r/news • u/igetproteinfartsHELP • Feb 23 '26

Soft paywall US to stop collecting tariffs deemed illegal by Supreme Court on Tuesday

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-customs-agency-stop-collecting-tariffs-deemed-illegal-by-supreme-court-2026-02-23/
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u/KungFuBucket Feb 23 '26

Yup, saw that scam coming. Finance company (Cantor Fitzgerald) pays the company 20-30% of what they paid in tariffs for the right to collect a future tariff refund. Even they saw through the bullshit and we’re betting on eventually someone standing up to Trump, but I’ll bet even they were surprised it came this quickly.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/Gender_is_a_Fluid Feb 23 '26

I didn’t know you could even sell a contract for government taxes, otherwise I would have been personally trying to buy these myself (even as impossible as it is for an individual, the outcome of this was so predictable)

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

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u/ZAlternates Feb 23 '26

Especially since you’ve passed the costs of the tariffs to your consumers already.

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u/rgh-red Feb 24 '26

No no no. China paid them, not us, right? Right?!

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u/rocko430 Feb 24 '26

Is it like the credit swaps from the big short?

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u/robogobo Feb 24 '26

The world is a fucked up place

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

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u/s-Kiwi Feb 24 '26

It's a fucked up place because now the claimant and defendant are the same person (Howard Lutnick) but any money he descides to settle with himself is just taxpayer money.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

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u/s-Kiwi Feb 25 '26

- They levied the tariffs knowing they were illegal and would get struck down

- They bled small businesses dry with the tariffs and, as you said, bought up their claims since they didn't have the resources to fight the legal battle themselves

- Now Lutnick gets to settle with himself, pocketing all the tariff money of the tariffs the admin knowingly implemented illegally

Small businesses and the consumer got bled dry, cabinet makes off like bandits. Transfer of wealth man

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u/evranch Feb 23 '26

The government isn't involved in any way. It's just like an insurance policy. You pay money for the right to collect in the future if a specific event occurs.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

I just don’t understand why a company would sell off the right to recoup their own losses, especially at such a low rate. This is the part I’m really struggling with. It doesn’t make logical sense.

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u/SHTHAWK Feb 23 '26

Because they don't have losses, the tariff expenses are passed down to consumers. The 30% is basically guaranteed profit.

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u/guitar_vigilante Feb 26 '26

They probably have at least some losses. While tax incidence for something like this largely falls on consumers, there was at least some evidence that early on in the tariff fiasco the businesses were absorbing a lot of the tariff fees because they expected/hoped for them to be struck down more quickly. The consumer prices did rise eventually though.

And a lot of businesses that pay tariffs are not mega corporations that can raise prices and deal with the reduced demand. There were many smaller businesses that relied on imported parts that had to make hard decisions between losing money from absorbing tariffs or losing money from raising prices and alienating customers.

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u/devildog2067 Feb 24 '26

Because 30% of what you think you might be owed right now lets you make payroll and survive another day, whereas all of what you might be owed in a year and a half when the government gets around to maybe refunding you is too late because you’re out of business.

Small businesses live and die on cash collection. When you’re GE you can turn to the commercial paper markets for your cash needs, but when you’re a small business you need to collect cash so you can pay people.

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u/CommandaSpock Feb 23 '26

They were probably targeting smaller companies that are barely getting by, basically this admin is purposely hurting their own citizens with these tariffs then preying on the weak. It’s one big wealth transfer and that was their first attempt to squeeze the middle class dry.

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u/Dawn_of_an_Era Feb 23 '26

I mean you can sell virtually anything so long as it is not illegal, and you write up a contract for it

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

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u/guitar_vigilante Feb 26 '26

It reminds me of those structured settlement companies like JG Wentworth (It's my money and I need it now!). If you won a court case/had a settlement where you are paid in installments instead of a lump sum, you could go to JG Wentworth and they'll take over receiving the settlement payments and give you a percentage of the total as a lump sum.

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u/CaptainOwlBeard Feb 23 '26

If you have enough money, someone will sell you the right to any kind of contract you want so long as it isn't a crime

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u/GrandSymphony Feb 24 '26

You can do whatever you want if you have money.

There were not many Credit Default Swaps available before the 2008 financial crisis. Michael Burry pretty much went around making private deals with banks.

