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Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

wsj.com

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Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#491

Post by burkaman »

rayiner wrote: post #264
burkaman wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tariff…

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.

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.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#492

Post by cheema33 »

whh wrote: post #246

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.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#493

Post by Calavar »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #183
philipov wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

> 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.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#494

Post by arrosenberg »

trymas wrote: post #256

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?! M…

The point is to bankrupt the country so the robber barons can buy up all the assets for pennies on the dollar.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#496

Post by adampunk »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #421
bogtog wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Think about how to actually pull this trade off. It isn't pushing a button on your trading app. Competitors cant enter this competition easily.

I thought his son just had a brain?

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#498

Post by philipallstar »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #280
philipallstar wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just refund the people who pay the tariffs. You can't do any more than that.

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.

Agreed; only the edge importer can be refunded by the government. Hopefully those businesses pass on the refund, but that's up to them.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#499

Post by b112 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #30

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…

Well it's not, but that aside, how would consumers ever get a refund?

Show up with a banana peel at a grocery, and say you want a tariff refund for the banana you paid cash for, 6 months ago?

There's no tracking for almost all of tariff affected purchases.

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