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 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.
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.”
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".
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.
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.
He presumably did not have access to the court's opinion before it was released, but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced ("Mr. President this is illegal and very likely to be overturned by the courts"), and he obviously had access to the entire federal legal team during the court cases.
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".
>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?
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?
Because this hypothetical memo was paid for by our tax dollars, not your own private money! That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain. Using it for your own gain would be theft from the American public.
In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...
> That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain.
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.
Yes, because it was produced by the same people that are going to argue the case in court. You can hire the best lawyers in the world but they will still have to speculate on what arguments the government is going to make, and whether there are confidential communications showing evidence that there was some consistent rational justification for the tariffs and not just the president's public posts that leader X was mean to him on the phone so he imposed a tariff.
I understand your position but I disagree. If I were trying to predict whether the government is going to win in court, I think reading what the government's own lawyers think about the case would be valuable. If it were possible to pay for this I think people would, that's why I think it is material. Some random person's opinion is not relevant information, but the opinion of people directly involved in a case is.
That's fine, to each their own on trying to make predictions. I did try to predict it, did it accurately (along with many others, this wasn't the hardest thing ever), and wouldn't have had any interest in any internal memo.
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.
You’re piling speculation on speculation. First of all, there was no such memo saying the tariffs were “very likely to be overturned.” The Supreme Court decision was 7-3, with two Bush appointees voting to uphold the tariffs. The appellate court decision was 7-4, with two Obama appointees and two Bush appointees dissenting. Second of all, there is no evidence that this legal analysis was leaked to Cantor.
Who cares? The Treasury Secretary shouldn't have family profiting off fixing illegal policy the Treasury Secretary enacted. That should never happen. It is wrong, it doesn't explicitly spelled out.
In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging. People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not. The assumption is that simply by being close to a source of information, you are compromised. The same restrictions should apply to those close to government. By being family, he is compromised by default.
Wrong. People who work in finance (I spent years there) are allowed to trade stocks their company is trading. There is a process to get approval. The equities division at an IB might be trading every single name in the S&P500. If you sit in the investment banking division and that division isn't doing anything related to a name, you are likely to get approval.
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.
>People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not
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.
Insurance company deal: if you pay us $X now, and then Y happens, we will make you whole, even though that cost may very well exceed $X.
Lutnick deal: we pay you $X' now, and if Y' happens, we collect everything which will substantively exceed $X'.
This is not insurance, its closer to shorting stocks.
Oh, one other thing: the insurance company has essentially nothing to do with Y at all, in the sense that they have no control over Y and generally speaking no involvement in it (think: accidents, floods, storms, fires). By contrast Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States of America.
That's not really the comparable here, you need to find a person with vested interest in the outcome of the student loan forgiveness program.* Someone that was working within the agency responsible for the program and actively was in the discussions where the legality was discussed. Then made a scheme to financially get rewarded. Not only that used his son as a way to create the illusion of separation.
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
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.
It wasn’t “close to zero.” The Supreme Court split 6-3, with two Trump appointees voting against him. And the Federal Circuit, which is the most boring appellate court and not political at all, split 7-4, with two democratic appointees and two republican appointees voting to uphold the tariffs.
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.
Did you read the ruling? Read Clarence Thomas's dissent. It's not clear if he actually thinks what he wrote, or he just voted that way so he could write a dissent and make a strange legal point which probably doesn't carry water but sort of maybe could one day maybe.
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.
Did you read the ruling? And the appellate court decision below?
Thomas joined fully with Kavanaugh’s dissent. He wrote separately to articulate his view of the scope of non-delegation doctrine. He pointed out tariffs and taxes are different, in that tariffs implicate international relations, which is primarily within the province of the president. His analysis is extremely cogent. I was actually talking with my wife (we’re both Fed Soc people) that the administration should have pushed that angle much harder in the argument.
Did you read the Federal Circuit en banc decision? You don’t get two Obama appointees to vote in favor of the Trump’s administrations unprecedented tariffs when the legal issue “isn’t close.”
And, surely you understand that many see using the due process clause to make his argument was a stretch. Just saying "his analysis is extremely cogent" doesn't make it so.
I think the issue is that someone working in public office had influence to affect that probability, and their relatives stood to gain from it.
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.
They weren't buying insurance. There's no insurance payout for the companies. They got a small amount of money in hand, and lost the chance to reclaim any of the tariff refund. That isn't insurance.
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.
> And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.
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.
It’s sleazy because Lutnick’s son bet against the administration Lutnick was in, and against one of Trump’s signature policies. I’d be furious if I was Trump.
> 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.
If this was so obvious, wouldn't there have been more competitors pushing down the value of it?
The people selling the debt thought there was a ~ 20% chance the money would be collected.
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.
A lot. If you remember all the tariff announcements in the first months of 2025, the stock market tanked and it was an easy buy. The market then reasonably quickly realized many of these tariffs weren't going to persist. The payoff was fast, and the reason you didn't see a massive uptick in the market when the ruling came out was because it was already priced in at that point.
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
What’s happening is that the deal stinks, and people aren’t precisely analyzing exactly why it stinks so they’re just using it to confirm their priors.
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.
It's not insider trading, but surely it's a conflict of interesting? If you ignore all the specific name calling, isn't it still quite wrong that one minister can financially bet against the administration?
You mean the guy who kept talking about bringing back jobs to US - jobs requiring Americans to screw iPhone parts - wasn't debating in bad faith, like you are doing here? I am shocked, I tell you. I am really shocked.
The mental gymnastics people are performing in order to convince themselves that this isn't the most corrupt administration the US has seen in modern history is staggering.
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.
Technically it might not be "insider trading" since most information (we assume) was public knowledge.
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).
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.""
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.
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.
.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs? Even FDR knew the 'separation' was a farce, that's how he magically got the court to go along with progressive programs they prior didn't support, after the 'Switch in time that saved nine.'
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.
> what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?
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.
>.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?
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?
Trump can profit either way, the key is the insider knowledge to bet for or against them. Admin insiders financially engineered where they profited from refunds.
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.
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.
I can't blame Ginsurg. She was still capable of performing her duties even at the end. She resisted an overtly political retirement and it wasn't even clear if a compatible replacement would be confirmed even if she did retire early.
It's unfortunate how it went, but I respect her decision.
> I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
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.”
> .... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?
Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.
I don't see how a vote against is a vote against the administration. The whole point here is their corruption machine profited more off the justices voting against the tariff and for refunds. The tariffs were a mechanism to feign a tax for public purpose but then 'refund' them turning it into a tax to private business and Lutnick's financial engineering. Funneling the money straight into corrupt private enterprise via 'refund' is even easier for Trump than having to launder it through public coffers.
The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these 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.
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.
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.
I'm shocked you can't see how this is a potential conflict of interest. You don't need to know the exact outcome of the SC decision to have confidence that things will land in your favor. There are certainly all kinds of high level discussions with legal experts in the White House that could have hinted this outcome as likely. The real question is whether there's any personal involvement still with Cantor or this was something launched without influence. If there was influence though, there will of course be denials and bold-face lying (just like with the Epstein involvement).
You don't need a crystal ball to understand a conservative supreme court would require the government to refund what amounts to an illegal tax on American businesses. If you stick your hand into a fire you don't need to speculate as to whether you'll get burned.
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?
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!).
> 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.
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" (?!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
It's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.
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.
How is it extortion? They could have gotten a different deal from anybody else or no deal at all. Nobody was twisting there arm or forcing them to deal with this one company to sell their tariff claims.
If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer? Or is there a risk and a benefit to taking the one that’s tied to the administration? (And frankly, can you even be certain either way?) This kind of conflict (even the appearance of this kind of conflict) is why we generally don’t want government officials or their families to be profiting directly off the policies they oversee. It is at best unseemly, and that’s being kind.
> If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer?
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.
This is basically the government doing a protection racket. I swear, the amount of neoliberals in here lauding the move is a recession indicator. Did we all forget what corruption is?
Self-dealing by someone connected to the state, yes. Extortion, no.
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.
>It's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.
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).