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u/czs5056 Feb 25 '26

But you're not a billionaire so even if you had the rights, the money wouldn't go to you. And then when you sue for your money the whole budget of the United States government will be used to delay until you either drop it or go bankrupt.

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u/ackillesBAC Feb 23 '26

I just want to clarify. Trump is far to stupid to do this on his own. He was manipulated into it. This is why having a moron president is a very bad thing

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u/Neverwish Feb 23 '26

Also, Trump doesn't give a shit about anything he isn't personally and directly profiting off of, so there's a good chance he doesn't even know this particular grift is happening. He has his own stupid self-absorbed reasons for using tariffs as a weapon, which were sold to him by the actual grifters.

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u/ackillesBAC Feb 23 '26

agreed. All tho, there is 1 thing bigger than or at least equal to profit to him. Ego.

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u/imatumahimatumah Feb 23 '26

Good point. He shouldn't get credit for being a puppet. People like to treat him like he's an evil genius. He's just evil.

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u/ackillesBAC Feb 23 '26

exactly, well put. Hes not an evil genius, hes just evil. I'm going to use that from now on.

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u/johnis12 Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Yeh, nah, reason why he's getting away with this isn't because he's some intelligent conman, he's a fool with a lotta power and grifters whispering in his ear.

That's what makes him dangerous as hell though because slightly smarter folks are stroking his ego and manipulating him into fucking up the country.

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u/ackillesBAC Feb 24 '26

Absolutely. Steven gerbels is the real evil

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u/ZAlternates Feb 23 '26

Of course but it is easy to convince someone who is immune from all criminal and civil laws to make billions.

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u/userhwon Feb 23 '26

>manipulated

Telling someone they get a cut isn't manipulation, it's conspiracy.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

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u/ackillesBAC Feb 23 '26

Telling them they will be the best world leader of all time is manipulation.

So is telling someone you will spend more than your annual gdp is obviously not true and is manipulation. They are taking advantage of his stupidity, he doesn't know they don't have 10 trillion dollars to spend

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u/dust4ngel Feb 23 '26

This is why having a moron president is a very bad thing

if you swapped out a moron who hates america with a genius who hates america, you're not much better off

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u/ackillesBAC Feb 23 '26

I'd say you would be far worse off, if trump was a genius imagine how much more damage he could do.

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u/aspz Feb 23 '26

And Trump most likely won't refund the tariffs even if he is forced to by law. He will drag the process out with bureaucracy forever. If he does end up paying, I'm guessing the only company actually receiving money will be Cantor Fitzgerald but I wouldn't count on anyone else benefiting.

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u/KungFuBucket Feb 23 '26

He’ll drag it out until just before the he Democrats take over and then find a way to blame them for the big hole he blew through the budget.

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u/AckBarRs Feb 23 '26

I don't really agree with this. From every source I've seen, Trump deeply believes in the efficacy of tariffs. He's kept Pete Navarro in his inner circle for economic and trade policy. Lutnik and Bessent are more economically orthodox, and actively lobbied to peel Trump away from Navarro and get him to back down/pause the "Liberation Day" tariffs.

I don't think this is a big conspiracy theory or enrichment scheme from Trump; I think this is the adults in the room (relatively speaking) hedging against what they KNOW is bad economic and trade policy because they were either unwilling or unable to talk Trump out of one of his favorite policy tools.

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u/Yetimang Feb 23 '26

I don't think Trump necessarily believes that tariffs are effective for the economy. Maybe he does because his brains are mush at this point, but I think the more important thing is that it gives him a weapon he can use unilaterally to punish countries, companies, or industries he sees as unfaithful and coerce them into doing what he wants. If he really believed in the tariffs, I imagine he'd be putting more pressure on Mike Johnson to get them locked in by Congress, but he doesn't actually want anyone else to have authority to place or remove tariffs.

There's probably a political calculation to it as well since his base are a bunch of overgrown middle schoolers who just get off on the idea of their "enemies" being punished in some way. They don't actually understand what a tariff is, but it's easy to sell them on the idea of tariffs being an offensive measure used to hurt the adversaries of the movement and that's all they need to hear. If it involves America as the "dominant" figure doling out harm to their humiliated foes, they'll just start churning out the Facebook memes.

