With great wealth comes great rewards

Howard Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce. Before that he was head of Cantor Fitzgerald, a really big Wall Street firm. He left that job and put his twenty-something son Brandon in charge. Then the tariffs started.

What Cantor Fitzgerald is doing now is buying up whatever tariff debt it can find.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say your company owes the government $100 million in tariffs. Cantor offers to buy the debt for 25 cents on the dollar, so you get $25 million and no debt.

But in the future if the tariffs are found to be illegal the government has to pay a refund, and Cantor gets that ($75 million). It’s all legal, but unethical and reeks of corruption.

Lutnick, of course, has all sorts of influence and insider knowledge over the tariffs, and nobody believes for a second he isn’t talking to his son. So far, they have bought hundreds of millions of dollars of tariff debt.

The courts have started ruling that the tariffs are illegal; how the Supreme Court will rule is anybody’s guess. They usually side with Trump, but they are owned by the billionaire class.

A nice touch is that Lutnick transferred his equity interest in Cantor to a trust fund (his son’s).

When his term is over, a deal is set up where he buys back his interest from Cantor but pays no capital gains tax, per ethics rules.

A tidy savings on the profits.

Paul Donahue

Niskayuna

Trump merely puts on a performance

In 1599, William Shakespeare put quill to paper and composed “As You Like It.”

In Act II Scene VII, the character Jaques says, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women........

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