“We live in the age of computers,” Eaton said. “It must be possible for Customs Service to program its computers so it doesn’t need a manual review.”
In DHL the link to get tax documents is already broken for a year or so, so I cannot get VAT back on DHL shipments.
With FedEx I can but it's a manual process of screenshotting a bank transaction and emailing a specific email address with a shipping number.
When tariffs started all the servers of the shipping companies went down.
So I highly doubt they will just do some computer magic.
From experience I assume they will "accidentally" run into all kinds of technical difficulties making it a 274 step process to get the money back.
For scale: Shopify, a software company by heart, with 170bn market cap and 3500 engineers employed, does not have native VAT support, required in the Europe which accounts for 15-20% of their revenue. All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.
So to assume a shipping company will just work some computer magic is really far fetched. The FedEx page only lets you login after you refresh the page exactly once already for more than a year.
If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.
If corporations are allowed to implement regulations in faulty ways the economic system stops working and fraud is easier than ever.
Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "anti regulation". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and
If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.
Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "pro fraud". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and regulations is something that corruption does not allow for.
> Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms.
Even though it's a sensible claim, and since you're implying causal relationship, can you provide a source for this? I'm not European so I wouldn't know.
> All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.
If only it would be that simple :)
In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT number the flow might take even 12h+ to verify it. If you can do that verification you can use 0% VAT rate but if not you need to use a different VAT rate.
For B2C you need to support several scenarios: if company is outside of EU it needs to register for IOSS, if it’s a EU company that sells to other EU countries it needs to register for OSS or in each EU country for VAT separately but also a mix of both is possible. You can decide to no register to OSS special procedure but then there’s a sales limit before you have to register and you need to track it. Otherwise, you need to maintain special OSS registry with sales records and three pieces of proof that customer is based in the member country. Some EU countries have XML invoices (Italy, Romania, Germany soon) or mandatory invoice APIs (Poland), of course there’s actually no common EU standard so it depends on where the company is based.
Finally you need to choose a VAT rate for that country and they also change occasionally, e.g. Slovakia, Romania and Estonia all changed their highest rate just last year.
This is the bare minimum you need to support. There’s a lot of edge cases, e.g. it matters what country you actually ship from, and if you use e.g. fulfillment there are special procedures for that as well, or if you resell in B2B there are chain transactions which have their own set of spaghetti rules.
Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell the tax service to us, but I refuse.
You can simplify for your use case (only B2C or you refund VAT afterwards for B2B, you only ship from one location, custom invoicing), but that’s what it takes to implement it correctly on platform level.
This is just the citizenry paying double tariffs. First, we bought the higher priced goods. Now, the companies are trying to take our tariff payments again, this time from the government, to "make up" for the tariff money that we had already paid them in the first place.
What should happen is that $X of the budget should be put into escrow for the next administration to use after these criminals make their way out.
Maybe triple. (1) paid higher prices, (2) the government will issue debt to refund the tariffs to importers who we already reimbursed through higher prices, and then (3) Congress will use the extra debt from the refunds as justification for higher individual taxes to pay for the 2025 tax cuts for businesses.
And the supreme court is to blame for all of this because they decided to invalidate lower court injunctions, reasoning that there was no chance for "irreparable harm"... Yeah, right.
Both the people who voted for the criminal to be president. And the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump.
People who voted for Trump were pretty clear about what their issues were. They wanted to bully trans and they wanted to stick it to the libs. They were looking forward to liberals suffering. Some of them would never vote for a woman or black person. They liked masculinity Trump projects - aggressive insulting fraudster.
If you really want to get to the root cause, on the Democratic side it’s the people who promoted/supported/covered up for Biden when it would have been obvious to anyone close that he wasn’t fit for the purpose any more. And Biden himself, for his hubris.
That was why things were rushed and there wasn’t a proper primary. Yes, they could have held a very late/quick convention and would likely not have picked Kamala, but anyone getting the nomination at that late stage would still have been hugely in the back foot.
There is no single root cause in a complex system of checks and balances. Many parts need to fail for things to get as bad as they are now. Trying to reduce everything to a single fault is either stupid populism or blatant propaganda.
I love how the root cause is always the opposition, never the perpetrator.
Focusing on the Democrats (who are hot garbage) is such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture (yes, it's pretty clear from the Epstein files that they did everything they could to destroy those young children's minds and hearts for sport, and that was the real 'game' they were playing).
But by all means, carry on about bad tactics in the election, surely that is the 'root cause' here.
I don't disagree with you, but I also wonder what exactly the Biden justice department was doing with these files for four years. It seems to me like they were covering for the same people. Being "in the club" is more important to them than party.
Restricted representative size, gerrymandering, FPTP voting, businesses with resident/citizen rights, the restriction of 42 U.S.C. 1983 to not cover Federal actors...
Tons of goods companies paid tariffs for were inputs for those industries.
Instead of being mad at companies that were forced to pay illegal tariffs, who now want to recoup some of that, be mad at the cause of illegal tariffs. Letting the govt keep the money by fighting over who is a victim, hold the govt feet to the fire so they learn not to do this to begin with.
Ehh, they do a little better, but they are very much run by capital now. Most of their politicians are capitalist investors. And while individuals may get smacked down on occasion, as a whole they still follow the desires of capital holders above all else.
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.
> 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.
I'd pretty much grown up believing that that's how the US worked post-slavery (aside from occasional deviances from the rule). Since the start of the pandemic, I've had quite the awakening.
> 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 was no VAT payable on the car tax of imported cars, only the ELV (ei-arvonlisävero, literally "not value added tax").
The ELV idea was that for locally bought new cars you did have to pay VAT on car tax, but for used EU imports that was not legally possible (cannot charge VAT again when importing used item from another EU country), so an equivalent non-VAT tax was invented so the full tax (inc. VAT/ELV) stays the same.
But this was unfair for e.g. the reason that Finnish companies buying cars could deduct Finnish car tax VAT on local new cars on their VAT return but not the car tax ELV on imported used cars (since it was not VAT).
Hmm. The "active request" is quite common though. I agree that this is unfair, since it is theft, IMO, but Finland is not the only one forcing active engagement to get your money back. Even when the government stole that money from the people.
> we can and should trust the authorities.
Well, Finland has a fairly competent government usually for the most part. That mantra will not work in many other countries though - such as Germany. Just look at what Merz is doing; his left hand does not know what the right hand should do ...
That may have been the case for some time, but the current government in Finland is... well, perhaps I personally wouldn't describe them as fairly competent.
Putting aside the discussions of who will actually see any money returned, I will note that this haul covers about 100 days of war with Iran. ($1 Billion per day is the initial assessment from the Pentagon.) [0]
For anyone who was still under the illusion that the tariffs would make any impact on the government debt, hopefully this illustrates that both the tariffs and the ridiculous DOGE effort were never really about the budget.
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.
They probably should have been. But the presidential system putting de-facto unchecked power into the president is just asking for such abuses to happen. Almost by design one might think.
If the lesson by now isn’t “be careful wishing for powers you don’t want the other side to use against you” then I don’t know what will drive that home…
The law applying to powerful high level people is a good thing. The state where law binds only weak people and can be safely broken by rich and powerful is the bad one.
As of now, the law applies to me. I am on that "other side". It officially does not apply to Trump at all. And billionaires and administration can safely ignore it, although there is at least pretension of the law technically maybe applying to them.
The law is constantly applied to Trump and his administration. The judicial branch keeps reining him in: National guard, ice, tariffs—-literally TFA for Pete’s sake.
Parent post isn’t about any specific law, it’s about wanting to see a result and working backwards from there: my political opponents should go to jail.
Guess what will happen? The administration after that will send your politicians to jail. And the bananificiation of the US will be complete.
If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Trammel up the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much!
The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.
I ordered something from a Chinese company and they quoted me 5USD per unit and 35USD shipping. I accepted and the units were shipped and delivered and of excellent quality.
Sometime later FedEx sends me a weird bill for some random seeming amount of money I owed. They had a link or email or something to basically refuse to pay. I did refuse to pay. The shipper ended up communicating with me to determine I was going to refuse to pay and I found where Fedex had on the website that indicated the shipper was responsible for all fees. I assume the randomness of it was related to tariffs but I wasn't going to pay anything like what they sent me.
I do hope that some repercussions come of these terrible economic policies and the shipper gets their money back from Fedex, but as a company or as an individual I don't think a company's policy to send random bills after delivery is valid either.
I've had this before, a few years ago, and a quick google at the time seemed to show that a fair few other people have. I'm in the UK, and about 6 months after buying something small from China (iirc), we got an £10 invoice for a "disbursement fee" from Fedex. It was very vague as to what the fee was actually for. I assume it was just a "scam" by Fedex to get more money.
This sounds familiar.
Months after not receiving an order, UPS sent a letter from a pseudo(?) collection agency for a charge added to the order. But there was no way to pay for it - as there was a statement that only the shipper could pay, but still, the order didn't arrive - it was very confusing, the shipment disappeared in paperwork - and no one could figure it out. Customer was out the original purchase fee, producer never could reviver shipment. Complete mess.
Do I understand correctly, that these companies applying for refunds, likely passed the costs onto consumers who paid a higher price for goods. Now the companies will claw back their refunds from the gov AND keep the markup they charged consumers?
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.
This is a tactic I'm seeing more in politics. When it's in the interests of a group for something to pass, but they don't want the blame, they can abstain or defer. It still goes through and if it goes wrong they can argue it's not their fault. Win/win for them.
It's not really, this is the result of having a flawed democratic system.
What do Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Nicaragua, etc and now US have all in common?
They are ALL presidential or semi-presidential republics where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party.
Winner-takes-all democracies, aren't democracies if only part of the electors is represented in the executive.
Presidential republics are super dangerous, they combine the perils of dictatorships with a cherry on the cake of being able to claim popular mandate.
Seriously, it's not a coincidence that the last parliamentary republic to turn into an authocracy has been Sri Lanka 50+ years ago.
Hungary is a parliamentary republic, Orban is the Prime Minister. Turkey was parliamentary system until was changed in 2017 to presidential system with more power for Erdogan.
I agree about parliamentary systems being better, but they are still vulnerable. It doesn't matter if the electorate is in favor of strongman.
> where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party
But that doesn't describe the US right now. The problem is that the GOP is providing at least enough support to enable the behavior that we currently see. If congress as a whole wanted to stop things they could.
I actually quite like the US system but the combination of first past the post voting and party politics appear increasingly likely to strangle us.
Several framers of the constitution expressed deep concerns about the potential for coordinated non-governmental "factions" taking over government via elections.
Unfortunately, despite going to great efforts to limit power centralization internally, concerns of external centralization were not heeded and there are no limits on the coordination of the US government via non-governmental organizations such as parties.
This might have been a prophesy:
> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.
> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
> [Omitted here, but at this point he worries that even a foreign country could weaponize a party to take control of the country, via elections.]
> There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true, and in Governments of a Monarchical cast Patriotism may look with endulgence, if not with layout, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.
