Prediction-market traders are pricing a high probability that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule against President Donald Trump’s emergency-power tariffs, a potential legal turning point that macro investors say could ripple into inflation expectations, rates and risk appetite, that are key inputs for Bitcoin (BTC).
On Polymarket, the contract “Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump’s tariffs?” was trading around 27% on Tuesday, implying a 73% market-implied probability that the court rules against Trump.
The case centers on whether Trump exceeded his authority by imposing tariffs using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and a ruling against the tariffs could trigger a complicated unwind across multiple sectors.
What A Ruling Against The Tariffs Could Mean For Markets
A key reason the outcome matters is the scale of money involved.
If the Supreme Court finds the tariffs unlawful, the U.S. government could face roughly $150 billion in refunds to importers, according to estimates tied to the tariff regime.
Also, investors and prediction markets have been leaning toward a ruling against the tariffs, with consumer and retail stocks reacting to the prospect that tariff pressure eases.
For macro markets, the immediate transmission channel is inflation and rates. Tariffs generally raise import costs and can feed into producer and consumer prices.
Research from the Boston Fed estimates the 2018 tariffs contributed on the order of tenths of a percentage point to core PCE inflation.
A Swedish central bank (Riksbank) staff memo reviewing tariff episodes similarly finds increased import tariffs raise prices and references estimates of inflation being about 0.1 percentage points higher during the 2018 tariff increases.
If tariffs are struck down, strategists typically frame the near-term macro effect as reducing one inflationary impulse, which can matter at the margin for rate expectations.
But the legal and fiscal mechanics could also become a market variable, including the breadth of affected countries and industries and the operational complexity around unwinding or refunding tariffs.
Where Bitcoin Fits
Bitcoin tends to respond less to trade policy directly and more to what trade policy does to liquidity, the dollar, and real yields.
In periods where tariff escalation pushes markets into risk-off positioning, analysts have observed spillovers into crypto alongside equities.
Binance Research, for example, described tariff escalation as coinciding with a broad risk-off move across markets in 2025, including a sharp drawdown in total crypto market cap.
Morningstar has also pointed to trade-war-era risk-off episodes that coincided with sharp moves in Bitcoin.
That backdrop is why traders are watching the Supreme Court signal as a potential macro catalyst, where a ruling that removes or constrains tariffs could alter the inflation-and-rates mix that has increasingly driven cross-asset risk positioning.
What To Watch Next
Beyond the verdict itself, markets are likely to focus on second-order details flagged by mainstream coverage, including how quickly any ruling would take effect, what refund process might look like and whether trade policy shifts to other legal mechanisms even if the IEEPA approach is rejected.
For Bitcoin, the practical question is whether the decision ultimately loosens or tightens financial conditions and whether it changes the direction of dollar strength and yields, which have been central drivers of crypto’s macro-sensitive moves in recent cycles.