Money Grab/Profit from his own market-moving decisions
Tether lends an undisclosed sum to the trust holding Lutnick’s children’s Cantor stake
Bloomberg reported on March 18, 2026 that around the time Howard Lutnick transferred his Cantor Fitzgerald ownership to trusts for his children to satisfy his ethics agreement, one of those trusts borrowed an undisclosed amount from Tether, secured by “all assets” in the trust.
What happened
Howard Lutnick ran Cantor Fitzgerald for decades, and when he became Commerce Secretary in February 2025 he agreed to give up his ownership. He did so by transferring it to trusts for his four children, with his sons taking over the firm.
Cantor is also Tether’s banker. It has held the reserves behind the world’s largest stablecoin since 2021 and bought a stake in Tether in 2024, a deal Lutnick negotiated.
On March 18, 2026, Bloomberg reported that one of the children’s trusts, which holds more than half of Cantor, had borrowed money from Tether around the time of the transfer. The trust pledged everything in it as collateral. The amount was not disclosed. In the last week of April, Senators Warren and Wyden wrote to Lutnick and Tether’s chief executive. They asked whether Tether had in effect financed the children’s purchase of their father’s company while Lutnick was promoting the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law Tether had lobbied for and which Trump signed in July 2025.
Who benefited
Tether got a law it had lobbied for and a financial hold on the family of the cabinet officer promoting it. The Lutnick family kept the firm in the family with Tether’s money.
Who wanted something
Tether had been investigated by the Justice Department as recently as 2024 for sanctions and money-laundering exposure. It needed legitimacy in Washington more than any crypto firm. A loan to the Commerce Secretary’s children’s trust is a relationship no lobbyist can buy.
Who lost out
The ethics agreement was meant to separate Lutnick from Cantor’s interests, and a loan from Cantor’s biggest client to the trust that owns Cantor does the opposite. The public was told the conflict had been cured.
Why it matters
A divestiture is supposed to end a conflict, and here it created a new one. The company whose law the secretary was pushing now holds a lien on his children’s inheritance. The record’s crypto conflicts have been Trump-family; this one is the cabinet’s.
Sources BloombergThe BlockInvestmentNews