8 ms·

Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and is now run by his son, went to various companies that were affected by tariffs and boug

• rbanffy 8mo ago
  I believe, with huge disappointment, that this level of corruption has been normalised in this administration and that nothing will come out of this.
  • candiddevmike 8mo ago
    Yea, I'm done hearing "the wheels of justice turn slowly..." bullshit. People have had their lives ruined, far quicker, for far less.
    • jacquesm 8mo ago
      The wheels of justice don't turn at all once you reach $1B or so. Their speed is essentially inversely proportional to the net worth of the individual under scrutiny. And if you're really rich you get to buy your own laws through a thing called lobbying. So you will get even more rich.
    • coldpie 8mo ago
      Life in prison for every single person working under this administration is the moderate position.
      • amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
        After this is all over, we probably need to do something about presidential pardon power. Getting a constitutional amendment through is hard, but I don't see another option.
        • rbanffy 8mo ago
          A different understanding of the extension of the presidential pardon when it creates a conflict of interest from the SCOTUS would be one possible path.
      • GaryBluto 8mo ago
        I'm sure plenty of wrathful extremists thought they held a moderate position too.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • rootusrootus 8mo ago
    Look how many comments in this discussion are scrambling to support the corruption. It’s very normalized, to the point where we don’t call it corruption any more, we call it good business.
• actionfromafar 8mo ago
  But they are sticking it to the libs, so it’s all worth it?
• barelysapient 8mo ago
  This assumes companies would have refunded consumers. Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
    Best case consumers may be refunded for tariffs directly charged to them by shipping companies like FedEx and DHL (USPS too, but can you really see them having the competence to do this?!). What consumers will presumably never be refunded for are the increased prices they've been paying for imports of any kind (from Walmart, Amazon, grocery store) where someone else was the importer.
  • 6510 8mo ago
    It will trickle down!
• sillysaurusx 8mo ago
  That’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case? As for whether consumers should get anything, I’m sympathetic. It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? You’d have to quantify how much overhead they’ve paid in tariffs, and that seems like an IRS-scale job. Dealing with it at the scale of individual companies is at least tractable.
  • bhouston 8mo ago
    > That’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case? Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.
    • Ajedi32 8mo ago
      The commerce secretary has no control over what the Supreme Court does. Anyone could have read the law and decided whether they thought the tariffs were legal or not.
      • simmerup 8mo ago
        But he does know that Trump had no plan to contest the supreme court or make new laws
        • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
          Trump doesn’t have those powers.
          • simmerup 8mo ago
            Trump doesn't have a lot of powers he's using regardless Like starting wars and creating tarrifs. He could have just broke the law again
• petcat 8mo ago
  Is it insider trading to bet on a Supreme Court verdict? It's not like it was a slam dunk. The decision was 6-3.
  • indoordin0saur 8mo ago
    Yeah, because he's the son of the commerce secretary, so (supposedly) has access to the internal deliberations within the government.
    • petcat 8mo ago
      You're saying that he had access to all of the Supreme Court Justices' chambers?
      • indoordin0saur 8mo ago
        You don't need to have access to everything for it to be insider trading, just more than the general public. Lutnick would know what case they are making to the court, perhaps the confidence of the attorneys in winning as well as information on how the case was going.
        • parineum 8mo ago
          All of that is based on public knowledge, including the confidence of attorneys.
        • tacticalturtle 8mo ago
          Supreme Court transcripts of arguments are posted to supreme court.gov the same day the arguments are made: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcript/2025 https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr... There’s no secret sauce here - their guess as to how the case is going is as good as any outside observer, and based on the questions made by the justices.
    • danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
      No, because "the government" isn't one blob. The court system is separate from the administration. And the supreme court justices aren't giving the internal deliberations to someone in the administration, especially when the administration is one of the parties in the case.
• gruez 8mo ago
  >Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet ...assuming they held those rights on their books, rather than selling it off to other hedge funds.
• energy123 8mo ago
  For it to be insider trading, he would have had to have access to private information from the Supreme Court, which seems unlikely.
  • jacquesm 8mo ago
    Why is that unlikely? It would seem to be a very easy thing to accomplish. For instance, he could just ask.