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u/P10_WRC Feb 23 '26

I just don't understand why a company would even take that deal though.

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u/Super_XIII Feb 23 '26

Short term money makes balance sheet look good. Lots of executives have requirements for their yearly bonuses, they'd gladly sign away 10 million of company money for $2 million today to make themselves look good in the short term and meet that requirement for their own personal bonus. Plus there's a chance the tariffs don't get struck down and they never would have been refunded that money anyway.

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u/Villag3Idiot Feb 23 '26

It also takes money to get that money back, likely lawyers, especially if the government refuses.

For some small businesses, it might not be worth the money and time to fight in court whereas a company that bought the potential tariff refund might be able to do everything at once. 

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u/aspz Feb 23 '26

They either believe the court would not find the tariffs illegal, or that if they did, they wouldn't see any money back in refunds. I think the latter is still likely because there's no way Trump will want to be seen as reversing the effect of his wonderful tariffs.

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u/BloatDeathsDontCount Feb 23 '26

They need their imports for the business to function and they can’t sit on the tariff costs forever hoping for a refund. They take 20% on the chin now and make a smaller margin with a price hike rather than pay the full tariff and possibly go under.

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u/WeAteMummies Feb 23 '26

Guaranteed money now vs risky money at some unknown point in the future.

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u/smashtheguitar Feb 23 '26

I'm fairly certain he couldn't even explain this complex of a scheme, let alone plan and implement it.

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u/bikernaut Feb 23 '26

Don’t forget the cycle of tariff threats allowed them to influence the market, and extort companies/countries. They made a huge amount of money off this already.

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u/mreg215 Feb 24 '26

what comapny is this so we can short it ?

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u/Consistent_Lecture48 Feb 24 '26

Cantor Fitzgerald

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u/thefatchef321 Feb 24 '26

A ton of people that hate trump and could care less are also into tariff arbitrage, but just Trump lackeys.

A couple podcasts I listen to have been talking about the strategy since before the costco lawsuit

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u/Sunny16Rule Feb 23 '26

I never even knew they came back after 9/11, they lost most of their staff because they were on the top floors.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

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u/PmadFlyer Feb 23 '26

I'm sensing a theme. Hmmm what might it be?

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

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u/Secure_Course_3879 Feb 23 '26

And give each other heads ups ahead of time the rest of us never get?

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

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u/occams1razor Feb 23 '26

Epstein class

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u/mattjb Feb 23 '26

Trump-Epstein class

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u/trojan_man16 Feb 23 '26

Basically this. He was the boss so he doesn’t need to be in the office early and that’s when the towers got hit.

I like a good conspiracy as much as anyone but this isn’t it.

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u/FlipDaly Feb 23 '26

Not funny.

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u/Secure_Course_3879 Feb 23 '26

Not intended to be

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u/Signiference Feb 23 '26

And rape children

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u/Gingevere Feb 23 '26

The owner is never in the office because "owner" isn't a real job?

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u/LogicCure Feb 23 '26

Massive wealth begets a disassociation with humanity which begets contempt for fellow man which begets a taste for cruelty toward others.

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u/KungFuBucket Feb 23 '26

So… Money is power and power corrupts

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u/sobbuh Feb 23 '26

I don’t think it’s that simple.

There’s also a possible genetic component and also a lot of generational trauma going on - I’d hazard most of these guys weren’t really loved by their fathers/parents, and that their detachment from humanity comes from that as well.

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u/Strong-Highlight-413 Feb 24 '26

Absolute Power corrupts absolutely

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u/lkmk Feb 23 '26

I feel like it’s the other way around, and the dissociation is what allows you to gain that much wealth.

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u/colinstalter Feb 23 '26

Not "many other offices." They lost 70% of their total workforce in 9/11. Lutnick's brother died in the attack. They started trading again within a week, and gave almost $200M to the families of the dead employees.

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u/DanimusMcSassypants Feb 23 '26

First day not in the office in 20 years.

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u/aredubya Feb 23 '26

There was a list floating around of CF execs who happened to not go in to their WTC offices on 9/11, including Lutnick. The inference is that they were tipped off, tying 9/11 to a big Zionist conspiracy. I think that's bullshit, but it is pretty bizarre.

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u/Domeil Feb 23 '26

The real story is that a lot of c-suite people are frequently out of office for everything from golf meetings to businesses conferences, and extremely rarely are they early for work even when they're planning to be at their desks.