You have to present figures when you're arguing the hard-to-prove side of something not when it's plain obvious that business are not in a position to deal with such shocks in the market without having to reach for capital. This is not normal. Typical operating margins of business is anywhere from 5 to 20% with outliers in the digital domain but that's not the part that we are talking about here.
Anyway, you want figures, well, here are some figures:
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.
There’s a long way from businesses like predictable stable climates (and that ship has long sailed) and business won’t survive. There’s no reason to believe the latter is true.
Those are a sunk cost at this point though. The business likely is better off having sold and got the money now - vs risking they will never get a refund.
Wasn't the whole point of selling your right to refunds that the initial tariff was so onerous to businesses that they needed a cash injection to stay afloat.
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.
>Wasn't the whole point of selling your right to refunds that the initial tariff was so onerous to businesses that they needed a cash injection to stay afloat.
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.
Is a 20 cent on the dollar or so payment for the new tariff expense really going to save a company that much on the bubble?
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.
I really hope those companies that passed the tariff to consumers are required to refund the increase to those same consumers, regardless of whether they sold their refund or not.
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?
He bragged about it, and certainly didn't spoke out against them
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?
> 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.
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.
The commerce secretary wasn't the one pushing for them in the first place. The president was.
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.
i guess there would be much more initiative for Lutnik not to refund (ignore courts order, or drag them out like in other cases) if no one would have sold their rights to refund.
I don't think anyone is disagreeing it's a shrewd decision by the corporations, just that it shouldn't benefit the Secretary of Commerce. We're a long way from having to put your peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid the perception of corruption.
Imagine instead if the government didn't do the illegal thing in the first place. Or if the supreme court had not intervened on the initial stay of the tariffs to allow them to go into place while the suit proceeded.
The fact that businesses were put in a position to make this choice is outrageous in the first place.
> It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people?
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 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.
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.
> The government knows exactly who paid what in duties
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.
If the government charges the importer $20 and the importer charges me $20, then I am in effect the one who paid the duty. If the refund goes to the importer, and it does not come back to me, then the government and the importer have colluded to rob me of $20. This isn't an accident, the owners of the import companies who will benefit from this theft were almost certainly all Trump supporters.
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.
Maybe I'm naive, but if court orders tariff refunds cannot it also order that the importer must return it to individual buyers? That's only fair, right? Companies don't get to keep the money. If they want to sue government for some extra compensation for their trouble they can do that separately.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Side topic, but this number puts into how crazy it was for trump[0] to go on tariff war against enemies and friends alike. All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.
Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?
$7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!
Masterminds!
…and now they need to refund it.
NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.
[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.
Maybe I don't understand as I'm an outsider, but as per my recent comment on this topic [0], I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.
I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.
Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?
Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.
You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.
Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.
Companies will make far more than 130b off this. There's no way they only raised prices just enough to cover the 130b and the labor required for the internal policy changes. This was a justification for price gouging. Which they will not stop doing.
The rest is financed by debt. The theft-class stole the rest from the govt thru debt, and expect the rest of us and the following generations to deal with the fallout while they sit on top of their obscene gobs of cash insulated from the fire they created.
I'm serious. The Trump/MAGA view of foreign policy is that the US sits at the top, we owe friendship to no one. We engage with other nations transactionally, zero sum, with the US always getting more.
I think it's legitimately hard to say. Most Americans know very little about international affairs, and care even less. I think interpreting broad opinion surveys can be fraught.
So, who do you count? everyone? only the informed? only people with strong views? Or do you assume people support the views and actions of the people they voted for?
It's clear that there was no reasoned thought behind the tariff push. Tariffs can work if implemented in a principled way and coupled with a complementary industrial policy to develop critical sectors of the economy.
Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.
The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.
When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?
"Trump brags in Oval Office that his billionaire pals made a killing in stocks after he pulled the plug on tariffs"
> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.
It's unbelievable he's still given any semblance of credence for anything he does. Trump is just palpably stupid. He is bad at absorbing information, he is bad at analytical thinking, he is impatient, vain and rash. Aside from his tenuous legal justification, he never once publicly expressed even a fundamental understanding of the basic mechanics of tariff collection nor what balance of trade actually means. You'd constantly see his proxies on TV just put words in his mouth to bend his foolish policy into some coherent. And we're seeing it again with the attack on Iran. No strategy, no achievable objectives, no comprehension of basic facts on the ground. He's really really really just stupid.
Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point. The courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time. They should have stepped in earlier.
Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….
courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time.
The don't forget about congress. 216 GOP congressional reps voted to handicap congress's ability to halt tariffs. For much of the current session of congress, their calendar wasn't counting days.
read from where? Because over 92% of tariff costs were born by domestic importers. Thats american companies who then offload that tax through higher purchasing costs.
That article doesn't even mention nonresident importers (NRIs). The percentage that are NRIs is not public information but it is believed to have grown during this trade conflict.
What got my attention on this was this HN comment by rstuart4133:
"There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs. For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China. Truly delicious."
Yes, but when the product costs went up to cover their fees who paid that? We did. So the "Importer of Record" will (maybe) get a refund from the government, while also getting the higher prices paid to them from the distributors/consumers.
Yeah, most of us absolutely are not getting our money back.
The importers pay the tariffs, and they might get a refund, but it's unlikely they can distribute the money back to the people who they passed the price increase onto.
Imagine I imported 1 ton of rice and paid the tariff. Then I split that ton of rice into 2000 one pound bags and sold them to two super markets, with a higher price accounting for the tariff. Then one super market decided to absorb the price from their margins and sell it at the same price as before to avoid price shocks. Can I track down the other 1000 purchasers who paid a higher price? Is it even worth it?
Not only can’t you track down the 1,000 rice buyers, you don’t have any legal obligation to, so you 100% wouldn’t. (Not speaking of “you” just the general case of all importers who get refunds).
The other important point is that those 2000 one-pound bags sold, so the market accepted the new higher price. Even after the tariffs are removed, the higher prices are here to stay.
Did they actually raise prices, though? I haven't noticed any significant jumps; my understanding was that they were absorbing (for the most part) the tariffs for the time being, but planned to raise prices in the near future.
These are taxes that businesses have to pay and as a result, they pass on to the consumer.
Larger companies have some room (in some cases) to absorb some of these costs. While smaller companies do not. These can literally put people out of business overnight.
A large cap company I totally dont work at paid 4% of revenue in tariffs last year. Our bonuses were cut in half. I dont have visibility into our customer pricing. It is fucking obscene how stupid this tax is. And all for what? So billionaires can get a bit richer? How did this help us, like at all???
It depends on if one thinks 10-20 percent is significant. Do you cook your own food - some food items are imported during USA winter months and those items went up noticeably, also items that are not grown/harvested in significant quantities in USA went up. The only things I did not see a price increase were US sourced oatmeal, rice and flour, stuff where they are selling stuff that could be from before tariff times. Coffee went up due to bad harvests but the tariffs added to that, and now that harvests are back to normal, prices haven't gone back down commensurately.
I get more or less the same items from the grocery store every week. My grocery store shows me purchases going back a year.
3/9/25 - 45 items - $178.98
3/15/25 - 40 items - $187.13
3/22/25 - 59 items - $315.29
3/29/25 - 45 items - $131.36
...
2/14/25 - 48 items - $238.15
2/21/25 - 17 items - $117.49 (used $45 in coupons from store loyalty points, actual cost $162.49)
2/28/25 - 27 items - $165.27
My grocery bill definitely is feeling it, now is it 100% tariffs, probably not. But research points to it being some what related to tariffs [1,2,3] You'll notice in the most recent shops, I have been trying to skip the non-essentials when possible to keep my bill lower.
I don't have any other regular purchases with history to look back on. It's not like I replace all my consumer electronics every 6 months-1 year. Closest thing that I have to consistent historical data is 3D printer filament, which has gone from $15.99 to $16.99 on Amazon for my brand of choice from April 2025 to my most recent order last week.
There is no probably; we not getting our money back. In fact, any of the money that has been spent in the meantime (say to make up for wealthy tax cuts or to expand military or border funding) we get to pay again!
Congress needs to step up and take its power back from the executive. There was no good reason for the President to have this power in the first place. Why the hell do we have emergency powers to impose tariffs? Is there going to be a fleet of nuclear-armed bombers headed for the USA and the only way to stop them is to impose tariffs? It's ridiculous.
