CHICAGO, December 11, 2025 — Among the uncertainties clouding the near-term future of the food-away-from-home business is how the U.S. Supreme Court might rule on President Trump’s protectionist tariffs.
Will it reaffirm the decisions of two lower courts that the chief executive lacked the legislative authority to impose the import duties? Or, consistent with its recent track record of siding with the White House, will it overturn those decisions and okay the tariffs, leaving the current charges and the President’s ability to change them at will firmly in place?
Even legal experts say they don’t have an educated guess. Lisa Rubin, the in-house legal expert for MS Now, says the decision of the nation’s highest court could come anytime between today and the end of June.
Costco recently sued the Administration to ensure it gets a rebate if the tariffs are ruled illegal. The suit says the retail giant acted now because a decision could come by Dec. 16, after which the recovery of the money becomes more difficult due to the dollars being blended into the federal government’s revenue stream around that time.
Now avid observers are getting a sense of what to expect from an unlikely source: Prediction markets, or the multi-million-dollar operations that allow the public to bet on their expectations for the future. For wagers as small as a few cents, members of the public can bet on what they think will happen—not only which NFL team will win the Super Bowl, but how much snow Chicago might get this month. Nearly $50 million has been bet on the former via a prediction-betting site called Kalshi (the favorites: the Rams, followed by the Seahawks and the Bills), while about $101,000 has been wagered on the latter (53% of bettors say it’ll be under a foot, while 32% contend the city will get at least 18 inches.)
Payouts are determined by the probabilities of the outcomes, as determined by the prediction-market bet takers.
Users of Kalshi can place 16 bets on variable relating to the tariffs, from whether Trump will succeed in getting $2,000 tariff-relief checks to most Americans, to what the duties will be on Canadian imports on Jan. 1.
As of this moment, $104 million has been bet on the Court scuttling the tariffs, which Kalshi has given a probability of only 24%.
The service’s arch-rival, Polymarket, sets the chance at 25%.
The two sites, generally regarded as leaders in the emerging prediction-markets field, differ far more on whether the Court will also order the Administration to issue rebates to parties that have paid the tariffs since they were announced on April 2. Polymarket sets the likelihood at 4%, while Kalshi sets a probability of 40% that the Court will order rebates be paid by July 1.
However, the projections change literally in real time, with the host service’s algorithms reviewing a variety of indicators. The probability of a White House victory in the Court dropped like a stone after arguments before the august body began in early November.
Within an hour, the whole situation could once again be, well, uncertain.