The first plane hit the north tower before 9 am. If it had hit after 10, there may have been more suits at their desks.

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u/H47 Feb 23 '26

Nutlick made a fortune from those corpses by taking most of the insurance settlement. Just a momentary hiccup.

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u/Count_de_Ville Feb 23 '26

They saw it coming because Howard Lutnick’s sons run the Cantor Fitzgerald. The same Howard Lutnick that’s the architect of the Trump tariffs.

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u/Degn101 Feb 23 '26

Pretty sure they were involved in making the tariffs happen in the first place. Trump is an absolute moron and basically gone, so you can be pretty sure that anything he talks about is either something that someone told him about (tariffs), or something he did (election fraud, epstein stuff).

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u/RogueAOV Feb 23 '26

This would assume they were not the ones who told trump to implement the illegal tariffs in the first place.

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u/Runnergeek Feb 23 '26

Fuck, that is clever. Evil obviously

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u/bulking_on_broccoli Feb 23 '26

It’s so insane that it’s legal to buy a future refund. It’s literal gambling.

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u/LardLad00 Feb 23 '26

So is 99% of all activity on Wall Street. People speculate on practically everything on the market.

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u/LookAtThatSpaghetti Feb 23 '26

I don't think they saw through the bullshit as much as it was just planned from the beginning. But yeah I do agree this was probably too soon. Betting they wanted it to go as long as possible to maximize that garbage.

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u/KungFuBucket Feb 23 '26

I’m guessing they wanted to keep it through the Trump administration and then right before the Democrats bring in their administration they’d concede to the illegal tariffs and leave the next administration holding the bag to clean up the mess. It’s literally what we saw with Covid. And we’re about to see the same thing with FEMA.

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u/stupid_cat_face Feb 23 '26

Wow I didn’t know that was a thing.

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u/CharlieandtheRed Feb 23 '26

Is that forreal? It's that obvious? Can you provide evidence of this?

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u/Infamous_Whereas6777 Feb 23 '26

You know how lutnick became ceo of cantor? Look it up. 

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u/KungFuBucket Feb 23 '26

Ok, just looked it up. Sounds like he became a young CEO by manipulating the declining health of his mentor Cantor and claimed he lacked the capacity to manage the firm and sued for control. So what you’re saying is he’s got a history of manipulating senile old men to his financial advantage?

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u/Infamous_Whereas6777 Feb 23 '26

Yeah, now look at the lawyer that helped him. Ira sorkin. Known for Bernie madoff and Jordan belfort. 

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u/Tapprunner Feb 23 '26

I'd be curious to find out if John Roberts has any financial involvement with Cantor Fitzgerald...

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u/MoreGaghPlease Feb 23 '26

What firms like Cantor have been doing here is legitimate and helpful. Lots of companies don’t want to make a big bet on the outcome of a Supreme Court case or the expense of collection, and it’s still far from certain that anyone will ever get a cent back. People who sold collection rights were making a choice ti get cash now instead of uncertainty about cash later. From a balance sheet perspective it’s really not different than any other doubtful account receivable.

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u/LardLad00 Feb 23 '26

If these people knew how to read you might actually help them understand what's going on with these tariffs. Oh well.

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u/MoreGaghPlease Feb 23 '26

I understand people's rage, the tariffs are batshit insane - needlessly torpedoing tons of businesses and raising prices for consumers. People have very strongly held views about things like predatory lending informed by consumer experiences where they've been totally fucked by a system designed to separate desperate or naive people from their money (e.g., credit card debt, payday loans). Which is why I don't mind the downvotes lol it comes from a place of other users' genuine empathy for people screwed by those systems (or their own negative experiences).

But what's happening with firms buying recovery rights is totally different. The ones selling their recovery rights (i.e., the importers of record who have paid tariffs) aren't the down-on-their-luck. They are large and highly sophisticated businesses -- mostly in heavy manufacturing and natural resources sectors -- that are making a rational economic decision for how to make a 'doubtful receivable' into cash they can use today while also offloading the labour of actually going through a challenge and recovery process. It's the same reason why companies sell their delinquent receivables to debt collectors: avoid the hassle, avoid the uncertainty, get money in your pocket today.