How 9/11 shaped the man behind Trump's tariffs

On September 11, 2001, Howard Lutnick's firm Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees, including his brother and best friend, when the World Trade Center collapsed. Days later, he became a national pariah for cutting off their salaries, a gamble to keep the company alive long enough to eventually give their families a quarter of its future profits. It worked. Twenty five years on, that same billionaire is Donald Trump's Commerce Secretary, and the man driving his global tariff war. Lutnick's business thrives on chaos rather than growth, and having survived and profited from the worst days of his life, he seems entirely unafraid of the economic wreckage his tariffs are causing. So what happens when a man built to bet everything on volatility gets his hands on the entire US economy? This episode was originally broadcast May 2025. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:07Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal and Gadigal people.

• 0:18Matt Bevan?

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. This was an episode that we released in May last year when Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on pretty much every country in the world. It's about Trump's close friend and US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. He's a fascinating person who endured a terrible tragedy on September 11th, 2001. So on this, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we've decided to re-release this story. It's a really interesting one. We'll be back with new episodes on Tuesday.

• 1:05Matt Bevan?

  Can you imagine what it would be like to have basically every economist in the world calling you an idiot?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  This could not be more stupid.

• 1:14Speaker 03

  We're living in crazy town right now.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  How stupid is that? Someone puts a gun to their own head.

• 1:23Matt Bevan?

  Now, I don't think that this bothers Donald Trump too much. He's the one they're calling stupid, by the way.

• 1:28Speaker 05

  All because one senile billionaire won't give up on the one stupid idea in his head.

• 1:34Matt Bevan?

  He is extremely sure that his idea of fixing the world with tariffs is a good one.

• 1:39Speaker 06

  Tariffs are very powerful, both economically and in getting everything else you want.

• 1:44Matt Bevan?

  Donald Trump argues that tariffs are the solution to everything.

• 1:48Speaker 06

  Tariffs are a, properly used, are a very powerful tool, not only economically, but also for getting other things outside of economics.

• 1:57Matt Bevan?

  Almost everyone else, including people that have worked with him for years, disagrees. But he doesn't care what all those other people think, because he's got someone in his corner agreeing with everything he says.

• 2:11Speaker 06

  Thank you very much. Today, I'm honoured to swear in our next Secretary of Commerce, Mr Howard Lutnick. I've known him a long time. He's a great guy.

• 2:24Matt Bevan?

  Howard Lutnick, a billionaire with a permanent smile on his face, is Trump's point man on tariffs, and he is all in.

• 2:32Speaker 05

  And so I think it's just a different way of thinking. Donald Trump understands it. He's going to be the driver of that policy, and I'm excited that he's at the desk.

• 2:42Matt Bevan?

  This is the guy that I want to talk about today. His story is tragic and surprising. He has been both a hero and a villain. Two decades ago, he was briefly one of the most hated men in America. He's about as Wall Street as anyone can get, but he's not stupid. He's not confused. He clearly understands the system that he is helping Trump upend.

• 3:14Matt Bevan?

  So why is he doing this? I think the answer lies in his past, and while Trump may have eased off on the stratospheric tariffs on China for now, I get the impression that he and Lutnick will not be dropping tariffs entirely anytime soon.

• 3:31Matt Bevan?

  Global tariffs are a gamble, and Howard Lutnick is all in. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

• 3:48Matt Bevan?

  There is a photograph of Howard Lutnick that I have been thinking about ever since I first saw it. A beaming Howard is crouched down next to his son Kyle, who is sporting a brand new red backpack on 90th Street in Uptown Manhattan.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  I took my youngest son, he was three, dropped him off at nursery school, and then I took my next son, my oldest son, who was five, to his first day at kindergarten.

• 4:19Matt Bevan?

  Howard Lutnick was almost never late for work because he had a very important job, but on this particular day, he took the morning off.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  So I have a picture. He's got little wet hair. He's wearing a little backpack.

• 4:31Matt Bevan?

  On any other morning, Howard Lutnick would have been downtown. He was the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm that occupied floors 101 to 105 of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. He was a real Wall Street rich guy. He loved fast cars, fancy suits and expensive art. The office was filled with August Rodin sculptures. Among the Rodins was a very nepotistic workforce.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  We chose to only work with people that we like. So we would tell everybody, look, you've got winning friends. Let's hire those winning friends. So we all hired our friends. I had my brother Gary, I had my best friend Doug.

• 5:13Matt Bevan?

  There were 29 sets of siblings on the Cantor Fitzgerald floors on the day that Howard took his son to his first day of kindergarten.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  Then, when you took a photograph, they would put the time on the lower right-hand corner in like an LED little orange thing. So I have a picture of me with my son in front of the school at 8:46.