-- George Washington [0]
States used to operate independently enough that the same party in different counties and states might have varied views. But today, both parties have become highly centralized and homogenous from local to federal levels. Now intensely centralized themselves, they are well prepared to each compete to centralize government as an extension of a single party.
And given it has become relatively easy to do so, the incentives are now there for parties to treat elections as war, and party control of government as the highest priority policy at all times. Incentives don't mean it has to happen, but ... well we know how that goes.
The winner take all elements, where a party that gains a power edge over the other is in a better position to entrench themselves further, if not permanently, are also in play.
When competition for power devolves into a dichotomy of complete wins or losses, the most powerful decision makers spend their time continually competing, with little attention left for concerns about competent governance or the public's well being.
The current state of the unchecked US party system is the number one problem for the country. As all other problems migrate downstream from it.
The biggest problem isn't "which" party gains control. The problem is that any party could ever obtain majority control in all three branches.
France has arguably the most presidential regime of the OECD, while it's not without faults it's not horrible either. Parliamentary regimes optimize for coalition stability which weakens them and forces to always take the path of least resistance, which isn't usually the best one.
> Parliamentary regimes optimize for coalition stability which weakens them and forces to always take the path of least resistance, which isn't usually the best one.
This is good: we live in objectively good times and safe/wealthy countries where problems are relatively minor and we should focus on debating and compromising, not having know-it-all unbounded captains.
Our first focus is risk management: not having systems that make it easy for the Putin/Erdogan and Trump-like individual to ruin everything.
The US is special. It's a true federative nation, with a fairly weak federal government and strong individual states. So the president actually does not have a lot of power inside the country. He can't just fire the governor of Minnesota or unilaterally cut funds to a state that he doesn't like.
But the foreign policy is where the president's authority is outsized. So that's why Trump is so focused on it, it's one of the few areas that he can directly control.
According to Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport, there was a large increase in the number of foreign companies registered as the "importer of record" in the US as a result of the tariffs. On the Odd Lots podcast, he stated this was due to fraud: companies set up subsidiary corps in the US, which then imported goods from their parent/sibling/related companies at much lower prices than market value. Because tariffs are a percentage of the value, this made them lower. Then the subsidiary could turn around and sell it in the US at market rates.
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.
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.
We have Chinese businesses that are domestic importers.
(To some extent, this was to facilitate tariff fraud. As an American business buying abroad, your foreign supplier would take over responsibility for importing into the US, and then you could pretend you were unaware it was fraudulently undervaluing its imports to lower effective tariffs paid. Any possible consequences for the foreign entity getting caught doing fraud are minimal.)
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."
I think it's practically impossible, and like you said, even worse prices are not going back down. Companies tested elasticity and most of them will increase revenue since the pricing is generalized, all competitors did it at once.
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).
If you wanted to pass the refund on wouldn't the most sensible way be to pass it on to the two supermarkets since they were the actual buyers from you?
If the supermarket that raised prices wants to pass that on to their 1000 buyers that would be for them to deal with, not you.
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???
All this fuckery makes it hard to keep track of financial inflows and outflows, which in turn makes it easy to commit graft and corruption. Especially coupled with the forced retirement of those principled people formerly in bureaucratic positions, and the lack of consequences for lying and scheming on behalf of the kleptocracy.
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!
There is an express lane, it's reserved for the government appealing cases, in which any and all injunctions are halted because the court has unilaterally decided to interpret "not being able to do illegal shit" as "great harm" while there is no harm in sending people to torture prisons abroad on the flimsiest of evidence.
This is a silly point. Courts aren't sitting around umming and ahhing about whether they should issue an arrest warrant to get x violent criminal off the streets, the system wastes minimal time in apprehending them and putting them in jail. At THAT point things slow to a crawl - because there's no longer the urgent incentive to act to prevent further harm.
Whereas in these cases the government is potentially harming the entire public every single day that the courts don't act.
Section 122 is only supposed to be applied to address balance of payments deficits, which are essentially zero with floating currency exchange rates (since the 70s). They're also limited to 15% and 150 days. (Judges will not look favorably on Trump trying to just restart the same tariff for another 150 days after the first expire.)
> I thought those were on very solid ground commonly used by past administrations
No, Section 122 tariffs have never been used prior to Trump turning to them after the Supreme Court decision striking down the IEEPA tariffs, and, the states suing the Administration argue, the explicit sole statutory purpose for which they were allowed in the 1974 law creating the power can only possible to exist under a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, which the US has not had since 1976.
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....
Just wait until the next Democratic president is elected. The current crop of Republicans will suddenly remember that Congress can exercise this power.
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.
What is it like purchasing consumer goods from the EU under the new 10% section 122 rates? Previously I could have expected 25% tariffs + UPS/govt fees equivalent to another 40%. But hearing the horrors of shippers (UPS, FedEx, DHL) charging import fees equivalent to 1000% with no recourse to refuse the shipment and recoup costs, I never pulled the trigger. Has anything changed with the section 122 rates, especially considering the $800 de minimus exception won't be reinstated?
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.
"Prices take the elevator up and the stairs down" - yes, over time the market pushes no-longer-justified prices back down, but this is much slower than the price increase happens.
You won't get the money back that you overpaid in the meantime.
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.
I think there actually was a lot of surprise from executives coming out of COVID that they could raise prices so high without it impacting consumer demand in the ways they had previously predicted.
The Chipotle earnings calls were pretty much the prime example of this. CEO more or less expressing amazement at how elastic consumers were on pricing, and that due to the increases not impacting sales volume they planned to continue ramping until it did.
I think plenty of companies were operating off the idea that price competition was far more important than it turned out to be. I note the baskets of those shopping next to me in the grocery store and this rings true. Due to a myriad of reasons - consumer behavior being a large one of those - buying behavior based on price just isn’t as much of a thing as it was 30 years ago. Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.
Couple that learned helplessness with the monopoly situation for many (most?) markets in the US and it’s no surprise to me that once the dam broke there is no going back. The price discovery moving forward is going to be much more aggressive. It will take a generation or three to get back to thrifty consumer behavior unless we see something actually painful to the average person on a scale of the Great Depression.
> Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.
I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?
> CEO more or less expressing amazement at how elastic consumers were on pricing
That is because the extra money in the economy also inflated salaries. Inflation is annoying but it basically has no impact on affordability over the long run. Everyone just assumed that their increases in salary were a well earned recognition of their contributions, but the increases in prices was pure corporate greed and corruption. They were both the same thing. People got more money and prices went up.
I think you're mistaking what's happening here. Companies are not discovering greed. People are finally recognizing that greed, and the greed inherent in the system, and recognizing that just because it's "part of the system", it's not OK.
This is what the government should really look into. Are prices being held at inflated levels to sustain profits? And if so why is capitalism not working? Why are competing companies not undercutting each other to bring them back down?
Can we have small watchdog programs that deeply study market conditions for critical resources (like peanut butter/eggs/milk/bread/etc.) and produce detailed data on why prices are what they are and what they estimate prices should be? It would be fascinating to see like detailed breakdowns and raw profit margins on different goods instantly.
Unfortunately, this is what republicans voted for, as approved by their congressional representatives who declined to assert congressional power over taxation. Sadly, we all have to live with it until they wise up or quit voting.
> big names such as Costco Wholesale, FedEx and Pandora Jewelry—seeking to recoup their money.
Oh, so it was always only about a money transfer from the customers (who fully and wholly bore the cost otlf the tariffs already) to the companies which will now get the refunds for what their customers already covered?
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.
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.
Let's call it what it is, a massive wealth transfer from the general public to companies, and transitively (primarily) to the super-rich. Just because it's legal that they are robbing us blind does not make it right.
What businesses were legitimately going to go bankrupt by the increased tariffs? I'm not defending the tariffs, mind you, but I don't buy that every company had to increase prices to offset the additional taxes. Many could've taken the hit and been fine, except profits would be down and shareholders would be angry.
Lots of them. Profit margins in many sectors are low, lower than the cost of the tariffs.
> except profits would be down and shareholders would be angry.
Right. So when profits turn into losses, you expect shareholders to be OK with the stock price falling to zero and they lose their entire investment? You think this is "fine"?
Delivery companies act as tariff agents and collect tariffs for Customs and Border Protection, so, yes, if you were the importer of record on a delivery, it is quite likely that you paid the tariff via the delivery company.
These are likely to be refunded, because even if you were the purchaser of the product, you were the importer of record and paid the tariff, not a downstream buyer who paid an increased price because of the tariffs.
Similarly, the importers voluntarily paid the tariffs. They could choose to go out of business, go to jail, be sued into bankruptcy, or pay. Totally at their discretion.
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.
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
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.
20% off the tariff-inflated price, so customers only pay the original price (until the tariff refund is used up, then it's back to the inflated price again).
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.
Sarcasm aside, I agree the refunds should go back to consumers, not the importers. I don't have a source, but I have to imagine the lion's share of companies that were hit with tariffs increased their prices, and the consumer paid the bill.
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.
There are three co-equal branches of government. SCOTUS is to blame for the chaos, but so is Congress. The Republican members of Congress could have joined the Democrats at any point to reassert Congressional power over tariffs and taxation. They chose not to.
They also chose to appoint the conservative majority on the Supreme Court which made these choices.
Any sensible administration implementing such an obviously suspect tariff regime could have easily put the tariffs in a kind of escrow instead of just pretending it's novel policy was trivially constitutional.
Blaming SCOTUS here is not out of the question, but they should not be "entirely" to blame, unless you think it's totally fine to run the Executive branch like you're trying to get away with something. It's not.
Of course not, you're right. I think the parent comment implies the responsibility of the Trump administration, the same way criticizing a botched police response implies blaming a mass shooter for a crime.
A sensible administration would not have used emergency powers to implement worldwide tariffs because they don't like how the world economy is shaping.
Elizabeth Goiten (Brennan Center) testimony to a senate committee on May 22, 2024 (a nice summary of the general issue of executive use of emergencies)
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.
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 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.
One of our vendors started charging a 10% tariff fee for parts ordered from Switzerland... we passed that fee directly on to our customers as a line item. I can't imagine the headache when (not if) they come to us expecting a refund for that.
The government raised taxes, consumers paid the costs, and companies will take the spoils. I don’t think this is what people voting MAGA intended, but will they realize that they got screwed?
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!"
There are more conflicts happening right now than in World War 2. Meaning, World War 3 is already here. I don't know why everyone is pretending it's not happening, the people doing it are calling themselves the Department of War.
I'd curious specifically about FedEx (and other parcel shippers like UPS if they filed suit as well.) They operated as a broker--they collected many of those fees from individuals who bought something overseas and when it was shipped in, FedEx paid the tariff then then billed the receiver. If FedEx wins a refund will I get paid back for the fee I paid them? I don't expect I'll see the "brokerage fee" because the labor was expended whether the tariff was legal or not and is not part of the refund they'd get, but I'd appreciate if I see the $79 I paid them to cover the tariffs for some Arca Swiss camera parts. I honestly haven't heard anything specific on that matter.