Congress has been gradually handing their power over to the executive for decades. For decades, people have been warning that this was setting up for major abuse if you got a particularly bad president. Well, guess what....
In terms of policy this is a truly massive gift to importing companies. They had to pay massive amounts of tax to import goods. Analysis shows most (but not all) of the tariffs were passed on down the line to consumers of the imported goods or their derivatives.
And now they get it all back! If they can figure out the paperwork. Which I expect most will, because if you import things and pay tariffs, you have to be good at govt paperwork.
Wow. I don’t know what this means. But it’s a huge windfall to a very specific horizontal slice of the economy - cutting across industries and supply chains. Just whoever happened to be doing the importing gets a giant present. So bizarre. Economists will write about this case study for decades.
I'm gonna have a stroke. The Congressional Budget Office found that consumers paid 70-80% of the tariffs, totaling more than $1000 per household. Where is my refund?
Not only that, the companies used the tariff excuse to raise prices which will not come back down even if tariffs are fully off the table. Just like the price inflation during COVID.
Depends on how sticky the prices are. Some things are volatile as hell and swing wildly from week to week, some things are stable until adjusted and then they stay that price for another decade.
Most things are never going to be cheaper than they are today. Some things may be cheaper this time next year but not by more than a few percent at the most.
I just love this idea that corporations just discovered greed during the pandemic and before that had been selflessly dedicated to selling goods for the benefit of mankind at the lowest price they possibly could. Companies always try to maximize prices, and they do that by trying to optimize the price they sell things at to sell as much as they possibly can at the highest price they can get away with. Sometimes you can get more profits by lowering prices and selling more stuff, sometimes by raising prices and selling less stuff. It's a trade off. Prices went up because of a series of demand and supply shocks enabled companies to raise prices. If they had not raised prices, there would have been shortages everywhere.
You did not pay the tariffs. You bore the cost of the tariffs. Those are not the same thing. The refund is due to the party that got the bill for the tariff and paid it-- the importer. What you paid for was for the business not to go bankrupt while this was occurring. If the business wants to refund you for that, they can choose to do so. But you are not owed a refund.
Look you can write the funny numbers in whatever accounting mumbo jumbo you want, but I paid more to cover the cost to the supplier == I paid the tariffs.
I don't think the commenter you are responding too thinks this is a good thing - they are just describing that it is. I read it as just a blunt summary of how absurd this situation is.
This answer is the incarnation of capitalismmaxxing. Economically speaking you're correct - but morally definitely not, companies are for the bigger part not the harmed party here.
In other words: the president can break the law and fuck you over by transferring a nice chunk of your money to big companies, and none of the lawbreakers will be held accountable in any way, and you're not owed a dime in restitution.
In practice, the entities who gave money directly to the US government are the ones who paid the tariff. Those entities should be pressured to refund the consumers, but in practice, that's unlikely.
I (unknowingly) ordered something on Etsy from another country. UPS delivered the items, then sent me a letter requiring I pay the tariff and an extra tariff handling fee. UPS paid the government, so UPS should get their money back from the government, then refund me. I'm not holding my breath.
Economically it is a direct redistribution of wealth. In crisis times, Congress acts swiftly to cure wrongs against corporations. What about this wrong against every single household?
UPS is definitely pocketing most of whatever refund they get. And golly gee gosh what a shocker, the company supports Republicans. I'm afraid you've been robbed.
> ‘Corporate and industry group political action committees have donated more than $44 million directly to the campaigns and leadership PACs of the 147 members of the Sedition Caucus. Companies and trade associations that pledged to suspend donations have given more than $12 million to the campaign and leadership PACs of the Sedition Caucus.
> Koch Industries ($626,500), American Crystal Sugar ($530,000), Home Depot ($525,000), Boeing ($488,000), and UPS ($479,500) have contributed the most money to members of the Sedition Caucus through their corporate PACs.’
> Tomé’s reconciliation with representatives who legitimized Trump’s attempted presidential coup — and who may control Congress after the November midterm elections — shouldn’t surprise us. Trump lavished huge gifts on UPS and Corporate America that have made them richer.”
> The second Trump presidency has the potential to be even more lucrative for UPS, given that the bulk of UPS’s unionized workers are Teamsters and led by prominent Trump ally Sean O’Brien
> UPS is definitely pocketing most of whatever refund they get. And golly gee gosh what a shocker, the company supports Republicans. I'm afraid you've been robbed.
Looks like they've given a pretty similar amount to both parties[1]. UPS charging a specific "Tariff Fee" is bound to have angered Trump.
Clearly, since calculating the individual refunds are impossible, the companies will be broadly discounting products going forward by their effective tariff rate for roughly the time the tariffs were in effect. /s
SCOTUS is entirely to blame for the chaos here, the courts quickly found the tariffs illegal but they used the shadow docket to stay the ruling causing the illegal behavior to continue for a year.
To blame in a second order but this is the admin's work overall, they shouldn't have tried to fund their PACs and pocket this money into their family & friends' bank accounts. Just shows how broken the system is.
The people harmed here were the US public and they are just going to continue to be harmed. The right answer is people go to jail. Until people start going to jail, being disbarred, etc, this will keep happening. This isn't a remedy. This is continuing the cycle.
There was an interesting case in Finland. Finnish customs used to apply a 22% tax (ELV) on top of the car tax for imported used cars from other EU countries. On top of that, Finnish law required VAT to be charged on the car tax itself.
There were multiple court cases and this practice was found unlawful (and actually against EU law). But the government did not issue automatic refunds, and instead requested that people "actively appeal" with some time limits. They also refused to pay interest on the money withheld.
AFAIK, only about 50M Euro was paid back. A lot of funds gathered between 2002–2005 was never returned.
I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.
every single so called "nation state" is in reality just a regime, they ALL do this. They are no different than the mafia. You can choose between so called "don socialist" and "don fiscally-resonsible", yet they are identical twins with a different haircut.
No organisations or regime has ever considered itself illegitimate. The big guys consider smaller guys legitimate or illegitimate, but its just ink on a page.
Finland (and _ALL_ other countries) is an illegitimate regime, collecting its protection money, telling you to pray it does not alter the deal any further
I love that every time one of these threads comes up I am reminded of how little morals the users on this site have; and how they use intellectualism to hide this fact.
None of this matters; this is guaranteed to go to the Supreme Court. Too much money, too much precedent. The only thing being established now is the battleground as the procedure of getting up to the Supreme Court. The actual rulings on the way up to the Supreme Court are of minimal consequence.
As sibling says, the Court very definitely did not order them to refund anything. They could have, and they didn't. The Court knew from the beginning that this was coming back to them.
You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons. Whatever your desired outcome is, none of it matters until this gets to the Supreme Court. Given the nature of money, it doesn't even matter if some higher court refuses to give an injunction against the refunds being issued until after the appeal is considered and some set of refunds goes all the way through... no company that gets any money from a pre-SC refund can really use it until the entire matter is resolved at the SC level.
> As sibling says, the Court very definitely did not order them to refund anything.
> You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons.
I think the government might have a bit of an uphill battle given arguments they have previously made to courts. For example, consider this decision from the US Court of International Trade from 2025-12 [0]:
> However, as the Government notes in its response to Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction here, it “[has] made very clear—both in this case and in related cases—that [it] will not object to the [c]ourt ordering reliquidation of plaintiffs’ entries subject to the challenged IEEPA duties if such duties are found to be unlawful.”
> <snip>
> Judicial estoppel would prevent the Government from taking an inconsistent approach after a final result in V.O.S. [] The Government has emphasized this point itself, citing to Sumecht NA, Inc. v. United States, which holds that “the Government would be judicially estopped from taking a contrary position” regarding a prior representation involving the availability of relief in the form of reliquidation. [] Having convinced this court to accept that importers who paid IEEPA tariffs will be able to receive refunds after reliquidation, and having benefited from the court’s subsequent conclusion that importers will not experience irreparable harm as a consequence of liquidation, the Government cannot later “assume a contrary position” to argue that refunds are not available after liquidation.
