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Senate confirms Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary, a key role for Trump's trade agenda
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....enate confirms Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary, a key role for Trump's trade agenda<BR>PTI News<BR>Dated:- 19-2-2025<BR>PTI<BR>Washington, Feb 19 (AP) The Senate confirmed wealthy financier Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary on Tuesday, putting in place a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump's hardline trade policies. At the Commerce Department, Lutnick, who was CEO at the investmen....
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....t firm Cantor Fitzgerald, will oversee 50,000 employees who do everything from collecting economic statistics to running the census to issuing weather reports. But he's likely to spend a lot of time -- along with Jamieson Greer, Trump's nominee to be the top US trade negotiator -- managing the president's aggressive plans to impose import taxes on US trading partners, including allies and adversar....
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....ies alike. The Senate vote to confirm Lutnick was 51-45. Trump views the tariffs as a versatile economic tool. They can raise money to finance his tax cuts elsewhere, protect US industries and pressure other countries into making concessions on such issues as their own trade barriers, immigration and drug trafficking. Mainstream economists mostly view tariffs as counterproductive -- they are pai....
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....d by import companies in the US, which try to pass along the higher costs to consumers and can thereby add to inflationary pressures throughout the economy. At his confirmation hearing last month, Lutnick dismissed as "nonsense" the idea that tariffs contribute to inflation. He expressed support for deploying across-the-board tariffs "country by country" to strong-arm other countries into lowerin....
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....g barriers to American exports. Trump last week announced plans for "reciprocal" tariffs -- raising US import tax rates to match the higher taxes that other countries impose on goods from the US. The move would shatter the rules that have governed world trade for decades. Since the 1960s, tariff rates have mostly emerged from negotiations between dozens of countries. Trump is commandeering the pr....
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....ocess. The president has also imposed 10 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports and effectively raised US taxes on foreign steel and aluminium. He has threatened -- and delayed until March 4 -- 25 per cent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico. Lutnick was CEO at Cantor Fitzgerald when its offices were hit in the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. The firm lost two-thirds of it....
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....s employees -- 658 people -- that day, including Lutnick's brother. Howard Lutnick led the firm's recovery and is a member of the Board of Directors of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Lutnick has promised to sell off his business holdings. They're complicated. His financial disclosure statement showed that he had positions in more than 800 businesses and other private organisations. ....
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....(AP) SZM<BR> News - Press release - PIB....