Most of them have promised to issue refunds to customers if and when they get refunded the money.
FedEx:
> Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges. When that will happen and the exact process for requesting and issuing refunds will depend in part on future guidance from the government and the court.
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?
Most everything was probably bought with credit/debit cards. The individual records exist. Just using your Amazon etc order history should be dead simple
I think the tricky bit is less proving you bought something, and more proving that the thing you bought cost more than it otherwise would.
As I understand it (which isn't a lot), if you paid a tariff on an overseas order you're theoretically due it back, although that might require taking the government to court, which is gonna cost more than the settlement for most people.
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.
The real thing is, price changes tend to be proportional to tariffs. If the tariff was $20, the consumer got charged $40 more. But not uniformly -- every price is different, there are other non-tariff price changes too, prices can increase before or after tariffs not exactly at the same time, etc.
If companies want to try to refund customers and come up with their own formulas for that, that's great. But usually there isn't some objective right answer that can be imposed externally.
It's difficult because some companies ate all the tariffs, some passed the costs to consumers, and some split the costs between suppliers, themselves, and consumers.
I think they should split it by giving a portion to companies and the rest to consumers.
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 reason companies invest is not because they have money.
And edit because I explained it badly:
That means that yes, getting the tariffs back can make them hire, because there may be more people wanting to buy things. Sending them the tariffs money will do absolutely nothing.
But even the first part isn't guaranteed, because you can't rollback the economy, things don't return to where they were, they go into some other place.
US imposes tariffs, companies increase cost to offset price, consumers front the bill. Companies sue government, judge orders refunds, companies pocket money and keep prices at current rate. The people get screwed over twice.
So the consumer ate the tariff (I saw somewhere that they just got passed on for the most part). Now the companies are just gonna get the money back and either enrich their exec staff or shareholders?
It feels like a company should have to prove they didn't pass the tariff on to consumers in order to collect this.
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?
This is a way of spending taxes on the public, the kind Denmark does. It isn't "no private property; everything belongs to the govt".
Also, if we are redistributing taxes to fund endless wars and subsidizing almond/avocado farmers, and propping up public money to ensure banks don't collapse, we are already in socialist territory. Have always been. But God forbid we spend the money on healthcare ... that's "taking us back to Mao".
The judge said the repayment process should be straightforward and grew impatient when a Justice Department lawyer said the government hadn’t yet formalized its position on refunding the tariffs, which President Trump imposed by citing a decades-old law. “Your position is clear,” the judge said. “The Supreme Court told you what your position is.”
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.
Some of us knew about the un-lubed dildo of consequences. And warned our fellow countrymen. But they appear to have joined a cult and were immune to reason. Now we are all riding the said dildo, whether we asked for it or not.
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.
So effectively US citizens have been paying an extra tax, which money flowed to certain companies.
I can't wait to hear the justifications that will follow from the Trump government.
I swear to God, the generation that voted the most for this stupid SoB will go down in history as the most stupid so far, like straight out of the Idiocracy.
Trillions of world wide economic damage, irreparable damage to transatlantic cooperation, death of post ww2 order. All because McFuckity Fuck saw online that brown man bad and there’s inexplicable feminist agenda, also somehow America needs to become great again because being top world economy is not good enough. Also soyjack memes.
Did the people pay for the majority of the tariffs, like 80% percent? But the companies are getting this money? How is this now just a transfer of what I paid to these companies? They just get free money at my expense?
... 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.
> 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?
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).
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.
> 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.
Well that would seem like a potentially huge mess depending on the size of the purchases. Not to mention that the purchasers are not all easily tracked down. I wasn't suggesting it because it was perfect; I was suggesting it because it might be viable.
> 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.”
Yeah. You're confusing capitalism and how businesses generally work with this particular tariff. Which, based on these comments, was often/always just passed through to customers.
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.
> 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.
I didn't have to deal with it, but from other comments, most of the international shippers also charged a hefty fee to broker the tarrifs. Expect not to get that refunded.
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
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.
> But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
The legal opinion itself was non public? If they couldn't use that they would first have to put up the money to pay the legal fees to find out how likely their bet was to pay off.
And just to put this in writing too, I would be shocked if we don't find out later that a lot of the volatility was a way for a few people to make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money when there's more volatility. So all the flip flopping on tariffs yes/no might very well be manipulating markets...
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.
Not just a Whitehouse insider, the guy actively doing the policy he was probably being advised was illegal and would be overturned.
And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.
Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.
The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.
>but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced
yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject. It would have been completely insane if the white house staff didn't believe the same. So I guess I'm actually surprised at the white house staff believing what everybody else did?
> yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject
That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....
You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.
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.
> but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.
There was no such memo because OLC isn’t full of dummies. Maybe the talking heads on CNN said the case against the tariffs was a slam dunk, but you don’t get split courts at multiple levels for cases that are slam dunks.
The two answers I'm hearing to my question so far are that either this decision was so obvious that anyone could have predicted it without insider information, or that this was a split decision that the administration could not have predicted ahead of time.
You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.
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.
If you go to a random lawyer in Wyoming and ask them to write "expert opinion" then what you'll get would probably be something standard, written by a junior associate, or maybe even produced by ChatGPT.
If the White House orders "expert opinion" on potential Supreme Court ruling then the chances are that the expert asked to prepare it is someone who plays golf with some of the SCOTUS judges.
So those two "expert opinions" might not bear the same weight.
Is a lawyer working on a case allowed to short the stock of his client?
Why not?
(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)
And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)
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.
> 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.
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank. Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration. Everything they do is heavily regulated. If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict, they literally couldn't do a single thing that makes up their business and would be hobbled.
I think a lot of people feel like people who have one foot in a heavy regulated industry shouldn't have their other foot in the regulatory body that regulates that industry.
> If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
You are just out of your depth in this area. You don't understand what Cantor has done here, you don't understand what Howard can or cannot do in his role.
Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.
There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.
Almost all companies issuing stock to employees also ban them and their family members and fellow house residents from trading in the same stock to avoid insider style improprieties and the SEC has frequently prosecuted such cases. Wild that congress and WH staff have zero such restrictions even in 2026!
>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.
One might argue it should fall under a different technical label, but whatever label one uses (A) it stinks of corruption and (B) it's only the tip of the iceberg.
People entrusted with government authority to do work for the public shouldn't be personally profiting from how they decide to wield that authority. Imagine a policeman that arrests people while placing bets about how long that person will be jailed, what they'll be charged with, or whether they'll be convicted.
The objection that "it's unfair, they know something other bettors don't" occurs first not because it's the biggest issue, but because it's easier to prove.
The bigger problem is making improper decisions with their work-powers in order to personally profit, a trust and separation which they've already destroyed by placing the bets in the first place.
it doesnt have to be black and white. they knew enough to spin up a business that when it is overturned they could make money... which means they knew the probability was high.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Seriously. These monarchists in this thread contort themselves in every which way to make sure their dear leader is always in the clear.
Shall we forget the shitcoin rugpull Trump has used to launder billions from foreign leaders?
The transparent bribes he's taken to his political org that have resulted in pardons for smuggler, drug lords and murderers?
The $200 million dollar contract Kristi Noem funneled to a company an operative of her for "marketing", formed days before the contract was awarded?
The secretary of labor using funds to throw herself a lavish birthday party and travel around the country?
Kash Patel flying himself and his girlfriend around on an FBI jet with an expensive security detail so they can party?
The fact that insiders are openly insider trading in crypto, the stock market, and these betting markets (both the illegal Venezuela and Iran invasions had huge extremely suspicious bets right before actions were taken).
This barely scratched the surface of this term alone. These fascists are so transparently corrupt.
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.""
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.
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?
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.
> .... 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.
(2) Is that SCOTUS functions as a legitimization process
(3) Is that de-legitimizing this particular tariff regime, while trump immediately pivots to a new tariff, is a best case scenario for the admin insiders as it lets them profit immensely from refund corruption while still pivoting immediately to a new tariff. The vote was one in favor of the Trump insiders.
(4) It is hilarious that the best counter your argument et al includes is just glossing over the insider aspect, which means you're just yielding the entire underpinning to this thread to me, which is more than enough to satisfy the premise on its own even if you reject this particular vote as being in the service of the admin insiders.
Of course, if you just smugly quote half of what I said and keep ping ponging one side or the other when I study the other half, citing muh changed argument, then you can play this fraudulent argument that pretends I "changed" what I said. This reveals your argument as a deliberate fraud so I will leave you the last word to lie further to the ether, rest assured I will not read whatever non-sense follows.
You 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!).
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" (?!)
> 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.
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.
If there was any justice at all left in this country, a class action lawsuit with the entire US population as the class would arrange for the tariff refunds to go to individuals, not companies.
That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.
might not be 'insider trading' with respect to the court decision, but Lutnick had influence with the president and could affect tariffs being paid by the various companies who were squeezed in to considering selling (or actually selling) their tariff refund rights. And tariffs changed many times over months, so... looking at what companies actually sold to CF might reveal some patterns that raise eyebrows. But nothing will be done about it.
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.
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.
Thank you. Yes, this is the reason to be concerned. Not because it's extortion, or anything else like that, but because having to evaluate a counterparty's degree of connection to the State before doing a deal is not the way that free enterprise or open markets are supposed to work. Lutnik Jr's involvement puts every other bidder for these contracts at a disadvantage (even if it's illusory, and he's not personally acting badly), and distorts pricing signals. It's unfair not (or not primarily / directly) to customers, but to the rest of the legitimate players within an industry.
Yes, I know this isn't the first time this has happened, and that people likewise benefit from connections to governments led by other political parties. Those instances are also bad!
> 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 naive. For larger firms, targeted product and industry-specific tariffs can be a game-changer. For example, Trump created a set of exemptions related to smartphones built in China that weren't officially aimed at Apple, but since Apple sells approximately 50% of US smartphones (for a much larger slice of profit) and 80% are made in China, this disproportionately affected a single company. But there are other areas where the administration can also use Federal power: see, for example, Trump's use of Federal approval to block the Netflix/WB merger as one example.
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?
Corruption is so endemic now that people stop seeing it. This was the same in the former USSR, when I was there I would be utterly amazed by the degree to which everybody had normalized corruption, it was not considered anything wrong or special at all, it was just the way business was done. You could effectively buy your way into or out of anything.
>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).
For example, NCR (National Cash Register) used to have their sales people "accidentally" break competitive machines (dropping them on the floor was common -- these were old precision mechanical adders), then offer an NCR machine as a "free" replacement.
You could argue this wasn't extortion. What are the damages? The replacement machine was higher value, so the shop was "made whole", and was only temporarily without a cash register. Of course, the competitor got screwed out of support contracts + renewal, and it was made very clear to the stores they had to play ball. (Unless they wanted to buy a replacement, and watch it also get smashed.)
