Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce | EUROtoday

Donald Trump will seemingly nominate Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, to be commerce secretary. CNN and the Financial Times report it. Lutnick, who has been co-chairman of Trump’s presidential transition workforce since August, has till now competed with hedge fund supervisor Scott Bessent for the function of Treasury secretary, supported by Elon Musk.

At Trump’s marketing campaign rally in Madison Square Garden final month, Lutnick stated the United States was extra affluent within the early 1900s, when “there was no income tax and all we had was tariffs.” “We had so much money that we brought together the biggest businessmen in America to try to figure out how to spend it,” stated Lutnick, 63, who helps increased tariffs in step with Trump who has pledged to impose tariffs of 60% on items from China, in addition to 10% duties on items from different nations.

Lutnick’s life was marked by tragedy. Two-thirds of his staff, together with his brother, died within the terrorist assault on the Twin Towers in 2001. The headquarters of his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, was within the World Trade Center. After the assaults he grew to become a fighter for his firm and his metropolis.

Mr. Lutnick has lengthy suggested Trump to rent associates, however solely the conscientious and succesful ones. Presumably he was not listened to when the tycoon selected the Minister of Defence, that of Health and that of Justice, writes the Economist which defines him as a brawler and a crybaby. However, the British weekly was maybe too optimistic: Lutnick was not too long ago criticized for having defended Robert F. Kennedy Jr for his completely anti-scientific positions which might hyperlink vaccines with the rising circumstances of autism amongst youngsters.

Owner of the penthouse of the Pierre Hotel in New York, he embraced the MAGA (Make America Great Again) motion and mythologized American employees “trampled by globalization.” He promised tariffs to the remainder of the world. In favor of tax cuts and cryptocurrency deregulation, Lutnick claims to personal “hundreds of millions of dollars” in bitcoin. In 2022 he engineered the itemizing of Rumble, a YouTube for the far proper, to present a platform to figures deemed too hateful for Big Tech. “This is the return of the Internet with free speech,” he stated on the time. “We just want the America we grew up in.”