Lutnick Family Angling To Make Astronomical Sums Off Court Nixing Tariffs

[muriel_volestrangler]

As noted by Talking Points Memo in September - now their boat really has come in. But Lutnick is immune from repercussions for being an Epstein close friend, so why should it matter the family gets hundreds of millions from the tariff clusterfuck?

This is not new. But I at least hadn’t heard any of these dots connected. I wasn’t even aware of the dots. A friend mentioned to me over the weekend that he’d heard about Wall Streeters buying up the rights to tariff refunds from big corporate importers. So the idea is that a Wall Street firm goes to an importer and says, you’ve now paid $10 million in tariffs. I’ll pay you $2 million right now for the right to collect the refund if courts ever end up deciding the tariffs were illegal. My friend had also heard that one most aggressive buyers was Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm until recently headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by Lutnick’s sons. Twenty-something Brandon Lutnick, pictured above on the left in a 2016 photo, is the current Chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. (He must be hella talented!)

Damn, I thought: That’s a hot story, crooked as the day is long. But I’m not sure how I or we would track it down without better finance world sources. Still, it was worth some quick googling. It turns out this is happening and Cantor’s role has already been reported. Wired and others reported this more than a month ago.

In mid-July, according to WIRED, Cantor was buying up the rights to your potential tariff refund at between 20 and 30 cents per dollar. Needless to say, I bet that price has gone up a lot since last Friday’s federal appellate court upheld the lower court ruling that almost all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. So in paper terms Cantor has probably already made a ton of money on this.

Now, before going any further I want to make clear that in itself this transaction is fairly unremarkable. A huge amount of modern finance is about making bets on uncertain outcomes, bets which can be structured in various ways. It might be commodities futures. In this case, it’s the right to collect a refund that may never happen. The sale of debt – a ubiquitous feature of modern finance – is similar. Purchasing debt, whether it’s a government bond or your home mortgage, is fundamentally a bet on the likelihood of repayment. I don’t want to belabor the point, only to make clear that the transaction in concept is neither outlandish or suspect, at least no more than any other part of modern finance.

All that said, it’s hard to imagine anything more emblematic of the Trump Era than what is for all intents and purposes still the Commerce Secretary’s company (yes, yes, arms length hand off to his twenty-something sons) making bets on something Lutnick himself has significant influence over. Indeed, far more important than whatever influence Lutnick has over tariff policy is that significant visibility he has into the bet’s probable outcome.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lutnick-family-angling-to-make-astronomical-sums-off-court-nixing-tariffs

As posted by Zorro in September on DU: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220603506

WIRED's July article: https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-refunds/

[Cheezoholic]

1. That was spare change in a jar for them that they purchased this debt with. If the jar got lost, oh well

Lock them all up!!!

[leftstreet]

2. How is that not insider...nevermind

I don't understand why Lutnick hasn't had his ass parked in front of Congress

[Initech]

3. Fuck these greedy grifting lunatics.

They need to be purged from the government.

[genxlib]

4. Just indicative of an important fact

Apparent conflict of interest aside.

It is indicative of the fact that those refunds will never make it back to the end buyers who paid for most of the tariffs through higher prices

[mobeau69]

5. Did he ever inform tsf that his tariffs were unconstitutional and would likely be struck down by scotus or did he just

let the idiot proceed with his folly, or even encourage it, so he could cash in with a big bet latter? That would be equivalent or worse to insider trading.

There is no honor among thieves and pedophiles.