It's the same with the tariffs:
Adopt a bunch of Trump dictated policies, or they steal your money (the mechanism is not providing exemptions). Later, they "refund" the payments (so, no further court action), but somehow the money does not go back to the people that it came from.
Ignoring the businesses that sold their rights to collect, all sorts of prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The consumers that are paying the increased amounts at retail are not going to see a cent of this settlement. Where is my check?
Also, it's unclear how many Supreme Court justices changed their votes because of the sold rights to collect refunds. The company involved gave a lot of money to Trump and conservative campaigns, and many of the justices are in his pocket. It's also unclear if they bribed the justices directly, since that's not public data.
On top of that, when these "securities" were sold, it could have been made clear that they would come with favoritism in the future. Did businesses that paid up get special exemptions? Were they threatened with intimidation that then didn't happen because they sold the rights?
All of the above is standard practice with this administration. They had the benefit of the doubt, but burned through it years ago.
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.
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.
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.
You agreed with your supplier on a price. You paid it.
Doesn’t matter that part of the price was tariffs or component costs or labor. Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact. These things are entirely immaterial to the meeting of the minds when you execute the contract for sale.
The only moderately fuzzy case is going to be if there is an outright line item for “tariff charge” - I always thought companies were being a bit reckless explicitly adding these as line items due to this exact uncertainty. Very few companies are going to have a perfect 1:1 ratio here so there is some definite business risk in doing so.
And no, not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies” - that’s an absurd claim on its face. The ones I know hurt the most and nearly put out of business due to needing to raise prices certainly were not. And there is zero way they could afford refunding at a 1:1 ratio now.
> Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact.
It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax, not the middleman who ferried it from here to there. The unclear method for how to accomplish this is where the grift will be coming in.
> not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies”
I did not claim this. I claimed most of the money that will be refunded will go to Trump toadies.
> I did not claim this. I claimed most of the money that will be refunded will go to Trump toadies.
That would require most of the money collected being from trump toadies to begin with. Anyone that regularly imports goods as a matter of business will also be requesting their refunds. Only a tiny fraction sold their rights.
> It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax.
The entity that paid the tax was the one that wrote the check to the federal government. They chose to (or not) pass all or a portion of those costs down to their customer. The customer in the end chose to purchase the goods or not.
If your landlord charges you $100/mo more in rent due to a property tax that was later reassessed due to a mistake, they are under no legal obligation to refund you that money. You chose to rent at the higher price.
Simply put: Your recourse was at the time of transaction. After that it’s no longer your money. Plenty of companies get refunded errant taxes paid years later due to law being misapplied or even found outright illegal. This is no different.
The only marginally interesting legal question here is going to be the companies that separated it out as a line item. I imagine this will be roughly as enforceable as “fuel surcharges” are on airline tickets - where the surcharge has nothing to do with the actual real time cost of Jet fuel. It will likely devolve all the way down to specific clauses in contracts, most of which will not cover this to start with. So it may as well be a “I’m wearing black socks today” tax as a line item would be my guess. Very interested in the first few test cases though!
These illegal taxes weren't only on optional goods. I couldn't opt out of buying everything for a full year. I disagree that it's OK for the government to force everyone in the country to give a $130B gift to business owners via an illegal action, the vast majority of which will be going straight to the wealthiest companies & people, and/or Trump's personal supporters. It's just straight-up theft.
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.
As coming from a semi-corrupt country I can assure you that the Commerce Secretary can have massive access to classified information from any part of the public sector, including any Court. For him all this is one to two telephone calls away. The question is if he has influence in the decisions, which elevates the corruption to the next level.
For the nonbelievers: why did only a company led by close relatives of a government member and no other bet on a game that is based on a Court decision?
> Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing.
Even if they hadn't made that bet were consumers going to get anything? The refunds would go to whoever directly paid the tariffs, which will generally be businesses.
I doubt that many businesses will go the effort of figuring out how much of any price increases they did while those tariffs were in effect raised the price for each individual customer, and issue refunds for that amount.
FedEx, I believe, have stated they will refund all consumers who paid them the tariffs, which they then paid to the gov. Nothing yet about the fees also incurred by consumers to pay the tariffs, but there are at least two class actions filed already on this subject, IIRC.
Grocery stores track their customers very extensively and cash purchases are fairly rare. I'm very confident that Costco, for example, knows everything that every member has bought from them since the tariffs started.
Indeed. And the concept of passing any refund on is just untenable. My example is to highlight how unreasonable such an expectation is.
And while this specific tariff situation is silly, and annoying, it's been going on forever. There were cases of tariffs on lumber from Canada, with presidents of all stripes. Some were fought, won in court, and nary a person questioned "where is the refund for the consumer".
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.
Isn't Lutnick literally the chief architect of Trump's tariff policy? I can hardly imagine anybody more responsible for creating this outcome besides Trump himself, who would presumably have appointed somebody else if Lutnick hadn't been available.
> I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.
Given the above, you really don't think Lutnick had a "better view" of the likely outcomes and timelines, including the Trump admin's planned and gamed out responses to certain outcomes, than the average Joe on the street? I think that's extremely, uh, naive.
Who cares who came up with the illegal tariff implementation, the point is that a member of the government profited off of their own administration's incompetence.
It's obscene. I don't care whether a law was broken or not.
You want to profit from government incompetence? Stop being part of the government then.
People are quibbling about the definition of insider trading. I will just say when fortunes are made by those who just happen to be in close proximity to power, it's not good for the country. Kushner is the prime example here.
> when fortunes are made by those who just happen to be in close proximity to power, it's not good for the country
When was the last time this wasn't the case? Back in the 1960's maybe? I started following politics around the time I started college - 1993 - and this has been true in my entire "following politics" part of life
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.
Jesus Christ, how pathetic you are. I severely doubt you’re just a bored billionaire, which leaves only the option of a bootlicker. Why do you simp for them? Do you expect a bread crump to fall off the table? Or are you a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thinking you belong to them?
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.
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.
A different understanding of the extension of the presidential pardon when it creates a conflict of interest from the SCOTUS would be one possible path.
Cantor Fitzgerald lost most of its staff in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Lutnick sued American Airlines, eventually settling for $135 million [1]. He claimed this would largely go to the family of hte victims.
Turns out most (if not all) of it went to the senior executive team, wtih himself being the primary beneficiary [2].
This is also the same Howard Lutnick who the DoJ accidentally released a photo of with Jeffrey Epstein [3]. People noticed and they removed it. People noticed that too so they restored it.
The reading I’ve done elsewhere suggests that it’s far from a done deal that companies will be able to extract refunds from the government. For example if doing so offends Trump and causes him to try to extract concessions elsewhere. Or if the government simply drags their feet on various ways.
“Trump’s buddy’s son offers 20c/$” 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.
Cantor Fitzgerald is sleezy, but you’ve got the reason wrong. They’re sleezy because they bet against the administration.
But it’s not “insider trading.” They didn’t have insider information on how the courts were going to rule—especially where it was a 6-3 split with three conservatives siding against the administration. And a split in the appellate court as well, with two republican and two democrat appointees siding for the administration.
And Cantor had nothing to do with imposing these tariffs in the first place. Trump loves tariffs. He has been wanting to do these tariffs since the 1980s. He imposed tariffs in his first term and campaigned on imposing them now.
So you’re taking a story about Cantor Fitzgerald displaying disloyalty to Trump and trying to turn it into a “corruption” story that makes no sense.
> ...bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value...
So - with umpteen $billion on the line, and all the big-shot lobbyists and Washington insiders and experts that all those huge companies had on payroll to advise them - they decided to sell at 20 cents on the dollar.
Theory: When the far-smarter-than-us money bets big, they might know the actual odds.
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.
I will be happy to be wrong, assuming that happens.
I want everyone who associated with Epstein to be under oath at some point, and I think we should prioritize based on how many pieces of evidence their name appears on.
You think Trump will ever let himself be questioned under oath? Any rational person knows that his refusal is tantamount to an admission, but I bet he does not see it that way.
Sadly, you're right on the money here, nobody will ever spill the beans.
Problem is Willie knows everything (he was the president for fuck's sake) and is just lawyer-speaking his way out of admitting that he along with multiple former presidents (including the current one) were/are compromised by a hostile nuclear-armed foreign actor's (read: "ally's") intelligence agency. He can't sing, or the whole charade comes apart.
The contagion fallout is massive. This involves several of the wealthiest people on the planet, tech leaders, business leaders, politicians in powerful countries...and involves several major geopolitical actors...and involves some unspeakably disgusting actions to children.
What they sold isn't a security regulated by the SEC. There is no "insider trading". There aren't enough facts to determine if what his sons did was ethical and/or legal.
It’s not that surprising. The entire tariff saga was one trading opportunity after another for insiders who knew which announcements were going to come out.
Lutnick is a particularly corrupt individual though. He’s in the Epstein files like Trump and Musk and Thiel. But he also took over Cantor by suing the widow of Cantor after his death. And now he hands the company to children and has no shame about openly nepotistical decisions like this.
"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.""
Trump should sign an executive order to appropriate the money for himself. Then all the other rich folks will learn what it feels like to be on be on the losing end of government wealth redistribution. I think Trump would deserve the money as tuition fee!
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.
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.
They also put out of business a bunch of upstart businesses that could threaten their oligopoly. In addition they acquired huge tracts of agricultural land for cheap from all the farms that went bankrupt.
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.
Agreed, this is the real take away most people will be left with. Not only did we all pay higher prices, instead of using that money to pay off the debt we give it away to business managers who were never out that money in the first place. Politically, that doesn't accomplish what some think it does. Midterms are coming up in 8 months...and the results of the house are going to be drastic no matter which side wins. Either Trump can do what he wants or the government will be deadlocked and nothing will happen for 2 years. Neither seem like good outcomes.
Even if the tariffs are not a lot, they are potent negotiating leverage.
They def knew they were lying about much they were collecting
They def knew they were lying about who is paying
They lied to the public about that and got a bit of extra creme in the bag but the effect was mostly leverage, which 'kind of worked'.
They could have very effectively used illegal tariffs to actually do 90-deals-in-90 days, knowing the case would take time to draw out.
But - they have no plan.
Trump does not think 9 months ahead - he has grudges, grievances, and he pursues whatever grievance he wants to that day.
He doesn't forget and will push his staff to go against old enemies
The point is not to improve the economy, bring back jobs - the point is to 'Look Tough' and 'Stick it to the Libs and Foreigners' and to get elected again, failing that, rig the elections (note, his secret signed Executive order with all sorts of things regarding elections)
The 'high visibility' of ICE is not a bad thing for him - it very much in purpose to show MAGA base that he's cracking liberal, immigrant and brown people heads.
Jamming those Somalis on the concrete is exactly the optics he wants for his base.
It was only until people started dying when newsmax/fox started questioning the legitimacy and some support is lost - and not even that much among the base.
Same thing with tariffs: he will play grievance, the 'Liberal Courts' are against, him blah blah and MAGA will be fine with it.
The problem is that Core MAGA is maybe really only 20% and Soft MAGA another 15% and that's not enough to win.