• 5:36Matt Bevan?

  8:46 AM on September 11th, 2001.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  Plane hits the building 8:48.

• 5:49Matt Bevan?

  Had Howard and Kyle looked up as that photo of the two of them was taken, they would have seen the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 fly almost directly overhead.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  He works for Cantor Fitzgerald, and he's a bond broker. And he was on the 102nd floor, and we just haven't heard anything at all. He called home, he left a message, and that's the last, the last I heard from him.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  I love you. Up in the World Trade Centre, in the building, it's a bit like something. I, I don't know if I'm going to get out, but I love you very much.

• 6:34Matt Bevan?

  Howard Lutnick went to the base of the tower and frantically searched among the evacuees for any of his staff members.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  And I'm running, and I'm running hard, and I'm just running. I don't know what I'm running from. And I look over my shoulder, and there's a tornado chasing me.

• 6:51Matt Bevan?

  Howard was hit by a wall of debris as the South Tower fell. His driver Jimmy dragged him uptown, and the North Tower collapsed behind them.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Of the thousand Cantor employees at the Trade Centre, only 300 are accounted for at this time.

• 7:08Matt Bevan?

  By September 14th, it was clear that none of the 658 people who were in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices that morning had survived.

• 7:22Matt Bevan?

  Howard did interviews with three TV stations and cried in all of them.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  My 700 families, 700 families, I have 700 families.

• 7:37Matt Bevan?

  He became nationally famous as the face of the Wall Street victims.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  Every single individual with his firm.

• 7:46Matt Bevan?

  Gone.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  Gone.

• 7:46Matt Bevan?

  Gone.

• 7:47Speaker 05

  His entire office, everybody, everybody. I mean, I watched this guy tell his story. It just, it just ripped me up. I couldn't handle it. Couldn't handle it.

• 7:58Matt Bevan?

  On the 14th of September, Lutnick created a relief fund for the families, and yet the following day, he sent out final paychecks to all of them. He would no longer be paying their lost loved ones' salaries.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Lutnick was all over national television, saying that he would do whatever he could for the families of the missing employees. Well, it was about a week later that those families learned that all their paychecks were going to stop immediately.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Why would he cry, sob on television? Are you suggesting that he just turned on the tears? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 8:30Matt Bevan?

  He went on CNN, talked to Larry King about it, and cried again.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  See, they call me and they say, how come you can't pay my salary? Why can't you pay my husband's salary? Other companies pay their salary, why can't you? But you see, I, I lost, I lost everybody in the company, so I can't pay their salaries. So they think we're doing something wrong.

• 8:55Matt Bevan?

  Within weeks, Lutnick was a national pariah.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Wall Street watchers say that's the cutthroat Howard Lutnick they know.

• 9:03Matt Bevan?

  So what was he doing? Well, he had a strategy of sorts. Having looked at his books, he thought that if he kept paying the salaries of his lost workers, the company would rapidly go bankrupt. But what if he restarted the company?

• 9:23Speaker 05

  On September 12th, I hosted a call with my surviving employees, and I laid out two choices for them. We could either attend our friends' funerals, that's 20 funerals a day, for 33 straight days, or we could try to rebuild the company to take care of the 658 families that we lost that day.

• 9:46Matt Bevan?

  He planned to pay the families of the victims using Cantor Fitzgerald's profits. My partners and I, we, we talked about it, and we've decided that what we're going to do is we're going to give 25%.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  Over the profits of the company, to the families of the victims, to try to take care of them.

• 10:08Matt Bevan?

  It was a massive gamble. He had lost two thirds of his workforce. He was locked out of all the company's accounts. The people who knew the passwords were dead in the rubble. All of their paper records were in New York Harbor. Did they have a backup? Yes, in what they thought was a safe place, the basement of the other twin tower. The company was a shambles. What if he never made a profit again? 25% of nothing is nothing.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  It's going to be a different kind of drive than I've ever had before. It's not about my, it's not about my family. I get to kiss my kids. I get to kiss my kids tonight, but other people don't get to kiss their kids.

• 10:55Matt Bevan?

  But he had a reason to think that his gamble might pay off. See, Cantor Fitzgerald was an unusual firm. They were basically the eBay of US Treasury bonds. What that means is they buy and sell US government debt. I'll let this 1960s film star explain.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Donna Reed. I'd like to talk to you about a unique Christmas gift, a gift that will fit any situation, is always in the best of taste and will never, never go out of style. One guess, you're right, it's money, but not the ordinary kind of money. No, this is growing money. Would you like to see some? US savings bonds. Now, watch how they grow.

• 11:43Matt Bevan?

