Few figures illustrate the US’s switch from globalisation champion to globalisation sceptic better than Howard Lutnick.
The financier-turned-US commerce secretary generated his reputed $3.3 billion fortune on the back of transforming Cantor Fitzgerald from traditional bond brokerage into a global financial services powerhouse.
Now he describes globalisation – the force that propelled Cantor Fitzgerald into the big time – as a failed project that has “crushed American workers”.
Lutnick’s conversion to the anti-globalisation cause wasn’t instant. In 2016 he reportedly called then candidate Donald Trump a “buffoon” and hosted a fundraiser for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
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By 2020, Lutnick had, however, switched sides, supporting Trump over Joe Biden but stopping short of criticising globalisation or US trade policy.
And, like many Trump supporters, he kept his head down when the US president was accused of stoking the January 6th Capitol riots.
By 2024, however, Lutnick’s Maga conversion was complete.
Ironically, Lutnick’s narrative is almost verbatim the argument made by left-wing anti-globalisation protesters in the 1990s and early 2000s
In the lead-up to the November election, he relentlessly promoted Trump, hosted lavish fundraising events for him in the Hamptons while he reportedly donated up to $10 million of his own money to the campaign.
The Wall Street Journal described him as Trump’s “top emissary on Wall Street”.
Lutnick went on to co-chair the president’s transition team, landing himself a plum job as commerce secretary, in charge of the administration’s chief weapon, tariffs, in the process.
He is now the loudest and brashest defender of Trump’s new economic order.
His pushy overconfidence rubbed many up the wrong way at last week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, something he would probably take as a compliment.
While Trump held court in the forum itself, Lutnick did the off-piste stuff, turning up at several corporate events to excoriate Europe and bang the drum for the US.
At one, hosted by BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde walked out while former US vice-president Al Gore booed after Lutnick mocked Europe for lagging behind the US.
Amid the furore, dessert had to be cancelled.
While known on Wall Street as a cut-throat, Lutnick only came to public prominence in 2001 during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
On the day of the attacks, he was to be late to the office so he could drop his five-year-old son to school for his first day of kindergarten, a change in his daily routine that saved his life.
Every one of the bank’s 658 employees who were at the office that morning, including Lutnick’s younger brother Gary, died.
Cantor Fitzgerald’s headquarters occupied floors 101-105 of the north tower of the centre, located at and above the immediate impact zone.
After crying on national TV and pledging to look after the families of his fallen colleagues, Lutnick became an instant hero but later a pariah when it emerged he had cut off pay cheques to the families four days after the attacks.
Lutnick insists he paused the payments to save the company and later distributed $180 million in profits to the families.
If Elon Musk was Trump’s cost-cutting tsar, Lutnick works on the other side of the ledger as Trump’s chief revenue raiser, tasked with generating new revenue streams, tariffs being the obvious one.
He came up with the Trump gold card visa programme, which allows wealthy foreigners buy US visas for $1 million.
Lutnick articulates, better than Trump, the US’s current disaffection with globalisation, a process it once championed.
“That approach failed the US, crushed American workers and ripped apart most of the rest of the world as well,” Lutnick wrote in a recent opinion piece in the Financial Times.
“It destroyed industries, weakened supply chains and left working people in most western countries behind.”
Ironically, his narrative is almost verbatim the argument made by leftwing anti-globalisation protesters in the 1990s and early 2000s.
On tariffs, Lutnick said: “Contrary to the warnings of establishment politicians, these policies haven’t hurt the world, they’ve helped it.
“Even as the US has used tariffs strategically to defend our workers, global markets have grown stronger. Stock markets in Japan, the UK, Europe and South Korea are all up, way up.
“This is because the message is clear: when America shines brightly, the world shines,” Lutnick wrote.
But he plies a less conciliatory line at home, talking about how the US has been “ripped off” by its trading partners. He called Ireland and its huge trade surplus in goods with the US his “favourite tax scam”, a comment that sent shock waves through the Department of Finance here.
But Trump’s tariff agenda – the backtracking, the carveouts – has become a messy affair, largely because of the US president’s impulsive nature. Its economic impact on the domestic economy has still to play out.
US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said this week that tariff-related price increases were the source of most new inflation.
Trump and Lutnick both idolise the late 19th and early 20th century era of US capitalism, personified by tycoons such as JD Rockefeller and Henry Ford and when the federal government funded itself by means of tariffs rather than income tax, a nostalgia-driven impulse that characterises populist politics in many countries.
It was also a period of monopolistic power and income inequality (similar in some respects to now) that ended in the biggest stock market crash of all time and a prolonged economic depression.