But it's almost.
Narrative, performance, grievance, populism, social media, information sphere - that's it.
It's Post-Truth.
People keep talking about these through the lens of the 'issues', it's completely wrong headed - policies don't matter, only perception etc.
Reality does have a way of sneaking through though, and 'hardball reality' can change minds. People do understand Epstein, tariffs when they pay attention, unemployment, prices, 'war mostly bad' etc. etc..
This is White House Reality TV, not really policy and that's the best way to understand it.
The entire Cabinet have completely been unable to explain the tariff policy - they keep changing their views there is no consistency - it's the same with the war in Iran - everyone's saying different things, objectives are unclear.
It's irrational too think that there is 'policy' here, this is whim, impulse, populism.
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.
Tariffs almost never make sense, unless it's an industry that's super important for your own survival.
Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.
Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.
US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.
Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.
It's not that it's conveniently ignored. It's that a services economy, while lucrative in the good times, leaves you lacking self sufficiency and resilience. We should never have let manufacturing leave to the extent that we did, all in the name of efficiency over all else.
Of course it goes without saying that launching an absurdist comedy interpretation of a global trade war is not the way to fix the problem.
I don’t have a source for this handy, but I believe that in terms of goods produced, manufacturing is actually still alive and well in the US. It’s just that this is done by a much smaller and more automated workforce.
The importer pays directly. There are three ways the importer can deal with the burden of that. In most cases it will be a combination of all three of them.
1. Raise the price they sell the imported item for.
2. Eat it.
3. Lower the price they are willing to pay the exporter.
For the Trump tariffs it has been overall it has been about 90-96% #1 and #2 and 4-10% #3. I haven't seen a breakdown of how #1 and #2 is split.
> 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.
The "logic" is/was that this was a lie directed at his "low information supporters" who tend to simply "believe" whatever he tells them without question. Those same supporters would have been very much against having a "tax increase" levied upon them, but so long as he lied to them and told them "the other country pays the tariffs" then they were fooled into not understanding the tariffs were just a tax increase and so were "in support" of the tariffs.
That was the sole logic -- although there have been times when I've seen news blurbs that have made me wonder whether Trump himself actually believes his own lie about "other countries pay us" in regards to tariffs.
Next time you wonder why a Trump supporter has a bad argument, remind yourself there was a nonzero number of them who literally drank bleach and Lysol after he told them too.
I like how you're being downvoted for pointing out an objective, documented fact. [1]
Of course an important corollary is that Trump did not, in fact, tell anyone to drink bleach or Lysol. His supporters were stupid enough to do it on their own initiative, at Trump's mere suggestion that it was worth looking into.
I am old enough to remember when the great minds at DOGE found $10T a year of fraudulent Social Security spending which would have cut the total governement spending from $7T a year to negative $3T.
The biggest damage is the souring of relations with other countries, who now no longer see the US as a reliable business partner. They have nudged countries in the EU to rather look to China. The longer Trump is in office, the bigger the damage gets. The long term course might already be set away from the US and towards China. The loss for the US cannot even be estimated yet.
Also the US is working hard on losing their military dominance. Engaging in unnecessary wars, offending its allies left and right, who are now starting to invest more into their own military, since they have learned, that they cannot rely on the US any longer, while China plays the catch-up game and is getting closer to US military capability every year.
Reputational damage is enormous of course and the US hands China easy PR wins after wins.
This seems to be the current trend. Projecting this into the future, it seems likely, that in 10, 20, 30 years from now, the most powerful global player might be China, instead of the US. Obviously, in decades a lot can happen. Future US administrations however have got a lot of repair work cut out for them. How can they convince international partners, that this does not repeat in the future, the next time a crazy administration is elected? Can they at all? Or can they fix the political landscape in their own country in that timespan? It kinda looks like their are stuck.
```
The government has collected perhaps $180bn in IEEPA tariffs. Over the past year 1,800 companies—including Goodyear, a tyre-maker, and Costco, a retailer—have filed lawsuits to protect their right to a refund should the Supreme Court overturn them. They are now owed this money, equivalent to roughly 5% of the profits companies generated in America last year, or 0.6% of GDP—plus interest, compounded daily at an annual rate of 6-7%.
```
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.
Countries act on people's emotions. Friends and enemies are a pretty good description of a lot of international politics, much better than a dispassionate analysis of interests.
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?
This isn't the Trump/MAGA foreign policy, american exceptionalism is a century old and only gotten stronger. If anything MAGA is the full blown expression of this phenomenon.
The difference was that in the past US understood that you "rule" better when you surround yourself with enemies.
Now the policy is to dictate conditions left and right.
From the 2nd half of the 20th century until Trump there was the view that the US lead a large group of "western" democracies (in the sense that Japan is "western") in a loose coalition that was NOT zero sum. The US provided a lot of benefits to others, this collaboration produced an overall surplus[1], which the US got a large share of.
The new view seems to be based on a zero sum, transactional view of international affairs. In this mode every interaction must clearly benefit the US more than any other participant. We have to clearly "win" every time.
[1] and this is not even counting 2nd order "surplus" from things like no longer having to fight world wars.
You may be right, but the honesty has destroyed an insane amount of good will and privilege that the US previously enjoyed (deservedly or not). To throw that all away for literally no benefit is . . . not good.
The $130B is only part of the economic costs of the tariffs. Many companies and people changed their buying behavior, either paying more to a domestic company or maybe a company in a country with a lower tariff rate or changed their behavior to not require an item all together. We've also heard about small companies that have gone out of business.
I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.
The purpose of the tariffs was to appeal to the part of the domestic constituency that has belief in protectionist policies as a good in and of themselves rather than a means to an ends, not to achieve some direct material policy outcome outside of the scope of political enthusiasm.
this reminds me of the Indian government's (read Modi's) demonetization efforts of 2016 which caused 80+ deaths and huge headaches for the common people. In the end, more than 99.3% of the demonetized money came back in circulation. Elect a clown, expect a circus. true for the oldest democracy in the world and also true for the largest democracy.
No, Trump manufactured negotiating leverage out of thin air— nothing, really. He extracted concessions on something like a bluff. Plus, didn’t he also extract a budget that in retrospect wasn’t appropriate had the tariff revenue been removed?
The budget wasn't appropriate regardless of tariffs. And OP's point is that 130B is a tiny number that no where near makes up for the loss in tax revenue from the very very stupid "OBBB".
To steel-man their sentence, it’s a large number to extract from US citizens, nearly $500/person. But it’s a small number in terms of government deficit and current spending
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?
The studies I’ve seen seem to indicate that tariffs can work but are like running with scissors.
The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.
Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.
There are better ways than tariffs. For instance, you can increase VAT and use the proceeds to decrease taxes on work, or cut taxes for specific sectors. This way your economy is more competitive internationally, while avoiding the distorsions of tariffs.
Tariffs can also be footguns as they increase costs on imports for upstream supplies, making downstream local producers less competitive. VAT is much better for this as it is refunded when you export.
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.
"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.
-They only got 130B
-They planned to fix all this with 100B?
I see what you did there. 70B eh? They only got 50B. A paltry 20B?
The real number though, was gotten in a relatively short time. And now replacement tariffs are on the way. And many companies have re-thought of manufacturing outside US with the higher tariffs always being the possibility in the future too.
If the OP had (incorrectly) rounded 130B to 200B, OP's point would have still been perfectly understandable and correct. Your odd quibble about rounding completely misses the point. Whooosh.
I mean 130 billion is a significant amount of money, and it's more remarkable given the tax is unnoticeable to the average consumer and primarily impacted foreign manufacturers (either forcing them to move to the US or more friendly countries). The deficit wasn't built in two years and I don't think it could be solved in two years either.
If I illegally forced a bunch of people to give me $130 billion, the courts would not stop at making me pay them back. I and all my co-conspirators would go to prison forever. We should accept nothing less here.
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.
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.
I recommend _Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense_ by Rory Sutherland [0]. It will help improve the understanding of marketing and hows business operate. This is an over simplified summary.
There are mainly two reasons people buy something.
1) It is seen as good deal.
2) It is seen as luxury.
Your premise hinges on only #1 and ignores #2. #1 is also limited to select products. How many bed sheets or cars do you need?
It also rejects the Friedman doctrine [1]. The continual following of this doctrine is what has lead to the enshitification of many products and services. Non-living wages also came out of following it. Living wages harms profits.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-...
In DHL the link to get tax documents is already broken for a year or so, so I cannot get VAT back on DHL shipments.
With FedEx I can but it's a manual process of screenshotting a bank transaction and emailing a specific email address with a shipping number.
When tariffs started all the servers of the shipping companies went down.
So I highly doubt they will just do some computer magic.
From experience I assume they will "accidentally" run into all kinds of technical difficulties making it a 274 step process to get the money back.
For scale: Shopify, a software company by heart, with 170bn market cap and 3500 engineers employed, does not have native VAT support, required in the Europe which accounts for 15-20% of their revenue. All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.
So to assume a shipping company will just work some computer magic is really far fetched. The FedEx page only lets you login after you refresh the page exactly once already for more than a year.
If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.
If corporations are allowed to implement regulations in faulty ways the economic system stops working and fraud is easier than ever.
Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "anti regulation". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.
Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "pro fraud". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and regulations is something that corruption does not allow for.
Even though it's a sensible claim, and since you're implying causal relationship, can you provide a source for this? I'm not European so I wouldn't know.
If only it would be that simple :)
In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT number the flow might take even 12h+ to verify it. If you can do that verification you can use 0% VAT rate but if not you need to use a different VAT rate.
For B2C you need to support several scenarios: if company is outside of EU it needs to register for IOSS, if it’s a EU company that sells to other EU countries it needs to register for OSS or in each EU country for VAT separately but also a mix of both is possible. You can decide to no register to OSS special procedure but then there’s a sales limit before you have to register and you need to track it. Otherwise, you need to maintain special OSS registry with sales records and three pieces of proof that customer is based in the member country. Some EU countries have XML invoices (Italy, Romania, Germany soon) or mandatory invoice APIs (Poland), of course there’s actually no common EU standard so it depends on where the company is based.
Finally you need to choose a VAT rate for that country and they also change occasionally, e.g. Slovakia, Romania and Estonia all changed their highest rate just last year.
This is the bare minimum you need to support. There’s a lot of edge cases, e.g. it matters what country you actually ship from, and if you use e.g. fulfillment there are special procedures for that as well, or if you resell in B2B there are chain transactions which have their own set of spaghetti rules.
I ordered a tent from overseas and they classified it as both a food product and an aluminum product and charged me 600 bucks in tariffs.
I'm fighting to get it back but they keep ignoring me with polite "were really busy" replys.
What should happen is that $X of the budget should be put into escrow for the next administration to use after these criminals make their way out.
Both the people who voted for the criminal to be president. And the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump.
2. The US senate is horribly malapportioned and gates scotus nominations.
There is no mystery about that.
The only people who are innocent are the people who have huge power in their hands and literally made decisions that caused this.
