Wall Street has been venting its outrage on Howard Lutnick over the tariffs. While the president’s controversial Commerce Secretary looks like an easy target, it’s worth asking whether he’s the right one.
As someone inside the White House recently reminded me: “A lot of people on Wall Street don’t like Howard, but they’re acting like this is his tariff policy – not the president’s.”
True, though in the past, I too have sounded the alarm on Lutnick’s role in Trump’s tariff war, specifically his ability (or inability) to promote the clear necessity to fix something that based on all the evidence continues to undermine the US interests. It would be nice to manufacture more stuff here as well. China has been screwing us for years.
Yet selling it is key: The bond market, even more than stocks, keeps the country’s lights on and there are growing signs that the credit markets hate the administration’s uneven policies, and explanation of those policies. One day we have massive tariffs, the next day there is a pause. One day we have an exemption for tech companies, the next day we don’t.
Lutnick is out there bloviating about all of the above, making the situation worse, his critics contend. Among his many gems to defend Trump’s World War Tariff is that it will magically create lots of new factory jobs, or in Lutnick speak: An army “of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing will come back to the America, it’s going to be automated, and great Americans, the tradecraft of America, is going to fix them, is going to work on them.”
Yes, not good.
That’s why behind the scenes, there’s a “Fire Lutnick” movement by Wall Street executives, lobbying key Trump aides to get him out of the tariff picture ASAP, get him reassigned to more mundane tasks like traveling the country visiting local chambers of commerce.
The movement picked up steam over the weekend after markets were prepared for a huge rebound at the Monday open. Major tech companies seemed to be excluded from tariffs, only to be told by Lutnick during the Sunday shows that wasn’t really the case. As one Wall Street executive put it after witnessing Lutnick latest on trade: “He’s a wrecking ball.”
Your humble correspondent, meanwhile, has been bombarded with nasty Lutnick stories – like how his brokerage firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, is heavily invested in AI and would thus benefit from onshoring factories as they increasingly use robots and other modernized manufacturing.
To be sure, the Wall Street establishment never liked Lutnick, an upstart with sharp elbows and voluble nature. He ran a tough, eat-what-you kill brokerage firm, and was very good at it. Plus, I’m skeptical of all these hit pieces I keep getting. The AI story seems dubious because Cantor (where he remains a majority owner on leave to the White House), is pretty much a minor player in the AI race that involves every bank and institutional investor and tech company on the planet.
Most of all, the tariff policy isn’t Lutnick’s but Trump’s, who likes to negotiate either in business deals or with trading partners by keeping them guessing. True, Lutnick hasn’t been the best spokesman for the cause, and markets like that Trump’s erudite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former currency trader, is now taking the lead.
Still, Bessent, after stripping down his more eloquent trade explanations, isn’t saying anything different than Lutnick, namely that we are in a tariff war with the rest of the world that the markets hate. The Treasury Secretary can spin Trump’s plans all he wants, but it won’t matter if the boss keeps throwing curveballs while the markets digest one of the most seismic economic policy shifts in decades.
In other words, cut Howard a break.
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