    • gruez 8mo ago
      >For instance, he could just ask. Or just pay attention to the oral arguments. The justices seemed very skeptical of the Trump administration, and betting markets reacted accordingly.
  • seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    They could have used inside government legal analysis that other people didnt have. You could have predicted this with higher certainty if you knew the justices well enough.
    • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
      Coulda woulda shoulda. They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.
      • seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
        Ya, that's why this will be impossible to show off as insider trading.
• NickC25 8mo ago
  You forgot to mention that Mr. Lutnik is also a close personal friend of a pedophile-turned-Mossad-agent-turned-pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein and visited his island. Mr. Lutnik deliberately and purposefully lied to congress about it, and faced no charges for lying to congress. In a just world, someone like that would be jailed indefinitely and made to publicly take stand about his activities, and called out to his face during depositions about his lies.
  • rootusrootus 8mo ago
    Yeah that’s never going to happen. Nobody in this administration will ever be under oath on the topic. Now they suddenly think Slick Willie is trustworthy because he said he had know knowledge of Trump doing anything wrong. What a world.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
      Presumably you don't consider a House panel to be under oath (since Lutnick, a part of this administration, will be appearing before one) ?
      • rootusrootus 8mo ago
        I will be happy to be wrong, assuming that happens. I want everyone who associated with Epstein to be under oath at some point, and I think we should prioritize based on how many pieces of evidence their name appears on. You think Trump will ever let himself be questioned under oath? Any rational person knows that his refusal is tantamount to an admission, but I bet he does not see it that way.
    • NickC25 8mo ago
      Sadly, you're right on the money here, nobody will ever spill the beans. Problem is Willie knows everything (he was the president for fuck's sake) and is just lawyer-speaking his way out of admitting that he along with multiple former presidents (including the current one) were/are compromised by a hostile nuclear-armed foreign actor's (read: "ally's") intelligence agency. He can't sing, or the whole charade comes apart. The contagion fallout is massive. This involves several of the wealthiest people on the planet, tech leaders, business leaders, politicians in powerful countries...and involves several major geopolitical actors...and involves some unspeakably disgusting actions to children.
• snowwrestler 8mo ago
  Could you go into detail about what you think happened? The tariffs were public knowledge, and the suits to invalidate them were public knowledge. Are you saying you think the Supreme Court justices secretly communicated to the Commerce Secretary how they intended to rule on the case, far in advance of publishing their ruling?
  • wutwutwat 8mo ago
    That would be insane. That would mean people in the government talk to each other and also that they have conversations or make deals behind closed doors or that one or god forbid all of them are corrupt, which is utter nonsense! Probably just a good guess. At least it wasn't based on intimate knowledge of things based on being in a position extremely close to everyone involved in all of it. Sheesh.
  • myrmidon 8mo ago
    I'll turn this around: Do you think it is acceptable for policymakers, lawmakers or people involved in such a process to reap profits more or less directly with (partially non-public) knowledge they've acquired? Because I think not. And I feel pretty strongly about this. The conflict of interest is so glaringly obvious that it should be completely self-evident why every voter should want to prevent, ban and punish any such action. I feel that anyone involved in this tariff insurance business should be able to prove without a shadow of doubt that they had no political insider knowledge about the whole thing, and I'm extremely skeptical that this is the case (just from the pople involved alone!).
    • irishcoffee 8mo ago
      You mean these policymakers? “ House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort-release-congressional-sexual-misconduct-harassment-rcna261679 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort...
      • myrmidon 8mo ago
• lowercased 8mo ago
  might not be 'insider trading' with respect to the court decision, but Lutnick had influence with the president and could affect tariffs being paid by the various companies who were squeezed in to considering selling (or actually selling) their tariff refund rights. And tariffs changed many times over months, so... looking at what companies actually sold to CF might reveal some patterns that raise eyebrows. But nothing will be done about it.
• rayiner 8mo ago
  Cantor Fitzgerald is sleezy, but you’ve got the reason wrong. They’re sleezy because they bet against the administration. But it’s not “insider trading.” They didn’t have insider information on how the courts were going to rule—especially where it was a 6-3 split with three conservatives siding against the administration. And a split in the appellate court as well, with two republican and two democrat appointees siding for the administration. And Cantor had nothing to do with imposing these tariffs in the first place. Trump loves tariffs. He has been wanting to do these tariffs since the 1980s. He imposed tariffs in his first term and campaigned on imposing them now. So you’re taking a story about Cantor Fitzgerald displaying disloyalty to Trump and trying to turn it into a “corruption” story that makes no sense.