> <snip>
> Additionally, the panel in In re Section 301 Cases unanimously agreed—as we do
now—that the USCIT has “the explicit power to order reliquidation and refunds where the government has unlawfully exacted duties.” [] The Government acknowledges that “a decision [to the contrary] would be inconsistent with years of [the court’s] precedent.”
Obviously all this doesn't prevent the government from appealing anyways, but they'll need to get creative to get around their previous representations.
But they didn't say anything about refunding them and you can bet Trump will oppose that and ask the SCOTUS to decide on it. They of course have an option to take their time to render the decision and then just dismiss the case without a comment.
The actual question is if Eaton overstepped his authority in this ruling.
Instead of ruling narrowly that named plaintiffs would get a refund
Eaton expressly said:
"all importers of record" which is all who were subject to the IEEPA duties.
It is unclear if this is lawful.
He didn't have to do this at all. He could stuck with tradition here. He specifies why he did it in this case, but this opens the door.
Also note that he did not open the door to "final liquidations" getting refunds (it is unclear how many tariffs more than 180 days ago were not officially protested).
I wonder if brands will have a "tariff refund" sale. Make everything 20% off until all of the brand's tariff refund is passed on to customers. Of course, this wouldn't help the customers that already paid the tariff but it could be a good marketing ploy.
Much more interesting would be if the tariffs were refunded equally to each person nationwide (interesting in that it very clearly then becomes an income redistribution scheme, even if on a limited basis).
Possibly a refund of about $500 per social security number. Doesn't even have to be in cash, could just directly go towards the social security fund if legislated that way.
Tons of ways to fix this quagmire in a way that's beneficial to people. But it won't happen.
I have a few thousand dollars that I paid to a Chinese manufacturer who then used that money to pay an importer so that I could get my materials hassle free.
Looks like the hassle will now be on the backend...
I work in the customs industry. What you are describing was a common scheme (DDP Incoterms) to evade the tariffs (partially), and there is a carve out of the refunds that explicitly says DDP will not be refunded. So there's s chance you get nothing back.
Also contractually you didn't pay the duties so you wouldn't get refunds.
Wouldn't it be simpler to implement a 'spend-forward scheme' rather than returning? For example, spend that money on research grants and health care. It is returning the money to the people. A man can dream, no?
One thing I don't see mentioned enough with the whole "the consumers paid these tariffs! we should get refunds!"... We "paid" not just in higher prices, but in many layoffs, reduction in working hours, skipped bonuses and raises. Companies that get 'refunds' will have an opportunity to use that money to rehire and repay workers. I'm cynical enough to think that will happen in large measures across the whole country, but I'm hopeful enough to want to see it happen nonetheless.
Delayed refunds won't even start to repair the damage done by bankruptcies triggered by high tariffs, the snowballed cost of tariffs impacting multiple steps in the supply chain, the emotional toll on families and communities having to deal with less money and rising prices. But rehiring and getting some regions and communities back to work might be a step in the right direction.
EXCEPT WE NOW HAVE A 15% GLOBAL TARIFF ONGOING. And a lunatic administration that will fight tooth and nail for years to keep this going as long as possible.
> Companies that get 'refunds' will have an opportunity to use that money to rehire and repay workers.
Why on Earth do you expect a single-time payment with no strings attached to make companies think some market is profitable so they should invest in it?
Unsure where you got that from? If a company that has had to lay off staff and reduce hours because of increase in expenses because of tariffs, then they get a chunk of money back, trying to 'get back' to where you were before - headcount, wages, etc - might be on your mind, and might be possible with a one-time refund of ideally a sizeable portion of your tax. However... we still have extremely high tariffs in place so the effects of higher input prices are still ongoing (and ramped up in some cases).
If our tariff structure went back to, say, October 2024, and companies who'd paid some inordinate tax - forcing layoffs and reductions - got a chunk of that back - and the taxes went back to what they were - there'd likely be some return to hiring and raises as before. But we can't get back to that any time soon with an administration hellbent on extracting as much from us via tariffs as possible.
The American people will be robbed blind and beaten into submission until there is a reason not to. It's that simple. They have NEVER been punished, why would they stop?
I do find it kinda crazy that we had a specific policy surrounding tariffs (Smoot-Hawley) that was in the center of the worst economic collapse in US history.
And now, less than 100 years later we're like "hey let's try that again!"
I don't usually like to get involved in US politics as I'm not American, nor do I live in the US. But I will say this: the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.
Read from that what you will... as a voter, or the POTUS.
Most everything was probably bought with credit/debit cards. The individual records exist. Just using your Amazon etc order history should be dead simple
you would need to prove what part of the amounts you paid were due to tariffs, and which were ordinary price changes. All vendors would need to publish that information, and be honest about it. Don't see it coming.
When Biden's student loan forgiveness program was determined to be illegal (twice) by the Supreme Court, nobody ordered that the recipients give it back.
It's 100% clear, and even if it weren't the government already conceded that the tariffs are refundable to get this far. If the tariffs were not refundable, that would mean that the injury from them is irreparable, and they would have had to be enjoined pending the decision.
Has anyone else noticed this? In our area, it seems in 2025 a lot of local businesses (ie local toy stores, etc) have closed. Presumably tariff pressures hurt (among other affordability issues).
The big players can restructure supply chains. Small businesses can't. The mom and pops seem to suffer.
I'm hoping there can be an infusion of $ into those companies and maybe stimulate a little growth, or at least survival through the Trump years.
Wonder if the companies (who have been mostly passing on the tariffs to the end user) will just add the refunds to their profits or give back in some way
"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.""
... refunded to the importer of record. Not the people the costs were passed to. Essentially turning it retroactively into a tax to private businesses. This is the worst case of all scenarios for the consumer.
I understand the frustration but I don't understand the logic. The businesses who paid the tariffs (who were literally sent an invoice that they paid) should be the ones refunded.
How would the government even be able to determine if a business increased product prices due to tariffs vs other factors, or even if the business increased prices at all? What if the product is a loss leader and the company was fine just eating the expense?
Or what about a nefarious company who manufacturers their stuff in Canada but used "tariffs" as an excuse to increase prices? What would they be refunded from?
Yes, you're almost there, just go one step further. Now you've got a big pile of money and no clear rules on where it should go. Who gets to decide where it will go? Given how this administration operates, where do you think it will go?
> I understand the frustration but I don't understand the logic. The businesses who paid the tariffs (who were literally sent an invoice that they paid) should be the ones refunded.
So if I'm the owner of Uncle Billy Bobs Autoparts and I ship from Madeupcountry. I billed you $500 extra for some new car part. The US government refunds me on the tariffs they charged me to import my product to you, and now your taxes is going into my refund. Who wins in this scenario? They're effectively giving every country a free bonus. I wouldn't be surprised if some people got scammed by the tariffs by being overcharged.
There's no serious paper trail to any of this to meaningfully return lost revenue to the American consumer, I would rather not waste tax dollars on refunds.
I guess the only "winners" are maybe businesses that didn't pass on the revenue loss on to the consumer? But how do you even correctly refund those businesses?
I'm okay with that, though I don't think most of my receipts highlight how much went into a tariff. Maybe for very specific purchases it did, but for most things I've bought over the past year there's no real way to gauge this.
Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customer cost, it seems pretty impractical to determine who is due a refund - end users or businesses. Or the logistics of refunds to customers.
One possibility would be for businesses to return the fraction of the tariff paid by customers to future customers by offering the items affected with a negative tax until the refund is used up.
"Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customer cost…"
Ha ha, that's a good one. I have yet to hear about reduced profits anywhere. Instead, as I said in another comment, I have actual physical receipts with the additional tariff cost (itemized!) in a pile on my workshop (which I'll never see refunded).
> Instead, as I said in another comment, I have actual physical receipts with the additional tariff cost (itemized!) in a pile on my workshop (which I'll never see refunded).
You could ask for a tariff refund from those suppliers.
If the amounts are under the limit you might sue the company who cut those invoices in small claims court for the amounts of the tariff line items on the invoices.
The invoices give you slam dunk evidence that you paid that amount in tariffs, and the supreme court decision says the payment was illegally collected, so seems like an easy win for you.
> Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customer
As someone who prices and sells labor and material for a living, nobody ate increased tariffs. They were passed along to the ultimate consumer of the tariffed product. Everyone was facing the same tariffs so they’re all incentivized to pass the cost along, line iteming the tariffs on the invoice would make it abundantly clear. I passed along all increased costs with a note on my proposal that said “Any and all additional tariffs will be paid for by the customer.”
Maybe this will finally be the impetus for the US to go for a VAT? Hell if we get a carbon based border adjustment tax out of this like people were talking about in Trump’s first term this might be a case of broken clocks.
One thing that should happen moving forward, whether we keep tariffs in one way or the other, we need consumer protection laws. I assume companies abused the "oh yeah you owe us for the tariffs" as a way to overcharge consumers. I think additional costs driven by tariffs should be 100% spelled out to the consumer next to where you're shown the tax amount. This should allow for auditing later if companies overcharge. It also would make "refunding" more reasonable, since you could show a receipt if technically you paid for a tariff, otherwise, if the company swallows it, they would show the amount but 'discount' or 'omit' it as something they are choosing to pay for. Without a paper trail I don't see how refunding any of this is feasible.
> refunded to the importer of record. Not the people the costs were passed to
I mean the importers were the ones who paid the duties. It's not a given they passed it on, and if it was then in many cases it was spread out. That is importer paid for one container of items, which in turn got sold to individuals which the government has no record of.
If you ordered delivery by say FedEx and they paid the duty and passed it on to you, you should have a reasonable case to get it refunded from FedEx when they get the money back. Ideally they handle it automatically since they have all the necessary details.
For manufacturing companies it's less clear, as some might have swallowed all or some of the duties, and multiple components might have been affected by different rates etc.
Will be interesting to see how companies who passed it on will handle this, given it's a massive PITA to do anything but screw over their customers.
1. Illegal tariffs made
2. Companies pay tariffs
3. Companies sell goods with tariff passed on
4. tariffs deemed illegal
5. companies get refunds on tariffs
6. COMPANIES KEEP TARIFFS
7. The customers get fucked.
You could point out the inconsistency, but I really think the cognitive dissonance of constant and pervasive hypocrisy is the point. Truth is whatever the party tells you today, and we have always been at war with EastAsia.
Every single proposal for a national sales tax, consumption tax, or 'flat' tax put forward by the right has been shown over and over again to not be regressive - usually through the implementation of prebates (literally a check written to lower income people every year/quarter to cover a portion of the taxes they will pay).
Whether or not these schemes would work is debatable, but to claim that they show an MO of regressive taxes is just false.
It's a smart play for a flat tax. Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax. It's very much aligned with conservative view points on income tax and it's progressive nature.
I don't necessarily disagree, a federal sales tax / VAT could make sense. But so far all it's been is conflicting objectives for tariffs: eliminating income tax, trade deal negotiations, and bringing jobs back. I don't think you can have all three of those simultaneously.
There is absolutely nothing "smart" about anything being done by this incompetent administration of criminals, rapists and self-dealing grifters. They're just flailing around after everything is turning to shit, going from distraction to distraction.
>Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax.
The US government generates $2.5 trillion dollars on just individual income taxes.
The US has about $3.4 trillion dollars worth of imports.
Explain how this makes makes any sense? It's laughable mathematical fantasy to imagine tariffs even denting the deficit, much less eliminating other revenue sources.
The US is a massive economic basket case -- it is basically an economically (aside from being morally) bankrupt country -- and I honestly don't even see a way out of it at this point. I guess just start some wars and try to steal some countries?
Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
My "smart play" wasn't on the merits of idea, largely the game theory aspect of moving forward to their policy goals after decades of having no traction. It's a unique idea, policy wise. Don't know if it will be effective. Neither do you.
Sadly I'm not. I'm objectively stating facts. This criminal cabal of spectacularly incompetent clowns is absolutely ransacking the final days of an empire. It is astonishing how Americans are unaware of this.
>Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
The US ran a $2.3 trillion dollar deficit over the last 12 months, and spending has gone absolutely wild. At the same time it's handing out massive tax cuts to corporations, and has absolutely no path to get back on track. Quite the opposite, the Trump cabal is basically making it impossible to get back on track. Which is why they're looting everything they can as quickly as they can.
>Neither do you.
Yes, I know that it was harebrained and literally zero economists with a functioning brain have called it a "smart" play. Only absolute cultists or the most profoundly gullible ever found the arguments by the criminals convincing.
Further, as is classic with Trump's lies (that only spectacularly gullible and/or stupid people fall for), he sells every angle of the same play simultaneously. Not only will tariffs eliminate income tax -- a notion that is so mathematically stupid it is instantly dismissible -- simultaneously all of those jobs are going to be repatriated and there will be no imports. These two notions are absolutely at odds -- and both are just utter fantasy nonsense -- but stupid people believe what stupid people do.
And yeah, bro, tariffs are not a unique idea. There is no novelty here.
How do we fix this should be the question asked. Is it even possible at this point?
I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.
Education is a public good, therefore good education is socialist, and Americans are very hyper-individualist (aka antisocial). History suggests that Americans generally only move toward communal support systems during extreme crises, like the shift during the Great Depression. Even Covid wasn't enough to get people asking for universal healthcare, it has to be much worse.
Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.
Yeah, it is an interesting bubble to be in. I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. I definitely felt the difference in education with the new hires. Reading comprehension/attention was weak. AI will easily replace them, I guess.
Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.
>I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE.
Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
Oh, I WISH that was the case but I'd estimate only 10% of SWE would fit your model of minimum competence... and yeah a lot of that 10% are browsing HN. I recall in 2016 asking coworkers why they voted trump. "My 401k" was a frequent answer.
Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.
> People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42.
One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.
It should be more complicated but the way the Trump admin did this isn't complicated. Tariffs were used to punish countries that didn't bend the knee. When they did, the tariffs were removed. So no-one was ever going to build a factory in the US because of tariffs, everyone knew they might go away tomorrow.
This back and forth is the entire issue if you ask me. Whoever you ask in the administration on any given day is going to say the tariffs exist for different reasons. It’s on purpose though - it’s so whoever is arguing for the admin can curate the answer.
Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us.
I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.
We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.
>Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
That's what the CHIPS act did. Indeed, everyone talking about TSMC, Intel, etc -- that's all because of the CHIPS act.
Toddler tantrum tariffs, which in reality are a vehicle for massive level corruption (see how Vietnam got a "deal" by approving a Trump resort. Or how every business leader is stuck to Trump's anus lest they be targeted by his tyrant tantrums), are not an incentive. It has had the opposite effect, and new builds have basically dried up.
Ironically I was mildly in favor of tariffs from the left pov. Reduced consumption and getting more taxes to help pay down the debt.
Consumption was likely mildly reduced (and still is with the 15% tax) but now we have more inflation coming our way when those billions start flowing and our debt just keeps going up.
Rich people consume a lot more, so a consumption tax would be ideal if you eased other tax categories like income tax and/or capital gains. It's easy to administer and would boost investment across the economy IMO.
Well, government spending could go down along with that too. Obviously, that ain't happening with Republicans (see: the OBBB and failed DOGE project) but in theory you could do major reform and craft coherent policy while not triple dipping tax-wise. I think you could implement quite a high consumption tax model and be okay -- you'd have the added benefit of very simple collection and enforcement since it's all at the tail end.
I don't see why this would be even slightly surprising: that is a common right-wing position and has been for a while? They even made a big run of it in 2023.
The same as the tax rate on a blessing of unicorns that I also couldn't buy.
Our domestic manufacturing industry is so far gone, it's doubtful whether even skillfully-applied tariffs could encourage any of it to come back on their own. Never mind this clown show, which apparently didn't even do the basic political work to make sure the tariffs would stay in place more than a year, despite having both houses of Congress.
It's such an old and standard and basic playbook. They cultivated fear among the poor about immigrants or some bit of social progress like pronouns. To win power and take whatever actions they believed would enrich themselves. There's never anything more to it than that.
Tariffs (or something like land value tax) are one of the less intrusive forms of taxes since imported goods are already scrutinized and tabulated at the border anyway under the border 4A exception. In theory tariffs are a lot less dystopic in their financial surveillance than stuff like income tax, but you were supposed to drop the income tax when you pick up tariffs, not just use it to make the Swamp larger.