  Donna Reed explaining savings bonds is the 1960s version of Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, explaining credit default swaps.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  So this Christmas, give growing money. Give United States savings bonds. Thank you and Merry Christmas.

• 12:02Matt Bevan?

  Hmm, I guess that didn't really explain the bond market though, did it? Unfortunately, Margot Robbie isn't available to come and sit in my bath to record this next bit, so I'll just have to do it.

• 12:21Matt Bevan?

  So the US government is always in debt and so it almost always needs to borrow money. You can lend your money to them in exchange for a bond, a promise that they'll pay you back with interest in the future. It's not sexy, but it's considered a very safe investment for those who don't want to take on too much risk. After all, the US government is hardly going to collapse, is it? Ha ha! Generally, US stocks and US Treasury bonds go in opposite directions because people switch from one to the other. That's how it's supposed to work anyway. Anyone can buy these bonds, but you can't just call up the US Federal Reserve and buy them directly.

• 13:03Matt Bevan?

  You need a broker and that's where Cantor Fitzgerald comes in. Okay, I'll get back out of the bath now.

• 13:14Matt Bevan?

  Anyway, in 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald were by far the biggest broker of US bonds. They'd reached that status by trading bonds over the phone, but they were in the process of transitioning to an online trading platform that they owned called eSpeed. ESpeed, the global leader in real time electronic market solutions, the online control centre. Howard Lutnick knew that the markets would soon be reopening and so it was the perfect time to capitalize.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  When the greatest financial market on earth does resume trading, the whole world will be watching.

• 13:55Matt Bevan?

  And he thought that the horrific terrorist attack would lead people to look for safe investments, switching their stocks for government bonds.

• 14:04Speaker 05

  People have basically moved to try and get into what they think of secure assets. So that they've gone into gold, they've gone into government bonds.

• 14:12Matt Bevan?

  And if people want to buy government bonds, they're going to do it through eSpeed and that means revenue for Cantor Fitzgerald. Using their London staff, a temporary office space in New Jersey and an army of technicians, they managed to get eSpeed up and running in two days. The strategy paid off.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  So together we raised $180 million over the next five years for those families and my employees, they stitched my soul back together.

• 14:42Matt Bevan?

  That's about $275,000 per family. He also paid for their healthcare for 10 years. After 15 years, Cantor Fitzgerald had hired 57 children of staff members who had died on 9/11 and he's committed to helping them where he can. Along with his sister, Lutnick now runs a massive charity which supports victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  It's called the Cantor Fitzgerald Foundation and you know, anyone who can, can make a donation to it is going to help a lot of people who really, really need it.

• 15:21Matt Bevan?

  Lutnick knew what funding and community could do for people who had lost everything and dedicated a great deal of time to helping people in need. In fact, it was through charitable giving that he met Donald Trump. He appeared on Trump's TV show Celebrity Apprentice in 2008 as a bidder in a charity auction.

• 15:44Matt Bevan?

  All right, that's the game we're playing. I'll take a bid for $100,000 in the front row. $100,000, sir. Thank you very much. His $100,000 donation got him a date for high tea with Fergie, as in the Duchess of York, not from the Black Eyed Peas. Now, obviously this is kind of how it rolls on Wall Street. Some people take massive gambles that if they work can really, really pay off. You can end up with high tea with Fergie kind of money. It was a pretty wild gamble though. I think I would have just liquidated the firm, collected the insurance money and just split the proceeds among the victims' families. And that's probably why Howard Lutnick is now a billionaire cabinet secretary and I

• 16:28Matt Bevan?

  am a thousandaire basement podcaster.

• 16:36Matt Bevan?

  I think Howard Lutnick's business and his history has made him a very unusual Wall Street trader. For one thing, his business is based on how much people trade, not on whether the market is going up or down.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  We don't make money when the markets go up. We don't lose any when it goes down, but when we win is when it's busy. So when you put in a headline on your show or in the New York Times, this is really good for the company. So the company loves volatility and with volatility back, you know, the numbers of the company are just, are just beautiful.

• 17:07Matt Bevan?

  So bull or bear, it doesn't matter as long as the market is busy. Secondly, this is a man who has gone through one of the worst traumas imaginable. Two thirds of his workforce, including his brother and best friend, were killed in an event that he survived only by chance. He seems, more than most people, to be almost entirely unafraid of negative consequences. How could anything be worse than what he has experienced? And anyway, he's a billionaire now who makes money from volatility. He is basically immune from repercussions.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Everybody walks around saying they're nervous. They're just trying to create something because let's face it, it's gorgeous out and it's gorgeous in the economy around the world.

• 17:56Matt Bevan?