  • reskewed 8mo ago
    [dead]
• Supermancho 8mo ago
  This is collusion between the offices of POTUS, SCOTUS, and corporate friends that looks like insider trading, from a zoomed in lens.
  • dmix 8mo ago
    You're saying Trump doesn't want tariffs? And the SCOTUS judges who went on record supporting executive powers to tariff was all just a big insider trading scam? And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?
    • Supermancho 8mo ago
      To clarify, POTUS being short for the group POTUS in-crowd of the actual POTUS and cabinet, who act in sync. I'm saying the public tide shifted and the legal reality set in that they weren't going to get sympathetic rulings...which they don't care about anyway since it's not their money and the tariff threats already had any desired effects sought. POTUS was floated the idea that they could enrich themselves, so the decision was made, communicated to the Secretary of Commerce and to the SCOTUS judges. > And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds? Nothing to do with them. Narcissists don't worry about the future of others, except as a narrative to sell their personal ambitions. Some people don't believe the administration is that flippant. I think it's obvious they are having fun.
      • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
        [flagged]
• danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
  This is wrong. It's not insider trading. Lutnick didn't have inside information. His son just had a brain. Anyone who read the case knew which way the court was going, it was the least surprising decision ever. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that the court ever heard it.
  • seydor 8mo ago
    is it not a conflict of interest if you facilitate the legislation of tarrifs that you knew are illegal?
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
      No, it's not a conflict of interest. It's perhaps dumb, or morally bad, or several other things.
      • rayiner 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        • leviathant 8mo ago
          You're upsetting the kind of people who leave their shopping carts in the parking lot instead of putting them away when they're done.
        • reskewed 8mo ago
          [dead]
      • cj 8mo ago
        > dumb, or morally bad This is easy to say in hindsight. There was a non-zero chance the decision could have went the other way. Also, companies aren't stupid. They don't buy insurance against things that are impossible. And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  Cantor Fitzgerald lost most of its staff in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Lutnick sued American Airlines, eventually settling for $135 million [1]. He claimed this would largely go to the family of hte victims. Turns out most (if not all) of it went to the senior executive team, wtih himself being the primary beneficiary [2]. This is also the same Howard Lutnick who the DoJ accidentally released a photo of with Jeffrey Epstein [3]. People noticed and they removed it. People noticed that too so they restored it. Just so we're all clear who Howard Lutnick is. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/busine.ss/judge-approves-american-air-cantor-fitzgerald-sept-11-settlement-idUSL2N0KN1Y2/ https://www.reuters.com/article/busine.ss/judge-approves-ame... [2]: https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2022877480516813077 https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2022877480516813077 [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/howard-lutnick-jeffrey-epstein-photo https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/howard-lutni...
  • selimthegrim 8mo ago
    Lutnick was refusing to pay survivor benefits to the families until a bunch of other CEOs confronted him in his office.
• GaryBluto 8mo ago
  > Now if this isn't insider trading [...], I don't know what is. Correct.
• mrwh 8mo ago
  The executive class are out to get as much as they can as quickly as they can while the music plays, then retire to whatever luxury boltholt they can prepare. It's FIRE with private islands, and without even a figleaf of noblesse oblige any more.
  • gruez 8mo ago
    >The executive class are out to get as much as they can [...] This is just hollow populist anti-elite rhetoric. Who do you think sold them the tariff refunds? They're not buying them from granny who didn't know any better. They bought it from other executives who knew, or at least ought to know what was at stake.
    • bcrosby95 8mo ago
      Lol. Granny paid for the tarrif then the refund was sold by an elite to an elite for 20 cents on the dollar. Everyone wins except granny. To be fair, I think some companies didn't raise prices because they thought they would be overturned.
    • wiseowise 8mo ago
      Jesus Christ, how pathetic you are. I severely doubt you’re just a bored billionaire, which leaves only the option of a bootlicker. Why do you simp for them? Do you expect a bread crump to fall off the table? Or are you a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thinking you belong to them?
