Apple Must Pay 2% of Ireland's GDP

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Sep 12, 2024

Imagine you made $16 billion last year.

You’re supposed to pay 12.5% of that in taxes, or $2B, but you end up only paying $10 million. You do this little scheme by heading over to Ireland, putting up some “head offices“ that don’t really exist, and then attributing only $50mm to being taxable. Your tax rate on the actual amount you made remains between 0.005% and 1%.

Seems great right?

Until the EU comes in (why they’re always sticking their nose in everything is a completely different subject) and tells you that you gotta pay everything you owe back - from 2003 to 2014. Yikes.

This original ruling was back in 2016, but Apple had appealed back in 2020 where they actually had some success in some of Europe’s lower courts to make an argument that they didn’t receive special treatment. Well, today the court above the General Court, the European Union's Court of Justice, said that they had to pay back the $14 billion to Ireland.

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Today was a pretty volatile day in markets.

Today’s CPI report pretty much solidified the narrative that the next Fed move will be a 25bps cut and not a 50bps one with odds at 94%.

The labor market is softening and inflation has cooled to a reasonable level that Powell should be comfortable with. CPI is rising a bit, but not enough to worry anyone in my opinion- just fluctuations.

The market moved almost 3% intraday which is massive for an index of this size. 0dte positioning magnifying everything?