That was why things were rushed and there wasn’t a proper primary. Yes, they could have held a very late/quick convention and would likely not have picked Kamala, but anyone getting the nomination at that late stage would still have been hugely in the back foot.
Focusing on the Democrats (who are hot garbage) is such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture (yes, it's pretty clear from the Epstein files that they did everything they could to destroy those young children's minds and hearts for sport, and that was the real 'game' they were playing).
But by all means, carry on about bad tactics in the election, surely that is the 'root cause' here.
Voting doesn't matter the only thing in history that has ever changed corrupt politicians is violence.
Instead of being mad at companies that were forced to pay illegal tariffs, who now want to recoup some of that, be mad at the cause of illegal tariffs. Letting the govt keep the money by fighting over who is a victim, hold the govt feet to the fire so they learn not to do this to begin with.
The system is capital.
Unavoidable
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.
I'd pretty much grown up believing that that's how the US worked post-slavery (aside from occasional deviances from the rule). Since the start of the pandemic, I've had quite the awakening.
There was no VAT payable on the car tax of imported cars, only the ELV (ei-arvonlisävero, literally "not value added tax").
The ELV idea was that for locally bought new cars you did have to pay VAT on car tax, but for used EU imports that was not legally possible (cannot charge VAT again when importing used item from another EU country), so an equivalent non-VAT tax was invented so the full tax (inc. VAT/ELV) stays the same.
But this was unfair for e.g. the reason that Finnish companies buying cars could deduct Finnish car tax VAT on local new cars on their VAT return but not the car tax ELV on imported used cars (since it was not VAT).
> we can and should trust the authorities.
Well, Finland has a fairly competent government usually for the most part. That mantra will not work in many other countries though - such as Germany. Just look at what Merz is doing; his left hand does not know what the right hand should do ...
For anyone who was still under the illusion that the tariffs would make any impact on the government debt, hopefully this illustrates that both the tariffs and the ridiculous DOGE effort were never really about the budget.
[0] https://iran-cost-ticker.com/
Thats pretty much every President in the last century.
They all lose court cases.
No other president violated laws (and please don’t start with Monica Lewinsky or that time Obama wore a tan suit…)
As of now, the law applies to me. I am on that "other side". It officially does not apply to Trump at all. And billionaires and administration can safely ignore it, although there is at least pretension of the law technically maybe applying to them.
The law is constantly applied to Trump and his administration. The judicial branch keeps reining him in: National guard, ice, tariffs—-literally TFA for Pete’s sake.
Parent post isn’t about any specific law, it’s about wanting to see a result and working backwards from there: my political opponents should go to jail.
Guess what will happen? The administration after that will send your politicians to jail. And the bananificiation of the US will be complete.
If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Trammel up the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much!
The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.
Sometime later FedEx sends me a weird bill for some random seeming amount of money I owed. They had a link or email or something to basically refuse to pay. I did refuse to pay. The shipper ended up communicating with me to determine I was going to refuse to pay and I found where Fedex had on the website that indicated the shipper was responsible for all fees. I assume the randomness of it was related to tariffs but I wasn't going to pay anything like what they sent me.
I do hope that some repercussions come of these terrible economic policies and the shipper gets their money back from Fedex, but as a company or as an individual I don't think a company's policy to send random bills after delivery is valid either.
The politicians did this. They could pass a law tomorrow forcing the companies to refund windfalls from the illegally levied taxes.
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...
It's not really, this is the result of having a flawed democratic system.
What do Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Nicaragua, etc and now US have all in common?
They are ALL presidential or semi-presidential republics where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party.
Winner-takes-all democracies, aren't democracies if only part of the electors is represented in the executive.
Presidential republics are super dangerous, they combine the perils of dictatorships with a cherry on the cake of being able to claim popular mandate.
Seriously, it's not a coincidence that the last parliamentary republic to turn into an authocracy has been Sri Lanka 50+ years ago.
I agree about parliamentary systems being better, but they are still vulnerable. It doesn't matter if the electorate is in favor of strongman.
But that doesn't describe the US right now. The problem is that the GOP is providing at least enough support to enable the behavior that we currently see. If congress as a whole wanted to stop things they could.
I actually quite like the US system but the combination of first past the post voting and party politics appear increasingly likely to strangle us.
Several framers of the constitution expressed deep concerns about the potential for coordinated non-governmental "factions" taking over government via elections.
Unfortunately, despite going to great efforts to limit power centralization internally, concerns of external centralization were not heeded and there are no limits on the coordination of the US government via non-governmental organizations such as parties.
This might have been a prophesy:
> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.
> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
> [Omitted here, but at this point he worries that even a foreign country could weaponize a party to take control of the country, via elections.]
> There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true, and in Governments of a Monarchical cast Patriotism may look with endulgence, if not with layout, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.
-- George Washington [0]
States used to operate independently enough that the same party in different counties and states might have varied views. But today, both parties have become highly centralized and homogenous from local to federal levels. Now intensely centralized themselves, they are well prepared to each compete to centralize government as an extension of a single party.
And given it has become relatively easy to do so, the incentives are now there for parties to treat elections as war, and party control of government as the highest priority policy at all times. Incentives don't mean it has to happen, but ... well we know how that goes.
The winner take all elements, where a party that gains a power edge over the other is in a better position to entrench themselves further, if not permanently, are also in play.
When competition for power devolves into a dichotomy of complete wins or losses, the most powerful decision makers spend their time continually competing, with little attention left for concerns about competent governance or the public's well being.
The current state of the unchecked US party system is the number one problem for the country. As all other problems migrate downstream from it.
The biggest problem isn't "which" party gains control. The problem is that any party could ever obtain majority control in all three branches.
[0] https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw2.024/?sp=241&st=text
This is good: we live in objectively good times and safe/wealthy countries where problems are relatively minor and we should focus on debating and compromising, not having know-it-all unbounded captains.
Our first focus is risk management: not having systems that make it easy for the Putin/Erdogan and Trump-like individual to ruin everything.
But the foreign policy is where the president's authority is outsized. So that's why Trump is so focused on it, it's one of the few areas that he can directly control.
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...
(To some extent, this was to facilitate tariff fraud. As an American business buying abroad, your foreign supplier would take over responsibility for importing into the US, and then you could pretend you were unaware it was fraudulently undervaluing its imports to lower effective tariffs paid. Any possible consequences for the foreign entity getting caught doing fraud are minimal.)
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?
If the supermarket that raised prices wants to pass that on to their 1000 buyers that would be for them to deal with, not you.
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...
Now the government says they can’t refund because the amount of money is too big and they already spent it.
They sure took their time with this one.
Whereas in these cases the government is potentially harming the entire public every single day that the courts don't act.
No, Section 122 tariffs have never been used prior to Trump turning to them after the Supreme Court decision striking down the IEEPA tariffs, and, the states suing the Administration argue, the explicit sole statutory purpose for which they were allowed in the 1974 law creating the power can only possible to exist under a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, which the US has not had since 1976.
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.
Edit: Sorry autocorrect thought I said moronically,
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.
You won't get the money back that you overpaid in the meantime.
The Chipotle earnings calls were pretty much the prime example of this. CEO more or less expressing amazement at how elastic consumers were on pricing, and that due to the increases not impacting sales volume they planned to continue ramping until it did.
I think plenty of companies were operating off the idea that price competition was far more important than it turned out to be. I note the baskets of those shopping next to me in the grocery store and this rings true. Due to a myriad of reasons - consumer behavior being a large one of those - buying behavior based on price just isn’t as much of a thing as it was 30 years ago. Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.
Couple that learned helplessness with the monopoly situation for many (most?) markets in the US and it’s no surprise to me that once the dam broke there is no going back. The price discovery moving forward is going to be much more aggressive. It will take a generation or three to get back to thrifty consumer behavior unless we see something actually painful to the average person on a scale of the Great Depression.
I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?
That is because the extra money in the economy also inflated salaries. Inflation is annoying but it basically has no impact on affordability over the long run. Everyone just assumed that their increases in salary were a well earned recognition of their contributions, but the increases in prices was pure corporate greed and corruption. They were both the same thing. People got more money and prices went up.
Can we have small watchdog programs that deeply study market conditions for critical resources (like peanut butter/eggs/milk/bread/etc.) and produce detailed data on why prices are what they are and what they estimate prices should be? It would be fascinating to see like detailed breakdowns and raw profit margins on different goods instantly.
Oh, so it was always only about a money transfer from the customers (who fully and wholly bore the cost otlf the tariffs already) to the companies which will now get the refunds for what their customers already covered?
What a robbery.
I'm not defending that. Just explaining.
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...
Effectively closed
> except profits would be down and shareholders would be angry.
Right. So when profits turn into losses, you expect shareholders to be OK with the stock price falling to zero and they lose their entire investment? You think this is "fine"?
was it a tariff you paid,
or a carrier fee related to the tariff?
These are likely to be refunded, because even if you were the purchaser of the product, you were the importer of record and paid the tariff, not a downstream buyer who paid an increased price because of the tariffs.
This should be interesting!
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.
Sarcasm aside, I agree the refunds should go back to consumers, not the importers. I don't have a source, but I have to imagine the lion's share of companies that were hit with tariffs increased their prices, and the consumer paid the bill.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
The number the New York Fed came up with is 90% was passed onto the consumer.
They also chose to appoint the conservative majority on the Supreme Court which made these choices.
Blaming SCOTUS here is not out of the question, but they should not be "entirely" to blame, unless you think it's totally fine to run the Executive branch like you're trying to get away with something. It's not.
A sensible administration would not have used emergency powers to implement worldwide tariffs because they don't like how the world economy is shaping.
[0] https://fivepoints.mattglassman.net/p/the-court-ieepa-and-th...
National emergencies: Chadha wasn't the problem
https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/national-emergenc...
Elizabeth Goiten (Brennan Center) testimony to a senate committee on May 22, 2024 (a nice summary of the general issue of executive use of emergencies)
[PDF] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Go...
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).
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.
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.
FedEx:
> Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges. When that will happen and the exact process for requesting and issuing refunds will depend in part on future guidance from the government and the court.
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/international/us-tariff...
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.
As I understand it (which isn't a lot), if you paid a tariff on an overseas order you're theoretically due it back, although that might require taking the government to court, which is gonna cost more than the settlement for most people.
If companies want to try to refund customers and come up with their own formulas for that, that's great. But usually there isn't some objective right answer that can be imposed externally.
I think they should split it by giving a portion to companies and the rest to consumers.
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.
or give it to shareholders.
Reinvesting it to generate more revenue now that prices are lower again is the obvious capitalist thing to do.
The companies aren't going to rehire workers out of charity. They do it because it makes them more money.
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.
And edit because I explained it badly:
That means that yes, getting the tariffs back can make them hire, because there may be more people wanting to buy things. Sending them the tariffs money will do absolutely nothing.
But even the first part isn't guaranteed, because you can't rollback the economy, things don't return to where they were, they go into some other place.