  • tencentshill 8mo ago
    Worse. They tend to stick around due to their inability to stop taking until they die.
• semiquaver 8mo ago
  > Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is. I agree that you don’t know what insider trading is.
• bell-cot 8mo ago
  > ...bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value... So - with umpteen $billion on the line, and all the big-shot lobbyists and Washington insiders and experts that all those huge companies had on payroll to advise them - they decided to sell at 20 cents on the dollar. Theory: When the far-smarter-than-us money bets big, they might know the actual odds.
• leggerss 8mo ago
  This type of financialization should be illegal
  • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    Based on what?
• hammock 8mo ago
  Source? I saw this claim going around but the one actual source supporting the claim was more like “we have the cash to buy them if folks are willing to sell them” and didn’t go any further than that. Via Newsweek, Cantor Fitzgerald has affirmed it “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.” https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-supreme-court-ruling-tariffs-11558345 https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...
  • burkaman 8mo ago
    This is contradicted by Cantor Fitzgerald documents obtained by Wired which said "We’ve already put a trade through representing about ~$10 million of IEEPA Rights and anticipate that number will balloon in the coming weeks". - https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-refunds/ https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r... So we don't really know, someone is lying. I'd prefer to let the congressional investigation play out, but if I had to guess right now I would believe Wired over Cantor Fitzgerald.
  • meetpaleltech 8mo ago
    [dead]
• happyopossum 8mo ago
  You've been sucked in by an online lie and are spreading it as fact: "Amid online claims Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, senior executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, could benefit from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, a firm spokesperson told Newsweek it has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs."" [0] https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-supreme-court-ruling-tariffs-11558345 https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...
  • pests 8mo ago
    Not according to the letter obtained by WIRED, as written about up thread.
  • p_j_w 8mo ago
    They’ve denied being involved in naked corruption, I suppose we have no choice but to take them at their word.
• nyeah 8mo ago
  That's some third-world shit.
• beeforpork 8mo ago
  > while, of course, consumers get nothing This would have been the case no mattern what.
• SilverElfin 8mo ago
  It’s not that surprising. The entire tariff saga was one trading opportunity after another for insiders who knew which announcements were going to come out. Lutnick is a particularly corrupt individual though. He’s in the Epstein files like Trump and Musk and Thiel. But he also took over Cantor by suing the widow of Cantor after his death. And now he hands the company to children and has no shame about openly nepotistical decisions like this.
• phillipharris 8mo ago
  But... who would make a bet with a counterparty like that? Hello, I'm a trump administration insider, here to make a bet with you about the future of one of Trump's policies. You'd have to be pretty stupid.
• mustyoshi 8mo ago
  Just about everyone on the left has been saying these tariffs were illegal since day one. It's not insider trading that they acted on that consensus.
• theptip 8mo ago
  The reading I’ve done elsewhere suggests that it’s far from a done deal that companies will be able to extract refunds from the government. For example if doing so offends Trump and causes him to try to extract concessions elsewhere. Or if the government simply drags their feet on various ways. “Trump’s buddy’s son offers 20c/$” does not seem like a terrible deal for getting your money out.
• syllogism 8mo ago
  The corruptions of this administration are legion, but this isn't one of them. Unless you can point to something Lutnick did to create this outcome, I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.
  • hedora 8mo ago
    https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cantor-fitzgerald/summary?id=D000021889 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cantor-fitzgerald/summary?i...
  • caconym_ 8mo ago
    Isn't Lutnick literally the chief architect of Trump's tariff policy? I can hardly imagine anybody more responsible for creating this outcome besides Trump himself, who would presumably have appointed somebody else if Lutnick hadn't been available. > I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else. Given the above, you really don't think Lutnick had a "better view" of the likely outcomes and timelines, including the Trump admin's planned and gamed out responses to certain outcomes, than the average Joe on the street? I think that's extremely, uh, naive.
    • pauldelany 8mo ago
      Yes, he is: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a-global-banking-billionaire-became-trumps-tariff-champion/ https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a... https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-trade-team/ https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr... https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/howard-lutnick-trump-tariffs-september-11-1.7475499 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/howard-lutnick-trump-tariffs-s...
  • mrguyorama 8mo ago
    Who cares who came up with the illegal tariff implementation, the point is that a member of the government profited off of their own administration's incompetence. It's obscene. I don't care whether a law was broken or not. You want to profit from government incompetence? Stop being part of the government then.
• throw_rust 8mo ago
  I fail to see the problem, people voted for this, did they not?
• snark_attack 8mo ago
  [dead]
• hedora 8mo ago
  If there was any justice at all left in this country, a class action lawsuit with the entire US population as the class would arrange for the tariff refunds to go to individuals, not companies. That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.
• willmadden 8mo ago
  What they sold isn't a security regulated by the SEC. There is no "insider trading". There aren't enough facts to determine if what his sons did was ethical and/or legal.
• abustamam 8mo ago
  The CF rabbit hole is wild. Somehow he manages to make a lot of money during tragedies and economic downturns. I don't buy into the conspiracies, but it is quite odd how he always manages to come up on top. https://www.reddit.com/r/911archive/comments/1r5rkk3/howard_lutnicks_evolving_911_story_the_cantor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/911archive/comments/1r5rkk3/howard_...
• ok_dad 8mo ago
  Similar to how Noem gave a contract for 143 million to an 8 day old company with an address at her former political operative’s home. The admin is just here to literally steal tax dollars.
• b112 8mo ago
  Well it's not, but that aside, how would consumers ever get a refund? Show up with a banana peel at a grocery, and say you want a tariff refund for the banana you paid cash for, 6 months ago? There's no tracking for almost all of tariff affected purchases.
  • HWR_14 8mo ago
    Consumers wouldn't. Importers will.
    • b112 8mo ago
      Indeed. And the concept of passing any refund on is just untenable. My example is to highlight how unreasonable such an expectation is. And while this specific tariff situation is silly, and annoying, it's been going on forever. There were cases of tariffs on lumber from Canada, with presidents of all stripes. Some were fought, won in court, and nary a person questioned "where is the refund for the consumer".
  • qingcharles 8mo ago
    FedEx, I believe, have stated they will refund all consumers who paid them the tariffs, which they then paid to the gov. Nothing yet about the fees also incurred by consumers to pay the tariffs, but there are at least two class actions filed already on this subject, IIRC.
  • timmmmmmay 8mo ago
    Grocery stores track their customers very extensively and cash purchases are fairly rare. I'm very confident that Costco, for example, knows everything that every member has bought from them since the tariffs started.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• g8oz 8mo ago
  People are quibbling about the definition of insider trading. I will just say when fortunes are made by those who just happen to be in close proximity to power, it's not good for the country. Kushner is the prime example here.
  • bdangubic 8mo ago
    > when fortunes are made by those who just happen to be in close proximity to power, it's not good for the country When was the last time this wasn't the case? Back in the 1960's maybe? I started following politics around the time I started college - 1993 - and this has been true in my entire "following politics" part of life
• tzs 8mo ago
  > Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing. Even if they hadn't made that bet were consumers going to get anything? The refunds would go to whoever directly paid the tariffs, which will generally be businesses. I doubt that many businesses will go the effort of figuring out how much of any price increases they did while those tariffs were in effect raised the price for each individual customer, and issue refunds for that amount.
  • maxerickson 8mo ago
    B2B stuff will often have the tariff as surcharge rather than rolled into the price.
• pauldelany 8mo ago
  Howard Lutnick was an architect and promoter of Trump's tariff strategy. He was involved in setting it up. 'Set up' being the operative verbiage. https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/howard-lutnick-criticism-trump-tariffs-controversy-us-economy-impact-13876524.html https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/howard-lutnick-criticis... https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-trade-team/ https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr... https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a-global-banking-billionaire-became-trumps-tariff-champion/ https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a...
• tsoukase 8mo ago
  As coming from a semi-corrupt country I can assure you that the Commerce Secretary can have massive access to classified information from any part of the public sector, including any Court. For him all this is one to two telephone calls away. The question is if he has influence in the decisions, which elevates the corruption to the next level. For the nonbelievers: why did only a company led by close relatives of a government member and no other bet on a game that is based on a Court decision?