alt Hacker NewsCantor 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 bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value on the expectation that it'd be struck down by the courts.
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.
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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.
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?
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-...
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
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.
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.
This assumes companies would have refunded consumers.
Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-criticis...
https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a...
This is collusion between the offices of POTUS, SCOTUS, and corporate friends that looks like insider trading, from a zoomed in lens.
For it to be insider trading, he would have had to have access to private information from the Supreme Court, which seems unlikely.
> while, of course, consumers get nothing
This would have been the case no mattern what.
> Now if this isn't insider trading [...], I don't know what is.
Correct.
I believe, with huge disappointment, that this level of corruption has been normalised in this administration and that nothing will come out of this.
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_...
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.
I fail to see the problem, people voted for this, did they not?
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-ame...
[2]: https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2022877480516813077
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/howard-lutni...
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.
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.
> ...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.
>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.
But they are sticking it to the libs, so it’s all worth it?
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.
That's some third-world shit.
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.
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.
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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-...