Just crazy transfer of wealth in broad daylight.
It feels like a company should have to prove they didn't pass the tariff on to consumers in order to collect this.
Like the saying goes, they get you coming and going.
This is a way of spending taxes on the public, the kind Denmark does. It isn't "no private property; everything belongs to the govt".
Also, if we are redistributing taxes to fund endless wars and subsidizing almond/avocado farmers, and propping up public money to ensure banks don't collapse, we are already in socialist territory. Have always been. But God forbid we spend the money on healthcare ... that's "taking us back to Mao".
The judge said the repayment process should be straightforward and grew impatient when a Justice Department lawyer said the government hadn’t yet formalized its position on refunding the tariffs, which President Trump imposed by citing a decades-old law. “Your position is clear,” the judge said. “The Supreme Court told you what your position is.”
Read from that what you will... as a voter, or the POTUS.
Good time to specialize in "tariff litigation", if you're a law firm.
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.
I swear to God, the generation that voted the most for this stupid SoB will go down in history as the most stupid so far, like straight out of the Idiocracy.
Trillions of world wide economic damage, irreparable damage to transatlantic cooperation, death of post ww2 order. All because McFuckity Fuck saw online that brown man bad and there’s inexplicable feminist agenda, also somehow America needs to become great again because being top world economy is not good enough. Also soyjack memes.
Protests are next, mid term elections will be furious.
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?
Gee, I don't know, receipts ?
Also simply revenue on the business end
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).
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.
You could ask for a tariff refund from those suppliers.
It doesn't need to be a perfect solution, you could just give everyone a flat refund similar to class action payouts.
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.
I didn't have to deal with it, but from other comments, most of the international shippers also charged a hefty fee to broker the tarrifs. Expect not to get that refunded.
lol
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.
The legal opinion itself was non public? If they couldn't use that they would first have to put up the money to pay the legal fees to find out how likely their bet was to pay off.
And just to put this in writing too, I would be shocked if we don't find out later that a lot of the volatility was a way for a few people to make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money when there's more volatility. So all the flip flopping on tariffs yes/no might very well be manipulating markets...
And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.
Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.
The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.
yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject. It would have been completely insane if the white house staff didn't believe the same. So I guess I'm actually surprised at the white house staff believing what everybody else did?
That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....
You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.
We have no reason to believe that if such a memo exists it was used improperly, but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.
BTW you've got an extra Justice on the Supreme Court. Should be 6-3, not 7-3.
There was no such memo because OLC isn’t full of dummies. Maybe the talking heads on CNN said the case against the tariffs was a slam dunk, but you don’t get split courts at multiple levels for cases that are slam dunks.
You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.
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.
If you go to a random lawyer in Wyoming and ask them to write "expert opinion" then what you'll get would probably be something standard, written by a junior associate, or maybe even produced by ChatGPT.
If the White House orders "expert opinion" on potential Supreme Court ruling then the chances are that the expert asked to prepare it is someone who plays golf with some of the SCOTUS judges.
So those two "expert opinions" might not bear the same weight.
Why not?
(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)
And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)
In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
Where is that? Who approved his request?
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.
There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.
Uh, essentially betting against a policy your former head put in place isn't a typical thing?
You would absolutely steer clear of this. There's plenty of other things they could be doing, no?
Just to make the point. This is such a typical thing investment banks do, that (especially) they are the ones doing it and nobody else?
(and/or have an explicit approval workflow that effectively does the above).
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.
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.
One might argue it should fall under a different technical label, but whatever label one uses (A) it stinks of corruption and (B) it's only the tip of the iceberg.
People entrusted with government authority to do work for the public shouldn't be personally profiting from how they decide to wield that authority. Imagine a policeman that arrests people while placing bets about how long that person will be jailed, what they'll be charged with, or whether they'll be convicted.
The objection that "it's unfair, they know something other bettors don't" occurs first not because it's the biggest issue, but because it's easier to prove.
The bigger problem is making improper decisions with their work-powers in order to personally profit, a trust and separation which they've already destroyed by placing the bets in the first place.
Did they know it was illegal? Any more than say, the Biden administration "knew" that forgiving student loans were illegal?
it doesnt have to be black and white. they knew enough to spin up a business that when it is overturned they could make money... which means they knew the probability was high.
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
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.
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.
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
In this case X was the tariffs. You are out of your depth.
If 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.
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.
Shall we forget the shitcoin rugpull Trump has used to launder billions from foreign leaders?
The transparent bribes he's taken to his political org that have resulted in pardons for smuggler, drug lords and murderers?
The $200 million dollar contract Kristi Noem funneled to a company an operative of her for "marketing", formed days before the contract was awarded?
The secretary of labor using funds to throw herself a lavish birthday party and travel around the country?
Kash Patel flying himself and his girlfriend around on an FBI jet with an expensive security detail so they can party?
The fact that insiders are openly insider trading in crypto, the stock market, and these betting markets (both the illegal Venezuela and Iran invasions had huge extremely suspicious bets right before actions were taken).
This barely scratched the surface of this term alone. These fascists are so transparently corrupt.
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-...
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.
You can blame RBG for one of those. It fascinates me that Biden made the same mistake RBG did, I’ll always wonder how different the would would be if she had stepped down and the democratic party had held a real primary.
I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
It's unfortunate how it went, but I respect her decision.
I can buy that.
You guys should have nominated Amy Klobuchar as VP so you had a credible backup when it became apparent that Biden was too old to run again. That’s a mistake that’s going to continue holding you back, since Biden made South Carolina the first primary state: https://www.masslive.com/politics/2025/06/2028-dem-frontrunn....
As Obama said, “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
Ofcourse most American politicians are pathetic losers who immediately cave but judges are generally people who are used to dealing with thugs.
And if you ever wondered why judges cannot be fired by the Executive branch now you know.
Given that the 2/3 justices appointed by Trump voted against the tariffs, what's the implication here? That Trump deliberately picked anti-tariff justices just so he can engage in a rube goldberg plan to enact tariffs, buy tariff refunds on the cheap, and then have them revoked?
Any vote towards what the insider information pointed to was a vote 'for' the admin as they had financially engineered their winnings based on that. And meanwhile Trump immediately turned to a new tariff structure. The vote they gave was the strongest vote in favor of the admin insiders they could have given, and meanwhile didn't actually stop Trump from continuing on with the scheme.
Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.
Oh wait...
The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these justices.
You keep changing what you are saying.
(2) Is that SCOTUS functions as a legitimization process
(3) Is that de-legitimizing this particular tariff regime, while trump immediately pivots to a new tariff, is a best case scenario for the admin insiders as it lets them profit immensely from refund corruption while still pivoting immediately to a new tariff. The vote was one in favor of the Trump insiders.
(4) It is hilarious that the best counter your argument et al includes is just glossing over the insider aspect, which means you're just yielding the entire underpinning to this thread to me, which is more than enough to satisfy the premise on its own even if you reject this particular vote as being in the service of the admin insiders.
Of course, if you just smugly quote half of what I said and keep ping ponging one side or the other when I study the other half, citing muh changed argument, then you can play this fraudulent argument that pretends I "changed" what I said. This reveals your argument as a deliberate fraud so I will leave you the last word to lie further to the ether, rest assured I will not read whatever non-sense follows.
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!).
“ House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort...
I frankly do not understand your argument: "Some policymakers are sleazy (yes?), so it should be fine for all of them to leverage influence/access into personal gain" (?!)
This does not make sense to me.
What partially non-public information did he have? Be specific.
How would I know? I'm neither Lutnick nor his son.
My point is that there is an extremely obvious conflict of interest here. If your family business is directly affected by decisions and information of the public office that you hold, then the very obvious risk is that you are going favor official decisions that help your business (possibly to the detriment of the majority), and that you leverage non-public information for personal gain.
For this specific case, insider knowledge could be a precise understanding on the "shakiness" of the initial tariffs combined with an insider picture of ongoing legal cases against them (progress and expected success rate).
I'm not saying that Lutnick & sons comitted some kind of crime, but if you let your family business overlap with your public office this much, then the resulting scrutiny is more than justified, and you could make a strong point that such a situation should be avoided in the first place.
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 admin is just here to literally steal tax dollars.
That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.
Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.
What consumers will presumably never be refunded for are the increased prices they've been paying for imports of any kind (from Walmart, Amazon, grocery store) where someone else was the importer.
As for whether consumers should get anything, I’m sympathetic. It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? You’d have to quantify how much overhead they’ve paid in tariffs, and that seems like an IRS-scale job. Dealing with it at the scale of individual companies is at least tractable.
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, I know this isn't the first time this has happened, and that people likewise benefit from connections to governments led by other political parties. Those instances are also bad!
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.
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).
For example, NCR (National Cash Register) used to have their sales people "accidentally" break competitive machines (dropping them on the floor was common -- these were old precision mechanical adders), then offer an NCR machine as a "free" replacement.
You could argue this wasn't extortion. What are the damages? The replacement machine was higher value, so the shop was "made whole", and was only temporarily without a cash register. Of course, the competitor got screwed out of support contracts + renewal, and it was made very clear to the stores they had to play ball. (Unless they wanted to buy a replacement, and watch it also get smashed.)
It's the same with the tariffs:
Adopt a bunch of Trump dictated policies, or they steal your money (the mechanism is not providing exemptions). Later, they "refund" the payments (so, no further court action), but somehow the money does not go back to the people that it came from.
Ignoring the businesses that sold their rights to collect, all sorts of prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The consumers that are paying the increased amounts at retail are not going to see a cent of this settlement. Where is my check?
Also, it's unclear how many Supreme Court justices changed their votes because of the sold rights to collect refunds. The company involved gave a lot of money to Trump and conservative campaigns, and many of the justices are in his pocket. It's also unclear if they bribed the justices directly, since that's not public data.
On top of that, when these "securities" were sold, it could have been made clear that they would come with favoritism in the future. Did businesses that paid up get special exemptions? Were they threatened with intimidation that then didn't happen because they sold the rights?
All of the above is standard practice with this administration. They had the benefit of the doubt, but burned through it years ago.
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.
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...
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.
You agreed with your supplier on a price. You paid it.
Doesn’t matter that part of the price was tariffs or component costs or labor. Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact. These things are entirely immaterial to the meeting of the minds when you execute the contract for sale.
The only moderately fuzzy case is going to be if there is an outright line item for “tariff charge” - I always thought companies were being a bit reckless explicitly adding these as line items due to this exact uncertainty. Very few companies are going to have a perfect 1:1 ratio here so there is some definite business risk in doing so.
And no, not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies” - that’s an absurd claim on its face. The ones I know hurt the most and nearly put out of business due to needing to raise prices certainly were not. And there is zero way they could afford refunding at a 1:1 ratio now.
It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax, not the middleman who ferried it from here to there. The unclear method for how to accomplish this is where the grift will be coming in.
> not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies”
I did not claim this. I claimed most of the money that will be refunded will go to Trump toadies.