  In 2023, he got a call from his old TV friend, Donald Trump.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  2023 calls me, says, will you help me? And I actually thought about it. Like, and that was the first time I really thought politics. And then I said, yes.

• 18:19Matt Bevan?

  He told the All In Podcast that he spent a lot of time in Trump's orbit throughout 2024 before deciding in October what he wanted to do to help a potential second Trump administration.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  And I said, I want to balance the budget in the United States of America. And I, this is the way we're going to do it.

• 18:37Matt Bevan?

  He said if Elon Musk can cut $1 trillion in spending and he can raise $1 trillion through tariffs, he thought that he would be able to get to a balanced budget.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  If we can balance the budget for you, will you agree to waive all income tax for every person who makes less than $150,000 a year for the United States of America? Which by the way, is about 85% of America. Right, right. And the reason you want to work for Donald Trump is he looks at me and goes, sure.

• 19:08Matt Bevan?

  Okay, I want to pause on that point because it is wild. Remember a few episodes ago when we were looking into Doge and I was illustrating Elon Musk's cost cutting goals with two very big jars of water? Yeah, I'm not going to do that this time because in order to illustrate what Lutnick is suggesting, that would basically involve me smashing the jars with a hammer and then trying to glue the pieces back together. He says he's wanting to use tariffs on imports to basically fund the entire US government. This is the equivalent of Howard Lutnick looking at a pile of twisted steel and concrete,

• 19:50Matt Bevan?

  a massacred workforce, a cloud of paper floating through the air and thinking, I can still make a profit this quarter. I have to, to support the 700 families. The American people are his 700 families now and he's taking another spectacular gamble.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Donald Trump is a rare politician. He does what he says he's going to do.

• 20:21Matt Bevan?

  The stuff Howard Lutnick and Donald Trump are saying in interviews only makes sense if you understand that they are genuinely trying to upend the entire US economy. Like this quote, for example, promising to bring the production of high-tech products back to the US.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  You're going to see robotic production of iPhones and the jobs that are going to be created. People who build those factories, the mechanics who work on those robots. These jobs are going to be millions and millions of those jobs. These are great, high-paying jobs, and you don't need a college education to do it.

• 20:58Matt Bevan?

  Millions of non-college-educated robot mechanics who presumably pay no income tax. What about this quote from Donald Trump?

• 21:07Speaker 06

  I don't think a beautiful baby girl that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.

• 21:17Matt Bevan?

  Donald Trump genuinely wants Americans to cut back on consumption of products that are currently made overseas.

• 21:24Speaker 06

  I'm just saying, they don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.

• 21:31Matt Bevan?

  They're not saying all these things by accident. These aren't gaffes. They are redesigning the American economy. You won't need a degree to get a good job. You won't buy so many toys or clothes. Trade with other countries will be vastly different thanks to the trade deals they're currently negotiating.

• 21:50Speaker 05

  But you're going to see over the next month or so, we're going to roll out dozens of deals.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  Because we'll find categories of countries that it'll work out just fine.

• 22:04Matt Bevan?

  But the other thing here is he's not making any specific promises. There's no particular benchmarks or goals. Much like with his promise to give 25% of his profits to the families, that could have been 25% of 1 million or 180 million. This means that any concessions they get from other countries can be called a win.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  We had a trade conversation with a country that sells a lot of cars into America. And we don't sell hardly any cars into their market.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  And we were getting nowhere. We were just getting nowhere. And the meeting was coming to an end. And the trade minister, at the end of the meeting, drops his head and goes, "Fine. We'll give your car manufacturers the same subsidy that we give our car manufacturers." Bang.

• 23:06Matt Bevan?

  Bang. We don't know what country that was or what subsidy was or if that's what Lutnick was even trying to get out of them. But in Lutnick's eyes, that's a win.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Bang.

• 23:20Matt Bevan?

  I don't know what's going to happen here. But it's clearly not going to calm down. Howard Lutnick is in the middle of the biggest gamble of his life. And in his mind, it's impossible for him to lose. The only thing that's convinced him and Trump to ease off a little bit was a sudden drop in the price of stocks and bonds at the same time after their Liberation Day tariffs. Instead of people swapping US stocks for US bonds, people swapped both for foreign investments because they thought that America had gone mad. Short of this kind of thing happening, Lutnick is not going to stop until he is forced to stop or until the US economy is unrecognizable.

• 24:05Matt Bevan?

  If you can find a way to benefit from volatility, like Howard Lutnick did, then the next few years look good.

• 24:13Matt Bevan?

  I don't know what's going to happen to everyone else, though.

• 24:23Matt Bevan?

  If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. Audio production is by Cinnamon Nipart. We'll be back with new episodes on Tuesday.