National sales tax would be significantly better than income tax. Per head would be even better
Unfortunately replacement doesn’t seem to be on the table for anyone.
If your argument is that taxation at sale is harder to dogdge than with income, and thus an obviously regressive scheme would still be advantageous for the average American, then I'm not buying it at all.
I see no evidence whatsoever that the wealthy would have any more difficulty in dodging sales tax than income/capital gains taxes.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more regressive tax scheme. Bill Gates and I consume approximately the same amount of resources. I don’t see why he should have to pay a significantly different rate than I do.
I'd argue that ressource consumption/pollution are on the contrary pretty strongly correlated with wealth.
But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.
Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).
Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.
Trump doesn't care who went bankrupt or lost money, he was able to create a whole pile of red number buying opportunities for his friends in the know. And for himself.
It's now an age of oligarchy, stable corporate capitalism and gentlemanly bourgeois behaviour and the appearance of "rules based order" and equally brokered commerce is out, schoolyard bully attitude and "give me your lunch money" is in.
If you still want to profit, you make friends with the right people, kiss the ring, and get permission to become a highwayman or parasite like the rest of them.
At the bottom, is us. I don't think any election can put the cork back in this bottle. The only thing that will end this decline is an angry non-compliant populace that is sick of getting a very bad deal.
Private businesses get refunded and a payday, prices for the consumer stay high (because consumers have proven that they can bear them), and inflation goes up.
No, this is the consequence of having an actual stupid person in the Oval Office and the majority party being half coerced and half committed in cultlike devotion to POTUS.
Obviously the US has economic weapons. It's the largest economy in the world.
If anything this signals that POTUS himself cannot wield those weapons though, and the American public, political, and business apparatuses have little appetite for this use of those weapons.
Okay, I'll entertain it. How would you distinguish between the brilliant move of using illegal tariffs to disclose limited power and appetite for tariffs, versus someone displaying a 3rd grader level of economic understanding and saying "well of course we should charge people to sell stuff in 'my store' and I am now the manager of 'the store', so I get to set the rate"?
What specific pieces of evidence do you believe makes the former more likely than the latter?
+1 on nukes, though MAD has worked for decades so far. I agree people think this risk is far more remote than it actually is. Especially the risk of a catastrophic accident as nukes proliferate and forces get put on higher readiness.
Why would China immediately retaliate with a Rare Earth threat to tariffs? Why would we threaten Greenland, another rare earth hotbed? We , the general public , similar to the Cuban Missile crisis, are not being told shit.
There is a global cold/hot war where real pieces have moved. NATO is basically at war and we can’t know. There’s millions dying in Ukraine, and it’s basically Eurasia to us (virtualized, reported , broadcasted ).
Warships are being torpedoed. Nuclear subs from either side can’t be tracked, it is always a leveraged threat that one has to negotiate around.
Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told. Maybe I should just go ahead and write my great American novel?
> Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told.
Effectively every city on the planet is perpetually on 24 hour nuclear watch and has been for decades now. This is completely "known" to anyone who cares to know and has taken the time to understand modern nuclear doctrine.
You should read The Doomsday Machine! It'll help amp up your anxiety ;)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
But expert advice, even if material, is not the same as insider information.
Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce.
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?
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.
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.
Did they know it was illegal? Any more than say, the Biden administration "knew" that forgiving student loans were illegal?
Lutnick deal: we pay you $X' now, and if Y' happens, we collect everything which will substantively exceed $X'.
This is not insurance, its closer to shorting stocks.
Oh, one other thing: the insurance company has essentially nothing to do with Y at all, in the sense that they have no control over Y and generally speaking no involvement in it (think: accidents, floods, storms, fires). By contrast Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States of America.
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
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.
Thomas joined fully with Kavanaugh’s dissent. He wrote separately to articulate his view of the scope of non-delegation doctrine. He pointed out tariffs and taxes are different, in that tariffs implicate international relations, which is primarily within the province of the president. His analysis is extremely cogent. I was actually talking with my wife (we’re both Fed Soc people) that the administration should have pushed that angle much harder in the argument.
Did you read the Federal Circuit en banc decision? You don’t get two Obama appointees to vote in favor of the Trump’s administrations unprecedented tariffs when the legal issue “isn’t close.”
And, surely you understand that many see using the due process clause to make his argument was a stretch. Just saying "his analysis is extremely cogent" doesn't make it so.
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.
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
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.
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.
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
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.
Why?
It stole money from consumers in the form of illegal tariffs, then refunded the money to people with no obvious relationship to the victims.
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.
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).
"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-...
That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was a very complex decision that ideologically divided the courts.
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!).
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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not insider trading that they acted on that consensus.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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-...
Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.
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.
The fact that businesses were put in a position to make this choice is outrageous in the first place.
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 $130B transfer of wealth to Trump's financial backers.
This would have been the case no mattern what.
I'm saying the public tide shifted and the legal reality set in that they weren't going to get sympathetic rulings...which they don't care about anyway since it's not their money and the tariff threats already had any desired effects sought.
POTUS was floated the idea that they could enrich themselves, so the decision was made, communicated to the Secretary of Commerce and to the SCOTUS judges.
> And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?
Nothing to do with them. Narcissists don't worry about the future of others, except as a narrative to sell their personal ambitions.
Some people don't believe the administration is that flippant. I think it's obvious they are having fun.
Or just pay attention to the oral arguments. The justices seemed very skeptical of the Trump administration, and betting markets reacted accordingly.
They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.
“Trump’s buddy’s son offers 20c/$” does not seem like a terrible deal for getting your money out.
I don't know if his sons had inside information, and I'm not defending their actions, but whatever it was, it wasn't "insider trading".
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.
Correct.
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...
...assuming they held those rights on their books, rather than selling it off to other hedge funds.
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.
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.
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.
Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?
$7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!
Masterminds!
…and now they need to refund it.
NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.
[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_bud...
I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47238951
Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.
You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.
Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.
This is an interesting way to frame a tax on Americans, but it aligns with this administrations actions.
I mean, FFS--we have a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes and was elected anyway!
You'd have to be pretty gullible to think that raising taxes on imported goods won't result in price hikes at the checkout counter.
So, who do you count? everyone? only the informed? only people with strong views? Or do you assume people support the views and actions of the people they voted for?
Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.
The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.
When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?
> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/trump-brags-oval-office-billionair...
Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….
The don't forget about congress. 216 GOP congressional reps voted to handicap congress's ability to halt tariffs. For much of the current session of congress, their calendar wasn't counting days.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/house-republicans-block-con...
Hah, we are 100% not getting our money back. And the higher, tariff level, prices aren't going to go back down either.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
What got my attention on this was this HN comment by rstuart4133:
"There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs. For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China. Truly delicious."
The importers pay the tariffs, and they might get a refund, but it's unlikely they can distribute the money back to the people who they passed the price increase onto.
Imagine I imported 1 ton of rice and paid the tariff. Then I split that ton of rice into 2000 one pound bags and sold them to two super markets, with a higher price accounting for the tariff. Then one super market decided to absorb the price from their margins and sell it at the same price as before to avoid price shocks. Can I track down the other 1000 purchasers who paid a higher price? Is it even worth it?
These are taxes that businesses have to pay and as a result, they pass on to the consumer.
Larger companies have some room (in some cases) to absorb some of these costs. While smaller companies do not. These can literally put people out of business overnight.
Here is a specific example: https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/us-news/idaho-business-owner-c...
Or Tax Foundation? https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs...
3/9/25 - 45 items - $178.98
3/15/25 - 40 items - $187.13
3/22/25 - 59 items - $315.29
3/29/25 - 45 items - $131.36
...
2/14/25 - 48 items - $238.15
2/21/25 - 17 items - $117.49 (used $45 in coupons from store loyalty points, actual cost $162.49)
2/28/25 - 27 items - $165.27
My grocery bill definitely is feeling it, now is it 100% tariffs, probably not. But research points to it being some what related to tariffs [1,2,3] You'll notice in the most recent shops, I have been trying to skip the non-essentials when possible to keep my bill lower.
