Amid a flurry of announcements of last-minute deals ahead of Donald Trump’s latest tariff deadline, the underlying legal justification for the US president’s global trade war was the subject of significant doubt before a panel of 11 members of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

The highly anticipated hearing was to consider a lower court ruling finding the Republican president’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to circumvent Congress’s power to levy tariffs was, in fact, illegal. Neal Katyal, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued Trump’s citation of a statute that doesn’t even mention tariffs to launch an unprecedented trade war was a “breathtaking claim to power that no president has asserted in 200 years.”

A majority of the panel, including both Democratic and Republican appointees, expressed varying levels of skepticism with the government’s position. Tariffs, said US Judge Alan David Lourie, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, seemed “to have no friends” in the law.

Still, Trump has plenty of room to run if he loses. Any decision will likely take weeks and would almost certainly be stayed in order to give the US Supreme Court time to consider a request for review.

The high court, controlled by a 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, has over the past several months repeatedly cleared the way for Trump’s agenda. But even if it didn’t this time, he has other legal avenues along which to prosecute a trade war. And of course, there’s always the more extreme option: A Washington Post study of the ongoing constitutional crisis has found the administration is accused of not following a full one-third of all court rulings against it. —David E. Rovella

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It took less than 48 hours after Trump declared there would be no extension of his Aug. 1 deadline for trade deals for him to announce an extension. And not for the first time, the beneficiary of the president’s largesse was Mexico and its president, Claudia Scheinbaum.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation increased in June at one of the fastest paces this year while consumer spending barely rose, underscoring the dueling forces dividing policymakers over the path of interest rates. The so-called core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes food and energy items, rose 0.3% from May, according to US government data released Thursday. It advanced 2.8% on an annual basis, a pickup from June 2024 that underscores limited progress on taming inflation in the past year.

Underlying the weakness in spending is a cooling labor market. Real disposable income was flat after declining in May, while wages and salaries barely rose. The July jobs report due Friday is expected to show a continued moderation in hiring and a slight pickup in unemployment. The saving rate held at 4.5%.

Figma shares jumped 250% in their public debut after the design software maker and some of its shareholders raised $1.2 billion in an initial public offering. Shares of the San Francisco-based firm closed at $115.50 on Thursday in New York, more than tripling the IPO price of $33. The trading gives Figma the largest first-day jump in at least three decades for a US-traded company raising more than $1 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Figma is used to design web and mobile application interfaces. It has expanded its suite of products in an attempt to be more useful for software development and general workplace collaboration. Like many software firms, Figma charges clients based on the number of users and the kind of seat those users have. It added Dev Mode to the platform in 2023 to enable closer collaboration with developers, and has more recently incorporated AI technology into many of its own tools.

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