That would require most of the money collected being from trump toadies to begin with. Anyone that regularly imports goods as a matter of business will also be requesting their refunds. Only a tiny fraction sold their rights.
> It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax.
The entity that paid the tax was the one that wrote the check to the federal government. They chose to (or not) pass all or a portion of those costs down to their customer. The customer in the end chose to purchase the goods or not.
If your landlord charges you $100/mo more in rent due to a property tax that was later reassessed due to a mistake, they are under no legal obligation to refund you that money. You chose to rent at the higher price.
Simply put: Your recourse was at the time of transaction. After that it’s no longer your money. Plenty of companies get refunded errant taxes paid years later due to law being misapplied or even found outright illegal. This is no different.
The only marginally interesting legal question here is going to be the companies that separated it out as a line item. I imagine this will be roughly as enforceable as “fuel surcharges” are on airline tickets - where the surcharge has nothing to do with the actual real time cost of Jet fuel. It will likely devolve all the way down to specific clauses in contracts, most of which will not cover this to start with. So it may as well be a “I’m wearing black socks today” tax as a line item would be my guess. Very interested in the first few test cases though!
These illegal taxes weren't only on optional goods. I couldn't opt out of buying everything for a full year. I disagree that it's OK for the government to force everyone in the country to give a $130B gift to business owners via an illegal action, the vast majority of which will be going straight to the wealthiest companies & people, and/or Trump's personal supporters. It's just straight-up theft.
For the nonbelievers: why did only a company led by close relatives of a government member and no other bet on a game that is based on a Court decision?
Even if they hadn't made that bet were consumers going to get anything? The refunds would go to whoever directly paid the tariffs, which will generally be businesses.
I doubt that many businesses will go the effort of figuring out how much of any price increases they did while those tariffs were in effect raised the price for each individual customer, and issue refunds for that amount.
Show up with a banana peel at a grocery, and say you want a tariff refund for the banana you paid cash for, 6 months ago?
There's no tracking for almost all of tariff affected purchases.
And while this specific tariff situation is silly, and annoying, it's been going on forever. There were cases of tariffs on lumber from Canada, with presidents of all stripes. Some were fought, won in court, and nary a person questioned "where is the refund for the consumer".
> I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.
Given the above, you really don't think Lutnick had a "better view" of the likely outcomes and timelines, including the Trump admin's planned and gamed out responses to certain outcomes, than the average Joe on the street? I think that's extremely, uh, naive.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a...
https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/howard-lutnick-trump-tariffs-s...
It's obscene. I don't care whether a law was broken or not.
You want to profit from government incompetence? Stop being part of the government then.
When was the last time this wasn't the case? Back in the 1960's maybe? I started following politics around the time I started college - 1993 - and this has been true in my entire "following politics" part of life
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.
I'm saying the public tide shifted and the legal reality set in that they weren't going to get sympathetic rulings...which they don't care about anyway since it's not their money and the tariff threats already had any desired effects sought.
POTUS was floated the idea that they could enrich themselves, so the decision was made, communicated to the Secretary of Commerce and to the SCOTUS judges.
> And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?
Nothing to do with them. Narcissists don't worry about the future of others, except as a narrative to sell their personal ambitions.
Some people don't believe the administration is that flippant. I think it's obvious they are having fun.
Or just pay attention to the oral arguments. The justices seemed very skeptical of the Trump administration, and betting markets reacted accordingly.
They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.
This would have been the case no mattern what.
Correct.
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...
I don't buy into the conspiracies, but it is quite odd how he always manages to come up on top.
https://www.reddit.com/r/911archive/comments/1r5rkk3/howard_...
“Trump’s buddy’s son offers 20c/$” does not seem like a terrible deal for getting your money out.
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/howard-lutnick-criticis...
https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a...
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.
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.
...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.
I want everyone who associated with Epstein to be under oath at some point, and I think we should prioritize based on how many pieces of evidence their name appears on.
You think Trump will ever let himself be questioned under oath? Any rational person knows that his refusal is tantamount to an admission, but I bet he does not see it that way.
Problem is Willie knows everything (he was the president for fuck's sake) and is just lawyer-speaking his way out of admitting that he along with multiple former presidents (including the current one) were/are compromised by a hostile nuclear-armed foreign actor's (read: "ally's") intelligence agency. He can't sing, or the whole charade comes apart.
The contagion fallout is massive. This involves several of the wealthiest people on the planet, tech leaders, business leaders, politicians in powerful countries...and involves several major geopolitical actors...and involves some unspeakably disgusting actions to children.
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.
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-...
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...
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.
That isn’t drastic, that is already how it is.
Even if the tariffs are not a lot, they are potent negotiating leverage.
They def knew they were lying about much they were collecting
They def knew they were lying about who is paying
They lied to the public about that and got a bit of extra creme in the bag but the effect was mostly leverage, which 'kind of worked'.
They could have very effectively used illegal tariffs to actually do 90-deals-in-90 days, knowing the case would take time to draw out.
But - they have no plan.
Trump does not think 9 months ahead - he has grudges, grievances, and he pursues whatever grievance he wants to that day.
He doesn't forget and will push his staff to go against old enemies
The point is not to improve the economy, bring back jobs - the point is to 'Look Tough' and 'Stick it to the Libs and Foreigners' and to get elected again, failing that, rig the elections (note, his secret signed Executive order with all sorts of things regarding elections)
The 'high visibility' of ICE is not a bad thing for him - it very much in purpose to show MAGA base that he's cracking liberal, immigrant and brown people heads.
Jamming those Somalis on the concrete is exactly the optics he wants for his base.
It was only until people started dying when newsmax/fox started questioning the legitimacy and some support is lost - and not even that much among the base.
Same thing with tariffs: he will play grievance, the 'Liberal Courts' are against, him blah blah and MAGA will be fine with it.
The problem is that Core MAGA is maybe really only 20% and Soft MAGA another 15% and that's not enough to win.
But it's almost.
Narrative, performance, grievance, populism, social media, information sphere - that's it.
It's Post-Truth.
People keep talking about these through the lens of the 'issues', it's completely wrong headed - policies don't matter, only perception etc.
Reality does have a way of sneaking through though, and 'hardball reality' can change minds. People do understand Epstein, tariffs when they pay attention, unemployment, prices, 'war mostly bad' etc. etc..
This is White House Reality TV, not really policy and that's the best way to understand it.
The entire Cabinet have completely been unable to explain the tariff policy - they keep changing their views there is no consistency - it's the same with the war in Iran - everyone's saying different things, objectives are unclear.
It's irrational too think that there is 'policy' here, this is whim, impulse, populism.
There is no script. They get him to believe and think certain things, also, looking for money on the backside. Deals, freebies.
I see Trump Plazas all over the Gulf after this is over if he does not have a hard landing, which is also very possible.
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
Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.
Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.
US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.
Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.
Of course it goes without saying that launching an absurdist comedy interpretation of a global trade war is not the way to fix the problem.
1. Raise the price they sell the imported item for.
2. Eat it.
3. Lower the price they are willing to pay the exporter.
For the Trump tariffs it has been overall it has been about 90-96% #1 and #2 and 4-10% #3. I haven't seen a breakdown of how #1 and #2 is split.
It's paying more for something just to keep it domestically available for purposes of national security.
The "logic" is/was that this was a lie directed at his "low information supporters" who tend to simply "believe" whatever he tells them without question. Those same supporters would have been very much against having a "tax increase" levied upon them, but so long as he lied to them and told them "the other country pays the tariffs" then they were fooled into not understanding the tariffs were just a tax increase and so were "in support" of the tariffs.
That was the sole logic -- although there have been times when I've seen news blurbs that have made me wonder whether Trump himself actually believes his own lie about "other countries pay us" in regards to tariffs.
Of course an important corollary is that Trump did not, in fact, tell anyone to drink bleach or Lysol. His supporters were stupid enough to do it on their own initiative, at Trump's mere suggestion that it was worth looking into.
1: https://www.poison.med.wayne.edu/updates-content/kstytapp2qf...
This is an interesting way to frame a tax on Americans, but it aligns with this administrations actions.
The DOGE refund cheque is of course, in the mail.
Also the US is working hard on losing their military dominance. Engaging in unnecessary wars, offending its allies left and right, who are now starting to invest more into their own military, since they have learned, that they cannot rely on the US any longer, while China plays the catch-up game and is getting closer to US military capability every year.
Reputational damage is enormous of course and the US hands China easy PR wins after wins.
This seems to be the current trend. Projecting this into the future, it seems likely, that in 10, 20, 30 years from now, the most powerful global player might be China, instead of the US. Obviously, in decades a lot can happen. Future US administrations however have got a lot of repair work cut out for them. How can they convince international partners, that this does not repeat in the future, the next time a crazy administration is elected? Can they at all? Or can they fix the political landscape in their own country in that timespan? It kinda looks like their are stuck.
``` The government has collected perhaps $180bn in IEEPA tariffs. Over the past year 1,800 companies—including Goodyear, a tyre-maker, and Costco, a retailer—have filed lawsuits to protect their right to a refund should the Supreme Court overturn them. They are now owed this money, equivalent to roughly 5% of the profits companies generated in America last year, or 0.6% of GDP—plus interest, compounded daily at an annual rate of 6-7%. ```
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/02/26/a...
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?
The difference was that in the past US understood that you "rule" better when you surround yourself with enemies.
Now the policy is to dictate conditions left and right.
The new view seems to be based on a zero sum, transactional view of international affairs. In this mode every interaction must clearly benefit the US more than any other participant. We have to clearly "win" every time.
[1] and this is not even counting 2nd order "surplus" from things like no longer having to fight world wars.
No one is or ever was planning on fixing any "holes".
Trump is drilling holes all over the boat and taking what he can.
After he's dead, others will have to deal with the sinking ship.
I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.
We’re definitely not going to get even a reduction in healthcare costs any time soon.
I wonder if your thoughts would be any different if they managed to get enough to actually pay off the deficit?
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4872657-us-goods-trade-defi...
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.
Which is it? A number can't be small and large at the same time.
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?
The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.
Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.
Tariffs can also be footguns as they increase costs on imports for upstream supplies, making downstream local producers less competitive. VAT is much better for this as it is refunded when you export.
> “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...
Sounds a bit like Brexit.
I see what you did there. 70B eh? They only got 50B. A paltry 20B?
The real number though, was gotten in a relatively short time. And now replacement tariffs are on the way. And many companies have re-thought of manufacturing outside US with the higher tariffs always being the possibility in the future too.
The idea that consumers don't notice higher prices is wild.
> and primarily impacted foreign manufacturers
Also not true?
This was the plan from the get-go:
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
There are mainly two reasons people buy something.
1) It is seen as good deal.
2) It is seen as luxury.
Your premise hinges on only #1 and ignores #2. #1 is also limited to select products. How many bed sheets or cars do you need?
It also rejects the Friedman doctrine [1]. The continual following of this doctrine is what has lead to the enshitification of many products and services. Non-living wages also came out of following it. Living wages harms profits.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine