance—and accurately convey the information to investors, or limited partners—is a necessary foundation.

The existing options fall into two camps: the service side, or high-touch accounting companies, like SS&C and Citco, or the software side, like Carta. As Ilicheva interviewed general partners and former clients in her user research, she realized that nearly everyone was dissatisfied with the existing options to the point that most turned to shadow fund administration, where they would hire outside firms but keep their own books at the same time. “When you raise a fund, your dream is to generate alpha by investing capital, not redoing someone’s work,” Ilicheva said.

Ilicheva planned to find a happy medium between the two models by leveraging AI to massively scale up the service approach, creating software for their own in-house accountants, which Ilicheva playfully calls bionic accountants. “They’re really focused on having a grip on the numbers and delivering service, but they’re not manually entering things in an Excel spreadsheet, which has been the industry’s burden for the past decades,” she said.

The challenge in creating a tech-enabled services company, of course, is scale, with a pure SaaS model able to grow at a much faster clip. When I asked Khosla’s Arul how he thought about the approach, he said the key is to deliver the vast majority of the product through technology: “It’s important for any entrepreneur or any investor to look at an AI-enabled services business and say, the margin of how this business runs looks more like a technology company than a services company.”

Arul said that while Khosla is not yet using Formulary, which is just now coming out of stealth, he’s optimistic for a future where tedious processes like ensuring data accuracy for LPs can be fully, reliably automated. Ilicheva mentioned one possible future use case for Formulary as drafting LP letters, which Arul wholeheartedly endorsed, along with a portal where investors could communicate directly with the system to understand the value of positions, fund deployment, and future capital calls. “[That] sounds pie in the sky relative to what the reality is today,” Arul said, “But it doesn’t feel out of reach.”

Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com

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Business

Leaders at Davos are obsessing over how to use AI at scale

Published

3 hours ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune‘s AI editor Jeremy Kahn reports on the AI buzz at Davos
The big story: SCOTUS could upend Trump’s leverage to acquire Greenland.
The markets: Jolted by Trump’s renewed tariff threats.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. I’m on the ground in Davos, Switzerland, for this year’s World Economic Forum. As Diane wrote yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s arrival later this week along with a large delegation of U.S. officials eclipses pretty much every other discussion at Davos this year. But, when people here aren’t talking about Trump, they are talking about AI.

At Davos last year, the hype around AI agents was pierced by the shock of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which was released during the conference. We’ll see if a similar bit of news upends the AI narrative again this year. (There are rumors that DeepSeek is planning to drop another model.) But, barring that, business leaders seem to be less wowed by the hype around AI this year and more concerned with the nitty-gritty of how to implement the technology successfully at scale.

On Monday, Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, told me the company is using ‘forward deployed engineers’ to tighten feedback loops between customers and product teams. Salesforce is also offering pre-built agents, workflows, and playbooks to help customers re-engineer their businesses—and avoid getting stuck in “pilot purgatory.”

Meanwhile, at a side event in Davos called A Compass for Europe, that focused on how to restore the continent’s flagging competitiveness, AI was front-and-center. Christina Kosmowski, the CEO of LogicMonitor, told the assembled CEOs that to achieve AI success at scale, companies should take a “top down” approach, with the CEO and leadership identifying the highest value use cases and driving the whole organization to align around achieving them. Neeti Mehta Shukla, the cofounder and chief impact officer at Automation Anywhere, said it was critical to move beyond measuring automation’s impact only through the lens of labor savings. She gave specific customer examples where uplifting data quality, improving customer satisfaction, or moving more workers to new tasks, were better metrics than simply looking at cost per unit output. Finally, Lila Tretikov, head of AI strategy at NEA, said Europe has enough talent and funding to build world-beating AI companies—what it lacks is ambition and willingness to take big bets.

Later, I met with Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process analytics software platform Celonis. He echoed some of these points, telling me that to achieve ROI with AI generally required three things: strong leadership commitment, the establishment of a center of excellence within the business (this led to an 8x higher return than for companies that didn’t do this!), and finally having enough live data connected to the AI platform.

For further AI insights from Davos, check out Fortune’s Eye on AI newsletter. Meanwhile, Fortune is hosting a number of events in Davos throughout the week. View that lineup here. And my colleagues will be providing more reporting from Davos to CEO Daily and fortune.com throughout the week.—Jeremy Kahn

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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