I don't have any other regular purchases with history to look back on. It's not like I replace all my consumer electronics every 6 months-1 year. Closest thing that I have to consistent historical data is 3D printer filament, which has gone from $15.99 to $16.99 on Amazon for my brand of choice from April 2025 to my most recent order last week.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-tariffs-food-prices/
[2] https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-june-17...
[3] https://www.edelmanfinancialengines.com/education/life-event...
Don't hold your breath for either to be given back.
Congress has been gradually handing their power over to the executive for decades. For decades, people have been warning that this was setting up for major abuse if you got a particularly bad president. Well, guess what....
Won't happen with this administration at least; the expectation being that unless you are a yes-man, you'll be denounced as "not loyal" and voted out.
And now they get it all back! If they can figure out the paperwork. Which I expect most will, because if you import things and pay tariffs, you have to be good at govt paperwork.
Wow. I don’t know what this means. But it’s a huge windfall to a very specific horizontal slice of the economy - cutting across industries and supply chains. Just whoever happened to be doing the importing gets a giant present. So bizarre. Economists will write about this case study for decades.
Every company that collected a tariff fee needs to refund it as they collect their own refunds.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-...
Most things are never going to be cheaper than they are today. Some things may be cheaper this time next year but not by more than a few percent at the most.
I (unknowingly) ordered something on Etsy from another country. UPS delivered the items, then sent me a letter requiring I pay the tariff and an extra tariff handling fee. UPS paid the government, so UPS should get their money back from the government, then refund me. I'm not holding my breath.
> ‘Corporate and industry group political action committees have donated more than $44 million directly to the campaigns and leadership PACs of the 147 members of the Sedition Caucus. Companies and trade associations that pledged to suspend donations have given more than $12 million to the campaign and leadership PACs of the Sedition Caucus.
> Koch Industries ($626,500), American Crystal Sugar ($530,000), Home Depot ($525,000), Boeing ($488,000), and UPS ($479,500) have contributed the most money to members of the Sedition Caucus through their corporate PACs.’
> Tomé’s reconciliation with representatives who legitimized Trump’s attempted presidential coup — and who may control Congress after the November midterm elections — shouldn’t surprise us. Trump lavished huge gifts on UPS and Corporate America that have made them richer.”
> The second Trump presidency has the potential to be even more lucrative for UPS, given that the bulk of UPS’s unionized workers are Teamsters and led by prominent Trump ally Sean O’Brien
https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/big-brown-and-the-fascists...
Looks like they've given a pretty similar amount to both parties[1]. UPS charging a specific "Tariff Fee" is bound to have angered Trump.
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/united-parcel-service/summa...
[0] https://fivepoints.mattglassman.net/p/the-court-ieepa-and-th...
There were multiple court cases and this practice was found unlawful (and actually against EU law). But the government did not issue automatic refunds, and instead requested that people "actively appeal" with some time limits. They also refused to pay interest on the money withheld.
AFAIK, only about 50M Euro was paid back. A lot of funds gathered between 2002–2005 was never returned.
I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.
No organisations or regime has ever considered itself illegitimate. The big guys consider smaller guys legitimate or illegitimate, but its just ink on a page.
Finland (and _ALL_ other countries) is an illegitimate regime, collecting its protection money, telling you to pray it does not alter the deal any further
You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons. Whatever your desired outcome is, none of it matters until this gets to the Supreme Court. Given the nature of money, it doesn't even matter if some higher court refuses to give an injunction against the refunds being issued until after the appeal is considered and some set of refunds goes all the way through... no company that gets any money from a pre-SC refund can really use it until the entire matter is resolved at the SC level.
> You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons.
I think the government might have a bit of an uphill battle given arguments they have previously made to courts. For example, consider this decision from the US Court of International Trade from 2025-12 [0]:
> However, as the Government notes in its response to Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction here, it “[has] made very clear—both in this case and in related cases—that [it] will not object to the [c]ourt ordering reliquidation of plaintiffs’ entries subject to the challenged IEEPA duties if such duties are found to be unlawful.”
> <snip>
> Judicial estoppel would prevent the Government from taking an inconsistent approach after a final result in V.O.S. [] The Government has emphasized this point itself, citing to Sumecht NA, Inc. v. United States, which holds that “the Government would be judicially estopped from taking a contrary position” regarding a prior representation involving the availability of relief in the form of reliquidation. [] Having convinced this court to accept that importers who paid IEEPA tariffs will be able to receive refunds after reliquidation, and having benefited from the court’s subsequent conclusion that importers will not experience irreparable harm as a consequence of liquidation, the Government cannot later “assume a contrary position” to argue that refunds are not available after liquidation.
> <snip>
> Additionally, the panel in In re Section 301 Cases unanimously agreed—as we do now—that the USCIT has “the explicit power to order reliquidation and refunds where the government has unlawfully exacted duties.” [] The Government acknowledges that “a decision [to the contrary] would be inconsistent with years of [the court’s] precedent.”
Obviously all this doesn't prevent the government from appealing anyways, but they'll need to get creative to get around their previous representations.
[0]: https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-154.pdf
That's what the GP likely meant.
The circus must go on.
Instead of ruling narrowly that named plaintiffs would get a refund
Eaton expressly said:
"all importers of record" which is all who were subject to the IEEPA duties.
It is unclear if this is lawful.
He didn't have to do this at all. He could stuck with tradition here. He specifies why he did it in this case, but this opens the door.
Also note that he did not open the door to "final liquidations" getting refunds (it is unclear how many tariffs more than 180 days ago were not officially protested).
Possibly a refund of about $500 per social security number. Doesn't even have to be in cash, could just directly go towards the social security fund if legislated that way.
Tons of ways to fix this quagmire in a way that's beneficial to people. But it won't happen.
Looks like the hassle will now be on the backend...
Also contractually you didn't pay the duties so you wouldn't get refunds.
I'll never see that money.
Delayed refunds won't even start to repair the damage done by bankruptcies triggered by high tariffs, the snowballed cost of tariffs impacting multiple steps in the supply chain, the emotional toll on families and communities having to deal with less money and rising prices. But rehiring and getting some regions and communities back to work might be a step in the right direction.
EXCEPT WE NOW HAVE A 15% GLOBAL TARIFF ONGOING. And a lunatic administration that will fight tooth and nail for years to keep this going as long as possible.
Trump "loves" this country so much it hurts me.
Why on Earth do you expect a single-time payment with no strings attached to make companies think some market is profitable so they should invest in it?
If our tariff structure went back to, say, October 2024, and companies who'd paid some inordinate tax - forcing layoffs and reductions - got a chunk of that back - and the taxes went back to what they were - there'd likely be some return to hiring and raises as before. But we can't get back to that any time soon with an administration hellbent on extracting as much from us via tariffs as possible.
or give it to shareholders.
And now, less than 100 years later we're like "hey let's try that again!"
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-average-u-s-tariff-rate...
Expect rhymes from the 1930's—an economic depression, tension leading to another world war. Fun stuff ahead.
Read from that what you will... as a voter, or the POTUS.
I definitely agree on principle, it sounds pretty tricky to see how proving "I paid $x more for groceries because of tarrifs" would work in practice.
Does anyone know of policy suggestions for how that could work?
* Direct Cash (using some equation for impoverished households)
* Infrastructure
* Better life conditions
No other uses for this money. The returns and the uses of this money must be public.
You’re getting mighty close to socialism there citizen.
What do you mean unclear? The ruling says that certain of the tariffs were always illegal.
The big players can restructure supply chains. Small businesses can't. The mom and pops seem to suffer.
I'm hoping there can be an infusion of $ into those companies and maybe stimulate a little growth, or at least survival through the Trump years.
This is by design. No doubt the large corporations who kissed the ring and gave gold statues will be the first to receive this money.
https://newrepublic.com/post/206882/trump-commerce-secretary...
"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-...
How would the government even be able to determine if a business increased product prices due to tariffs vs other factors, or even if the business increased prices at all? What if the product is a loss leader and the company was fine just eating the expense? Or what about a nefarious company who manufacturers their stuff in Canada but used "tariffs" as an excuse to increase prices? What would they be refunded from?
