The IRS adjusts tax brackets for inflation every year. That sounds like protection. But the adjustment is partial. What remains uncorrected is a quiet mechanism that transfers revenue to the government without a vote. Here's how it works. 🧵

April is dense with data. Four releases and one Fed meeting will define the macro picture for Q2. Not all data moves markets equally. And even less of it actually tells you where the economy is going. Here's what to watch — and how to read it. 🧵

The Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. His response: pivot to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. A 10% global tariff, still in place, valid for 150 days. The lesson isn't legal. It's systemic. When an executive branch has dozens of statutes granting trade authority, blocking one doesn't end the policy — it reroutes it. The water finds another channel. Courts can constrain instruments. They can't constrain the incentive driving them. As long as the political will exists, the toolkit will be searched.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA doesn't authorize tariffs. Now Treasury owes ~$166B in refunds. The mechanism matters: tariff revenue flows in immediately. Refunds flow out through courts and customs bureaucracy — slowly. The government collected a tax it wasn't authorized to collect. Unwinding collection is always harder than imposing it. That asymmetry — easy in, slow out — is the actual story.

A tariff is a tax on the consumer, collected at the border, credited to the producer. That's the whole mechanism. Everything else — trade deficits, jobs numbers, retaliation — follows from that sentence. Thread on what tariffs actually do.

Earnings season starts in two weeks. Most people will watch whether companies beat or miss. That is the least useful thing you can pay attention to. The reported numbers are Q1 results. January through March. Already happened. Already mostly priced in. The real macro signal is buried in forward guidance, and almost nobody treats it with the seriousness it deserves.

There's a meaningful difference between learning from recorded content and watching someone trade live. Recorded content is edited, cleaned up, and selected after the fact. Live sessions show you the wrong reads, the revised thesis, the moments of uncertainty — which is actually where the learning is. Playbit does this live every week. Free to join, no commitment:

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There's a meaningful difference between learning from recorded content and watching someone trade live. Recorded content is edited, cleaned up, and selected after the fact. Live sessions show you the wrong reads, the revised thesis, the moments of uncertainty — which is actually where the learning is. Playbit does this live every week. Free to join, no commitment:

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I'm in there as Playbit Patriot.

The workflow I actually use: Macro analysis tells you the environment you're operating in — rate expectations, liquidity conditions, currency dynamics. Hard Money Herald is where I work through that layer. Price structure shows you how that environment is expressing itself in actual markets. TradingView is the tool:

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Live tape reading is where you develop execution judgment. Playbit does that better than anything I've found:

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Central banks bought more gold in 2023 than in almost any year on record. The same institutions will tell you gold is not a serious monetary asset. The contradiction is structural, not accidental. A reserve manager who publicly endorses gold undermines confidence in the dollar-denominated holdings that make up most of their balance sheet. So the institution maintains two positions: a stated one for the press, and a revealed one in their IMF filings, which surface months after the fact. The behavior and the communication are optimized for different audiences. China's PBOC went silent on reserve disclosures for extended stretches, then disclosed large additions in quarterly filings. That is not evasion — it is the cleanest example of how the information management works. The statement is managed; the balance sheet moves on its own timeline. The practical read: when an institution buys something it calls irrelevant, the more informative signal is the transaction, not the framing. What are other reserve managers doing that their statements haven't caught up to yet?