Wall Street is venting anger at Howard Lutnick over the tariffs. The president’s controversial secretary of commerce looks like a simple target, but it’s worth asking if he’s the right one.
As someone in the White House recently reminded me, “Many people on Wall Street don’t like Howard, but they behave like this.
Certainly, in the past I have also heard warnings about Lutonic’s role in Trump’s tariff war, particularly his ability (or inability) to promote a clear need to correct anything that undermines US interests based on all the evidence. It’s great to make more here too. China has ruined us for years.
But it’s important to sell it. Bond markets maintain even more lighting than stock prices, and there are increasing signs that credit markets hate the administration’s uneven policies and hate the explanations of those policies. One day we have a lot of tariffs and the next day we have a pause. One day there is a waiver for high-tech companies, but the next day it is not.
Lutnick is blowing away all of the above and making the situation worse, his critics argue. Among his many gems defending Trump’s World War I tariffs, it’s magically creating many new factory jobs or telling Lutonic’s story: “Millions of human human people screw small screws to make iPhones – something like that will come back to America, it will be automated, great Americans, American merchant ships go to them.
Yes, it’s not good.
So behind the scenes there is a “Fai Altonic” move by Wall Street executives, reassigning them to more normal jobs, including lobbying Keatrump’s aides to get him out of tariff photos and traveling around countries visiting the local chamber of commerce.
The movement picked up steam over the weekend after the market was prepared for a massive rebound at the opening on Monday. The major tech companies appeared to be excluded from tariffs, but it wasn’t just Lutonic told them on Sunday’s show. “He’s a destructive ball,” one Wall Street executive witnessed Lutnick’s latest trade.
Meanwhile, your humble correspondent is being attacked with the nasty Lutnick story, as his brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald has invested heavily in AI, and will benefit from overseeing the factory as he will increasingly use robots and other modernized manufacturing industries.
Certainly, the Wall Street facility didn’t like Lutnick, a startup company with sharp elbows and volumetric nature. He ran tough and food. Plus, I’m skeptical of all these hits I’m getting. The AI story seems suspicious as Cantor (as he remains the majority owner during his vacation to the White House) is almost a minor player in AI races involving all banks and institutional investors and high-tech companies on the planet.
Above all, I like to prefer to negotiate with business transactions and trading partners, not Lutonic’s or Trump’s. Certainly, Lutnick is not the best spokesman for that cause, and markets like Trump’s PhD Director Scott Bescent (former currency trader) are currently taking the lead.
Still, Bescent has not said anything different to Rutnik after stripping him of his more eloquent account of trade. This means we are in a tariff war with a world that the market hates. The Treasury Secretary can spin all of Trump’s plans, but it doesn’t matter if his boss continues to throw curveballs while the market digests one of the most earthquake economic policy changes in decades.
In other words, take a break with Howard.