So if I'm the owner of Uncle Billy Bobs Autoparts and I ship from Madeupcountry. I billed you $500 extra for some new car part. The US government refunds me on the tariffs they charged me to import my product to you, and now your taxes is going into my refund. Who wins in this scenario? They're effectively giving every country a free bonus. I wouldn't be surprised if some people got scammed by the tariffs by being overcharged.
There's no serious paper trail to any of this to meaningfully return lost revenue to the American consumer, I would rather not waste tax dollars on refunds.
I guess the only "winners" are maybe businesses that didn't pass on the revenue loss on to the consumer? But how do you even correctly refund those businesses?
One possibility would be for businesses to return the fraction of the tariff paid by customers to future customers by offering the items affected with a negative tax until the refund is used up.
Ha ha, that's a good one. I have yet to hear about reduced profits anywhere. Instead, as I said in another comment, I have actual physical receipts with the additional tariff cost (itemized!) in a pile on my workshop (which I'll never see refunded).
You could ask for a tariff refund from those suppliers.
The invoices give you slam dunk evidence that you paid that amount in tariffs, and the supreme court decision says the payment was illegally collected, so seems like an easy win for you.
As someone who prices and sells labor and material for a living, nobody ate increased tariffs. They were passed along to the ultimate consumer of the tariffed product. Everyone was facing the same tariffs so they’re all incentivized to pass the cost along, line iteming the tariffs on the invoice would make it abundantly clear. I passed along all increased costs with a note on my proposal that said “Any and all additional tariffs will be paid for by the customer.”
I mean the importers were the ones who paid the duties. It's not a given they passed it on, and if it was then in many cases it was spread out. That is importer paid for one container of items, which in turn got sold to individuals which the government has no record of.
If you ordered delivery by say FedEx and they paid the duty and passed it on to you, you should have a reasonable case to get it refunded from FedEx when they get the money back. Ideally they handle it automatically since they have all the necessary details.
For manufacturing companies it's less clear, as some might have swallowed all or some of the duties, and multiple components might have been affected by different rates etc.
Will be interesting to see how companies who passed it on will handle this, given it's a massive PITA to do anything but screw over their customers.
Christ on a bike,
This was the plan from the get-go:
Isn’t the new line that we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years?
For 47 years.
Imminent.
They've been pushing the national sales tax to replace income tax since the 2000s (and probably longer).
Whether or not these schemes would work is debatable, but to claim that they show an MO of regressive taxes is just false.
>Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax.
The US government generates $2.5 trillion dollars on just individual income taxes.
The US has about $3.4 trillion dollars worth of imports.
Explain how this makes makes any sense? It's laughable mathematical fantasy to imagine tariffs even denting the deficit, much less eliminating other revenue sources.
The US is a massive economic basket case -- it is basically an economically (aside from being morally) bankrupt country -- and I honestly don't even see a way out of it at this point. I guess just start some wars and try to steal some countries?
I mean 2.5 / 3.4 = ~ 75%. A measly 75% tariffs will allow the abolition of income tax.
Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
My "smart play" wasn't on the merits of idea, largely the game theory aspect of moving forward to their policy goals after decades of having no traction. It's a unique idea, policy wise. Don't know if it will be effective. Neither do you.
Sadly I'm not. I'm objectively stating facts. This criminal cabal of spectacularly incompetent clowns is absolutely ransacking the final days of an empire. It is astonishing how Americans are unaware of this.
>Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
The US ran a $2.3 trillion dollar deficit over the last 12 months, and spending has gone absolutely wild. At the same time it's handing out massive tax cuts to corporations, and has absolutely no path to get back on track. Quite the opposite, the Trump cabal is basically making it impossible to get back on track. Which is why they're looting everything they can as quickly as they can.
>Neither do you.
Yes, I know that it was harebrained and literally zero economists with a functioning brain have called it a "smart" play. Only absolute cultists or the most profoundly gullible ever found the arguments by the criminals convincing.
Further, as is classic with Trump's lies (that only spectacularly gullible and/or stupid people fall for), he sells every angle of the same play simultaneously. Not only will tariffs eliminate income tax -- a notion that is so mathematically stupid it is instantly dismissible -- simultaneously all of those jobs are going to be repatriated and there will be no imports. These two notions are absolutely at odds -- and both are just utter fantasy nonsense -- but stupid people believe what stupid people do.
And yeah, bro, tariffs are not a unique idea. There is no novelty here.
You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there.
People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.
Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.
Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.
Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.
One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.
This math would work on any demographic.
Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...
Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us.
I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.
We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.
Trump and his cabinet don't understand this.
That's what the CHIPS act did. Indeed, everyone talking about TSMC, Intel, etc -- that's all because of the CHIPS act.
Toddler tantrum tariffs, which in reality are a vehicle for massive level corruption (see how Vietnam got a "deal" by approving a Trump resort. Or how every business leader is stuck to Trump's anus lest they be targeted by his tyrant tantrums), are not an incentive. It has had the opposite effect, and new builds have basically dried up.
Consumption was likely mildly reduced (and still is with the 15% tax) but now we have more inflation coming our way when those billions start flowing and our debt just keeps going up.
Now if tariffs had only been applied to, I don't know, yachts, private jets…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_tax#United_States
The ironic part is not that you were mildly in favor from the left, the ironic part is that they came from the right.
Pre-Trump, the right was very anti-tariff and only a portion of the left was pro tariff, the Bernie Sanders type.
I suppose that sounds pretty good if you're rich.
https://pettersen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...
Even if there was a US version, you'd still pay more regardless. This goes against one of the main grievances in the 2024 cycle: prices are too high.
Our domestic manufacturing industry is so far gone, it's doubtful whether even skillfully-applied tariffs could encourage any of it to come back on their own. Never mind this clown show, which apparently didn't even do the basic political work to make sure the tariffs would stay in place more than a year, despite having both houses of Congress.
If your argument is that taxation at sale is harder to dogdge than with income, and thus an obviously regressive scheme would still be advantageous for the average American, then I'm not buying it at all.
I see no evidence whatsoever that the wealthy would have any more difficulty in dodging sales tax than income/capital gains taxes.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more regressive tax scheme. Bill Gates and I consume approximately the same amount of resources. I don’t see why he should have to pay a significantly different rate than I do.
But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.
Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).
Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.
Trump doesn't care who went bankrupt or lost money, he was able to create a whole pile of red number buying opportunities for his friends in the know. And for himself.
It's now an age of oligarchy, stable corporate capitalism and gentlemanly bourgeois behaviour and the appearance of "rules based order" and equally brokered commerce is out, schoolyard bully attitude and "give me your lunch money" is in.
If you still want to profit, you make friends with the right people, kiss the ring, and get permission to become a highwayman or parasite like the rest of them.
At the bottom, is us. I don't think any election can put the cork back in this bottle. The only thing that will end this decline is an angry non-compliant populace that is sick of getting a very bad deal.
Clearly, this makes America great again. /s
No, this is the consequence of having an actual stupid person in the Oval Office and the majority party being half coerced and half committed in cultlike devotion to POTUS.
Obviously the US has economic weapons. It's the largest economy in the world.
If anything this signals that POTUS himself cannot wield those weapons though, and the American public, political, and business apparatuses have little appetite for this use of those weapons.
Happy?
Can we get back to the topic at hand now that I scratched that little itch for ya?
What specific pieces of evidence do you believe makes the former more likely than the latter?
+1 on nukes, though MAD has worked for decades so far. I agree people think this risk is far more remote than it actually is. Especially the risk of a catastrophic accident as nukes proliferate and forces get put on higher readiness.
There is a global cold/hot war where real pieces have moved. NATO is basically at war and we can’t know. There’s millions dying in Ukraine, and it’s basically Eurasia to us (virtualized, reported , broadcasted ).
Warships are being torpedoed. Nuclear subs from either side can’t be tracked, it is always a leveraged threat that one has to negotiate around.
Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told. Maybe I should just go ahead and write my great American novel?
Effectively every city on the planet is perpetually on 24 hour nuclear watch and has been for decades now. This is completely "known" to anyone who cares to know and has taken the time to understand modern nuclear doctrine.
You should read The Doomsday Machine! It'll help amp up your anxiety ;)