I mean at some point you just have to laugh.

TPM last fall:

A friend mentioned to me over the weekend that he’d heard about Wall Streeters buying up the rights to tariff refunds from big corporate importers. So the idea is that a Wall Street firm goes to an importer and says, you’ve now paid $10 million in tariffs. I’ll pay you $2 million right now for the right to collect the refund if courts ever end up deciding the tariffs were illegal. My friend had also heard that one of the most aggressive buyers was Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm until recently headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by Lutnick’s sons. Twenty-something Brandon Lutnick, pictured above on the left in a 2016 photo, is the current chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. (He must be hella talented!)

Damn, I thought: That’s a hot story, crooked as the day is long. But I’m not sure how I or we would track it down without better finance world sources. Still, it was worth some quick googling. It turns out this is happening and Cantor’s role has already been reported. Wired and others reported this more than a month ago.

In mid-July, according to Wired, Cantor was buying up the rights to your potential tariff refund at between 20 and 30 cents per dollar. Needless to say, I bet that price has gone up a lot since last Friday’s federal appellate court upheld the lower court ruling that almost all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. So in paper terms Cantor has probably already made a ton of money on this.

Now, before going any further I want to make clear that in itself this transaction is fairly unremarkable. A huge amount of modern finance is about making bets on uncertain outcomes, bets which can be structured in various ways. It might be commodities futures. In this case, it’s the right to collect a refund that may never happen. The sale of debt — a ubiquitous feature of modern finance — is similar. Purchasing debt, whether it’s a government bond or your home mortgage, is fundamentally a bet on the likelihood of repayment. I don’t want to belabor the point, only to make clear that the transaction in concept is neither outlandish or suspect, at least no more than any other part of modern finance.

All that said, it’s hard to imagine anything more emblematic of the Trump Era than what is for all intents and purposes still the Commerce Secretary’s company (yes, yes, arms length hand off to his twenty-something sons) making bets on something Lutnick himself has significant influence over. Indeed, far more important than whatever influence Lutnick has over tariff policy is that significant visibility he has into the bet’s probable outcome.

Lutnick can’t be certain what’s in a judge’s mind any more than Trump can. But he’ll have lots of visibility into what the government’s lawyers think, how they rate their odds of success, what their arguments will be. On top of that, given the immense corruption of the current Supreme Court, I would say there’s at least a 50%-50% shot that Trump and thus Lutnick will gets signals from one or more of the justices about how the Court will rule. Any way you look at this it’s corrupt as hell. And on a more metaphoric level it typifies the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose rules that the billionaire class and their sub-billionaire toadies live by.

As somebody or the other said, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.

Well to be fair it’s both.

Also too: The Meritocracy!

. . . this sums up well the cogency of the “policy debates” about Trump’s tariffs:

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digitaldiscipline:

derinthemadscientist:

insomniac-arrest:

movies about apocalypses: it’s every man for himself!! you can’t trust anyone, it’s a wasteland of solo travelers and sad families, we’re alone out here

humans irl: *pack bond with strangers*

*pack bond with large carnivores*

*pack bond with robots in space thousands of miles away*

Apocalypse preppers who fantasise about all our artificial rules and governments falling away in times of chaos seem to forget that we invented those rules and governments. Over and over. When you put humans near each other, they group up and make a society; that’s why those  governments exist. Do they think we magically stop doing that in dangerous situations? Because… we don’t.

hopepunk doesn’t have time for your racist doomsday hard-on, carl.

"The similar-sounding verbs careen and career are often used interchangeably, meaning "to move at top speed," often in a reckless or out-of-control manner.

Despite their one-letter-off resemblance, careen and career are not etymologically related. Career finds its origins in medieval jousting tournaments. Before it came to be the preferred term for one's professional path, the noun career (from Middle French carriere) referred not only to the courses ridden by knights but also the act of riding a horse at a rapid clip in short bursts.

The verb careen, meanwhile, originally described the action of putting a ship or boat on land, usually in order to clean, caulk, or repair the hull. So how did this verb get conflated with career?  To careen a boat, you need to tilt it on its side. Careen gradually became used to describe the act of a boat tipping over in rough waters, or the similar tilting of other things... As motor vehicles became commonplace, careen became a useful word to describe the lurching, side-to-side motion that a vehicle would make when it was racing out of control, thus the overlap between careen and career.

Traditional usage commentators frown upon this overlap, insisting that careen shouldn't be used for something that is only moving at a headlong pace without any kind of side-to-side motion. But popular use tends to drown out those objections. Nowadays, careen is actually the preferred verb for rushing forward, particularly in American English.

"The twisted tree lives its life, while the right tree ends up as planks."