271–280 of 843 posts
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….
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 i…
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.
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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 j…
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.
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.
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 i…
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-...
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?
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.
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 peopl…
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Yeah, it is an interesting bubble to be in. I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. I definitely felt the difference in education with the new hires. Reading comprehension/attention was weak. AI will easily replace them, I guess. Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article fr…
>I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.
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It was non-zero but close to zero. 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 prec…
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…
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.
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> 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…
You just refund the people who pay the tariffs. You can't do any more than that.