Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing. Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
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.
Companies don't want to deal with the headache for many things. It's not a given over what time horizon and how much work is involved to get the refund. It's totally sensible to sell the claim for 70 cents on the dollar for example.
The supreme court absolutely hears cases that are obvious. They do it for several reasons - to create clarity, to narrow scope, to set a very clear precedent, and other reasons.
This was a case that split both the liberal and conservative blocs. Obama’s former SG, Neal Katyal, went up there and argued for limiting presidential power over the economy. One of the justices quipped about the irony of Katyal’s major contribution to jurisprudence being revitalization of non-delegation doctrine, which has always been a conservative focus.
If it were close, I think he would have voted the other way. The folks on the court appear extremely inclined to take the other side on things just as a mental exercise, or to be able to write something on the record that they find interesting.
It was close to zero.
There is an argument in about two months' time as to whether or not the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment actually guarantees birthright citizenship in the US. There is no serious legal argument in favor of the interpretation being advanced by the Trump administration, that it does not. And yet here we are.
Also, the SCOTUS is not a criminal court, it is a constitutional court. If a case is heard there, both sides have not agreed on "obvious illegality". That is unsuprising since in general one side (in this case, the administrative branch of the US Government) is being accused of illegal behavior - when it comes to constitutional rather than criminal questions, most parties do not just accept their guilt, but push as far as they can towards exoneration.
Frequently, however to everybody else, the case concerns obvious illegality.
In insurance, you pay [-$10] to avoid a potencial negative risk [-$100].
Here you get money [+$10] instead of waiting for a potencial positive benefit [+$100].
Very slightly related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mortgage
I don’t know enough about the ethics laws to know if it was strictly illegal, but it does create a smell.
Suppose a county engineer has influence on whether oil drilling will be allowed (they don’t make policy but consult those who do), and prior to approval their relatives buy up a lot of land in the area. That engineer may not have been the deciding factor, but it seems like it runs afoul of ethics laws/standards.
Did they know it was illegal? Any more than say, the Biden administration "knew" that forgiving student loans were illegal?
it doesnt have to be black and white. they knew enough to spin up a business that when it is overturned they could make money... which means they knew the probability was high.
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
It was damaging.
In 2015.
And then for a bit between 2021 and 2024.
Now it's not again.
You have to enforce these sorts of gentlemen's agreements. Just saying "it's damaging" isn't enough to actually make it damaging.
In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
Where is that? Who approved his request?
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
Uh, essentially betting against a policy your former head put in place isn't a typical thing?
You would absolutely steer clear of this. There's plenty of other things they could be doing, no?
Just to make the point. This is such a typical thing investment banks do, that (especially) they are the ones doing it and nobody else?
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.
There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.
But the supreme court is a separate branch of government from the executive, so the analogy doesn't really hold. To claim otherwise would require Lutnick playing some 4d chess where he's publicly pro tariffs, but secretly anti-tariffs and was sandbagging the government's legal defense (can he even do that?), all the while not tipping Trump or the MAGA base off for being disloyal.
(and/or have an explicit approval workflow that effectively does the above).
Why?
The deal stinks because Cantor bet against the administration that its former head is a part of, and against the signature policy of the president its former head serves.
I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information? It seems the same as a corporate insider dumping stock because a company lawyer privately told them "we're definitely going to lose this case".
And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.
Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.
The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.
But expert advice, even if material, is not the same as insider information.
If you go to a random lawyer in Wyoming and ask them to write "expert opinion" then what you'll get would probably be something standard, written by a junior associate, or maybe even produced by ChatGPT.
If the White House orders "expert opinion" on potential Supreme Court ruling then the chances are that the expert asked to prepare it is someone who plays golf with some of the SCOTUS judges.
So those two "expert opinions" might not bear the same weight.
It's a public arena on things like this. I don't think even the justices themselves have "material inside information" until a little ways through the hearing, and people are trying to predict the outcome well before that. On the surface that might sound absurd, but it isn't.
Why not?
(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)
And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)
Was the hypothetical "White House advisory memo" produced using any proprietary information? If not, why should it be any different than if I hired a bunch of top lawyers to produce a private report for me?
In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...
This is a strong case that there ought not to be any such thing as a secret opinion or confidential advice from the White House OLC - and I agree with that opinion if that's what you're saying.
But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
I'm not saying this whole thing wasn't a total scumbag move - it was - but it's not quite the same crime as insider trading.
The legal opinion itself was non public? If they couldn't use that they would first have to put up the money to pay the legal fees to find out how likely their bet was to pay off.
And just to put this in writing too, I would be shocked if we don't find out later that a lot of the volatility was a way for a few people to make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money when there's more volatility. So all the flip flopping on tariffs yes/no might very well be manipulating markets...
You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.
We have no reason to believe that if such a memo exists it was used improperly, but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.
BTW you've got an extra Justice on the Supreme Court. Should be 6-3, not 7-3.
There was no such memo because OLC isn’t full of dummies. Maybe the talking heads on CNN said the case against the tariffs was a slam dunk, but you don’t get split courts at multiple levels for cases that are slam dunks.
yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject. It would have been completely insane if the white house staff didn't believe the same. So I guess I'm actually surprised at the white house staff believing what everybody else did?
That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....
You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.
But members of the government being able to trade on matters of government policy is exactly how government corruption works. Previous administrations understood this was important to prevent (Carter putting his peanut farm in a blind trust, the Bush's did the same) but now Trump has made clear corruption is just totally fine (why else become president or a government official).
It stole money from consumers in the form of illegal tariffs, then refunded the money to people with no obvious relationship to the victims.
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
In this case X was the tariffs. You are out of your depth.
If a fraction of the level of skepticism these people applied to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton were applied to Trump and his cronies, they'd be demanding impeachment.
Shall we forget the shitcoin rugpull Trump has used to launder billions from foreign leaders?
The transparent bribes he's taken to his political org that have resulted in pardons for smuggler, drug lords and murderers?
The $200 million dollar contract Kristi Noem funneled to a company an operative of her for "marketing", formed days before the contract was awarded?
The secretary of labor using funds to throw herself a lavish birthday party and travel around the country?
Kash Patel flying himself and his girlfriend around on an FBI jet with an expensive security detail so they can party?
The fact that insiders are openly insider trading in crypto, the stock market, and these betting markets (both the illegal Venezuela and Iran invasions had huge extremely suspicious bets right before actions were taken).
This barely scratched the surface of this term alone. These fascists are so transparently corrupt.
If this was so obvious, wouldn't there have been more competitors pushing down the value of it?
Is there any proof he didn't have insider information? With this administration + court, it's rare when some sort of fraud, bribes, or protection money payments aren't at play.
One might argue it should fall under a different technical label, but whatever label one uses (A) it stinks of corruption and (B) it's only the tip of the iceberg.
People entrusted with government authority to do work for the public shouldn't be personally profiting from how they decide to wield that authority. Imagine a policeman that arrests people while placing bets about how long that person will be jailed, what they'll be charged with, or whether they'll be convicted.
The objection that "it's unfair, they know something other bettors don't" occurs first not because it's the biggest issue, but because it's easier to prove.
The bigger problem is making improper decisions with their work-powers in order to personally profit, a trust and separation which they've already destroyed by placing the bets in the first place.
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-...
- 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.
"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-...
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.
SCOTUS largely functions as a post-facto legitimization machine for those that appoint them. They do not interpret the constitution so much as serve as god-people in funny costumes that provide the cultural message from god that the actions of their political persuasion were legal (or illegal) even in cases where a historical and literal reading of the constitution would otherwise find you with no way to find them legitimate if not for man in black robe say so.
------ re: "2 of 3" below due to throttling--------
A vote to refund here was not a vote against the admin, it was a vote to simplify the laundering of the tax. It was a vote to put the money straight into the coffers of admin insiders like Lutnick et al financial engineering scheme. Meanhwile it did not invalidate tariffs, as Trump immediately pivoted to a different tariff structure.
As a second note, the profit here was actually not dependent nearly as much on the vote as the insider information. The fact the best any rebuttal can come up with is the vote might have been 'wrong' is basically totally defaulting to the insider trading element which means you are totally yielding the underlying premise.
That is, the only 'vote' against the admin in this case would be one that went against their insider information. Failure to note this is how the justices and admin have swindled you and the public. The very posing of this comment of rayiner et al reveals how they tricked you.
Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.
Oh wait...
The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these justices.
You keep changing what you are saying.
(2) Is that SCOTUS functions as a legitimization process
(3) Is that de-legitimizing this particular tariff regime, while trump immediately pivots to a new tariff, is a best case scenario for the admin insiders as it lets them profit immensely from refund corruption while still pivoting immediately to a new tariff. The vote was one in favor of the Trump insiders.
(4) It is hilarious that the best counter your argument et al includes is just glossing over the insider aspect, which means you're just yielding the entire underpinning to this thread to me, which is more than enough to satisfy the premise on its own even if you reject this particular vote as being in the service of the admin insiders.
Of course, if you just smugly quote half of what I said and keep ping ponging one side or the other when I study the other half, citing muh changed argument, then you can play this fraudulent argument that pretends I "changed" what I said. This reveals your argument as a deliberate fraud so I will leave you the last word to lie further to the ether, rest assured I will not read whatever non-sense follows.
You can blame RBG for one of those. It fascinates me that Biden made the same mistake RBG did, I’ll always wonder how different the would would be if she had stepped down and the democratic party had held a real primary.
I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
It's unfortunate how it went, but I respect her decision.
I can buy that.
You guys should have nominated Amy Klobuchar as VP so you had a credible backup when it became apparent that Biden was too old to run again. That’s a mistake that’s going to continue holding you back, since Biden made South Carolina the first primary state: https://www.masslive.com/politics/2025/06/2028-dem-frontrunn....
As Obama said, “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
Ofcourse most American politicians are pathetic losers who immediately cave but judges are generally people who are used to dealing with thugs.
And if you ever wondered why judges cannot be fired by the Executive branch now you know.
Given that the 2/3 justices appointed by Trump voted against the tariffs, what's the implication here? That Trump deliberately picked anti-tariff justices just so he can engage in a rube goldberg plan to enact tariffs, buy tariff refunds on the cheap, and then have them revoked?
Any vote towards what the insider information pointed to was a vote 'for' the admin as they had financially engineered their winnings based on that. And meanwhile Trump immediately turned to a new tariff structure. The vote they gave was the strongest vote in favor of the admin insiders they could have given, and meanwhile didn't actually stop Trump from continuing on with the scheme.
They were nominated in Trump's first term, which had a very qualitatively different cabinet assembled around Trump, one much less focused on sycophancy and pleasing Trump. I don't think anybody in Trump's cabinet 6 years ago was thinking about the potential powers a president had in being able to change tariffs based on how he felt waking up in the morning, much less interrogation of judicial candidates based on how willing they were to go along with that.
This was a very complex decision that ideologically divided the courts.
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.
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!).
“ House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort...
I frankly do not understand your argument: "Some policymakers are sleazy (yes?), so it should be fine for all of them to leverage influence/access into personal gain" (?!)
This does not make sense to me.
What partially non-public information did he have? Be specific.
How would I know? I'm neither Lutnick nor his son.
My point is that there is an extremely obvious conflict of interest here. If your family business is directly affected by decisions and information of the public office that you hold, then the very obvious risk is that you are going favor official decisions that help your business (possibly to the detriment of the majority), and that you leverage non-public information for personal gain.
For this specific case, insider knowledge could be a precise understanding on the "shakiness" of the initial tariffs combined with an insider picture of ongoing legal cases against them (progress and expected success rate).
I'm not saying that Lutnick & sons comitted some kind of crime, but if you let your family business overlap with your public office this much, then the resulting scrutiny is more than justified, and you could make a strong point that such a situation should be avoided in the first place.
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-ame...
[2]: https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2022877480516813077
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/howard-lutni...
The admin is just here to literally steal tax dollars.
> Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.
Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.
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.
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.
Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.
Like starting wars and creating tarrifs. He could have just broke the law again
I mean, look, there's plenty of conflicts of interest, and stuff that sure looks like graft, and claims of people making insane amounts of money off of stuff. But in this case, the commerce secretary's options were 1) do the tariffs or 2) get fired. Minion? Sure. Minion without the self-respect or ethics to quit when they were being told to do unconstitutional stuff? Also sure. Pushing these policies, as though they had agency in the matter? No.
Don't sell your right to your tariff refund is one of those things that sounds good in principle, but falls apart when you apply some sense to it.
No? You also do it for certainly. "One bird in hand beats two in the bush" and all that. You see this occurring outside of tariff refunds, with businesses selling debts to debt collectors for pennies on the dollar, or bond holders selling high risk bonds (eg. Argentina) for steep discounts.
I'm sure there are a few exceptional cases, but that doesn't seem to me like it would be the typical cases. A company needing to pay $100 in tariffs but then the $20 of cash infusion being the thing that saves the day seems rather unlikely.
I'd say it's more likely this was a profit center to more companies than it was a life line. As in they passed the tariff down to their consumers, and also collected the 20% as a cash payment to juice the bottom line.
More common though would be simply a way to help defray some costs and provide certainty.
If you think this is smart then you may as well go around clubbing old ladies over their heads, as long as you don't get caught it's like free money right?
The alternative is not to forbid companies from selling those rights, the alternative is to undo this deal and pay the whole amount back to those that originally forked it over and who needed to sell these 'rights' in order to keep their companies alive.
Where's the extortion? The "it's a nice shop you got there..." racket only works if you can strongly influence whether the damages occur (ie. you tell your goons to attack the shop, or not). So far as I can tell however, that's not the case, because Trump wanted the tariffs to stay, and was sad that they got revoked. Going back to the mob analogy, it would be like if the mob boss asked for protection money, the goons didn't damage the shop, the mob boss was sad that the shop didn't get damaged, and then went to to find some other way to damage the shop (ie. section 122 tariffs).
Anyway, you want figures, well, here are some figures:
https://marketrealist.com/why-did-700-bu/
I'm sure there are other sources, better ones, worse ones but they all tell roughly the same story: willy nilly tarrifs have a negative effect on one's ability to operate a business. Businesses like predictable, stable climates to operate in.
For example, NCR (National Cash Register) used to have their sales people "accidentally" break competitive machines (dropping them on the floor was common -- these were old precision mechanical adders), then offer an NCR machine as a "free" replacement.
You could argue this wasn't extortion. What are the damages? The replacement machine was higher value, so the shop was "made whole", and was only temporarily without a cash register. Of course, the competitor got screwed out of support contracts + renewal, and it was made very clear to the stores they had to play ball. (Unless they wanted to buy a replacement, and watch it also get smashed.)
It's the same with the tariffs:
Adopt a bunch of Trump dictated policies, or they steal your money (the mechanism is not providing exemptions). Later, they "refund" the payments (so, no further court action), but somehow the money does not go back to the people that it came from.
Ignoring the businesses that sold their rights to collect, all sorts of prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The consumers that are paying the increased amounts at retail are not going to see a cent of this settlement. Where is my check?
Also, it's unclear how many Supreme Court justices changed their votes because of the sold rights to collect refunds. The company involved gave a lot of money to Trump and conservative campaigns, and many of the justices are in his pocket. It's also unclear if they bribed the justices directly, since that's not public data.
On top of that, when these "securities" were sold, it could have been made clear that they would come with favoritism in the future. Did businesses that paid up get special exemptions? Were they threatened with intimidation that then didn't happen because they sold the rights?
All of the above is standard practice with this administration. They had the benefit of the doubt, but burned through it years ago.
It takes a fair amount of money to take a court case to the Supreme Court. You can pay it all (and still maybe lose), or you can let the law firm have part of what you win. This happens all the time in the US legal system. It's not extortion; it's essentially venture funding by the law firm. (Yes, I'm aware of the pattern in the previous sentence, but I'm in fact a human, and not even LLM-assisted.) If the company doesn't want to play that way, they don't have to. They can pay the full cost of the lawsuit themselves.
https://thehedgefundjournal.com/the-emerging-market-for-liti...
Yes, because tariffs, like all taxes in the USA, are not imposed on individual people or entities. They’re on industries and specific materials.
If a company truly thought the chance of winning was low and needed the money now, they would pick the best offer. Regardless of who is making it.
Yes, I know this isn't the first time this has happened, and that people likewise benefit from connections to governments led by other political parties. Those instances are also bad!
This was the point of the tariffs, wasn't it? The White House now has a $130B slush fund to distribute more or less however they want, with no accountability because accountability is by-design impossible. Sure maybe half of it will go where it ought to as a fig leaf, but a very large chunk of that cash will be making its way to Trump's loyalty crew.
The government knows exactly who paid what in duties, otherwise they couldn't tell if you were trying to avoid duties.
So they know exactly who to pay back and how much.
No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties. There's going to be a whole lot of Trump toadies & business owners in the chain, siphoning cash from refunds before they work their way back to the people who actually paid them. And that's not even getting into the open corruption & fraud that will be happening as part of this as well.
The entity that handed over the money to the government is the entity that paid the duties, and is the one the government must refund.
If an entity has passed those costs on does not change that, and does not turn the 130B into a slush fund.
However I agree that consumers will be likely be royally screwed by this debacle, that much was obvious from the start.
In reality, half of the funds will go to that. Maybe even some tiny portion of it will genuinely make its way back to the people who actually paid the duties. This is the fig leaf to which I referred. The other half will go to Trump toadies in the form of "mistakes," fraud, corruption, skimming, unclaimed funds, etc. This is the slush fund to which I referred.
In the end, all of it is going to Trump toadies. It's a $130B transfer of wealth to Trump's financial backers.
You agreed with your supplier on a price. You paid it.
Doesn’t matter that part of the price was tariffs or component costs or labor. Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact. These things are entirely immaterial to the meeting of the minds when you execute the contract for sale.
The only moderately fuzzy case is going to be if there is an outright line item for “tariff charge” - I always thought companies were being a bit reckless explicitly adding these as line items due to this exact uncertainty. Very few companies are going to have a perfect 1:1 ratio here so there is some definite business risk in doing so.
And no, not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies” - that’s an absurd claim on its face. The ones I know hurt the most and nearly put out of business due to needing to raise prices certainly were not. And there is zero way they could afford refunding at a 1:1 ratio now.
It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax, not the middleman who ferried it from here to there. The unclear method for how to accomplish this is where the grift will be coming in.
> not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies”
I did not claim this. I claimed most of the money that will be refunded will go to Trump toadies.
That would require most of the money collected being from trump toadies to begin with. Anyone that regularly imports goods as a matter of business will also be requesting their refunds. Only a tiny fraction sold their rights.
> It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax.
The entity that paid the tax was the one that wrote the check to the federal government. They chose to (or not) pass all or a portion of those costs down to their customer. The customer in the end chose to purchase the goods or not.
If your landlord charges you $100/mo more in rent due to a property tax that was later reassessed due to a mistake, they are under no legal obligation to refund you that money. You chose to rent at the higher price.
Simply put: Your recourse was at the time of transaction. After that it’s no longer your money. Plenty of companies get refunded errant taxes paid years later due to law being misapplied or even found outright illegal. This is no different.
The only marginally interesting legal question here is going to be the companies that separated it out as a line item. I imagine this will be roughly as enforceable as “fuel surcharges” are on airline tickets - where the surcharge has nothing to do with the actual real time cost of Jet fuel. It will likely devolve all the way down to specific clauses in contracts, most of which will not cover this to start with. So it may as well be a “I’m wearing black socks today” tax as a line item would be my guess. Very interested in the first few test cases though!
These illegal taxes weren't only on optional goods. I couldn't opt out of buying everything for a full year. I disagree that it's OK for the government to force everyone in the country to give a $130B gift to business owners via an illegal action, the vast majority of which will be going straight to the wealthiest companies & people, and/or Trump's personal supporters. It's just straight-up theft.
Or would you trust someone on advising you, that has a pretty huge financial interest in proposing you policies that will fail because they are illegal?
So I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Why not replace the I.R.S. with an External Revenue Service, which will collect tariffs and other levies from foreign sources instead of taxing citizens?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/donald-trumps-...
The fact that businesses were put in a position to make this choice is outrageous in the first place.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone wins except granny.
To be fair, I think some companies didn't raise prices because they thought they would be overturned.
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
It's not insider trading that they acted on that consensus.
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.
Or just pay attention to the oral arguments. The justices seemed very skeptical of the Trump administration, and betting markets reacted accordingly.
They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.
This would have been the case no mattern what.
Correct.
“Trump’s buddy’s son offers 20c/$” does not seem like a terrible deal for getting your money out.
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_...
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.
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.
...assuming they held those rights on their books, rather than selling it off to other hedge funds.
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/howard-lutnick-criticis...
https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a...