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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Lutnick wants factories here, but his firm touts manufacturing in Mexico

By Abha Bhattarai washington post

On the campaign trail with Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick railed against policies that encouraged factories and jobs to move to Mexico. But at the same time, the president’s eventual nominee for commerce secretary runs a commercial real estate firm that has been pitching the virtues of Mexican manufacturing to American companies.

Lutnick is scheduled to testify before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at a confirmation hearing Wednesday. He is executive chairman of Newmark Group, a publicly traded commercial real estate firm that has touted multiple industrial sites for sale and rent in Mexico, sometimes pitching them as a way for companies to avoid Chinese tariffs and tap into cheap labor.

“This is the best time to settle in Mexico,” says a brochure for a manufacturing complex called Puerto Verde. “The nearshoring effect and the trade war between the US and China are creating a perfect atmosphere for business.”

Lutnick, who co-chaired Trump’s transition team, spent months campaigning for him, talking about the importance of policies that favor moving factory jobs back to the United States. “Bring it back here. Bring the jobs here. Bring the factories here,” Lutnick said at an October roundtable.

The sharp contrast between Lutnick’s rhetoric and his firm’s dealings raises fresh questions about just how Trump’s commerce secretary pick might approach trade negotiations and tariffs. If confirmed, the wealthy executive would play a leading role in implementing the president’s economic and trade agenda.

The Trump White House, Lutnick and Newmark Group did not respond to requests for comment.

Lutnick has said that if confirmed, he would divest from his businesses, including Newmark, as required by law. Still, ethics experts say they have lingering concerns about Lutnick’s ties to financial and real estate firms.

“As commerce secretary, he would be in a position to play favorites,” said Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “He’d be involved in company-specific issues, promoting specific industries and specific companies. So the question becomes: Is he going to do what he honestly thinks is in the interest of the American people, or is he going to help the industries he came out of?”

There has been a growing movement by companies to invest in Mexico. Foreign investments in the country have picked up in recent years, driven largely by the automotive industry, according to Boston Consulting Group. In 2023, Mexico became the United States’ largest trade partner, toppling China’s two-decade reign.

The Washington Post identified four instances of properties for rent or purchase just across the Mexico border on Newmark’s website since March. In addition to the Puerto Verde complex, other listings played up proximity to the United States, appealing directly to manufacturers who were looking to cut costs. A current listing for an industrial warehouse in Reynosa, Mexico, is promoted as being just 10 kilometers (a little over six miles) from the U.S. border. Another project, an industrial plot just across the border from El Paso, is being called a “nearshoring” opportunity given the United States’ trade disputes with China. And a plot of land listed for $20 million in Baja California is being advertised as “ideal for industrial developers, plants, manufacturers and industrial assemblers.”

“The hypocrisy is palpable,” said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “Is he committed to U.S. jobs as commerce secretary? Or is he committed to promoting, as his website does, that labor is cheaper in Mexico than it is in the United States?”

Lutnick, a Wall Street executive who has led the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald for more than 30 years, is one of the wealthiest people in Trump’s orbit. He has held positions in more than 800 businesses and has a net worth of at least $800 million, according to financial disclosures filed last month. He is the chairman or CEO of four companies with connections to China, and he has received more than $35 million in pay, bonuses and equity from Newmark Group in the past two years, the filings show.

In announcing Lutnick’s nomination as commerce secretary on Truth Social, Trump called him “a dynamic force of Wall Street.” The banker was a major supporter of Trump’s presidential run, contributing more than $9 million toward this campaign.

Trump campaigned on a platform of sweeping tariffs and trade overhauls, repeatedly taking aim at Chinese companies that he said were opening car factories in Mexico to bypass costly tariffs on U.S. sales. “If we’re going to allow Mexico to build these massive plants, you’re not going to have any jobs,” Trump said in October. “They’re all going to be gone.”

The president was quick to signal his commitment to the cause, signing an “America First” trade policy on his first day in office. The commerce secretary, he said in an executive order, would be responsible for “addressing unfair and unbalanced trade,” and finding “loopholes” that were allowing goods and technology to make their way into rival countries.

As commerce secretary, Lutnick would probably oversee the renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), put into place by Trump in his first term. New tariffs on Mexico and China, which could come as early as Saturday, would call into question the fate of Trump’s signature trade deal, which he described as “the most advanced … in the world.”

Still, it is unclear exactly how trade talks might shake out. And, ethics experts noted, it isn’t all that uncommon for political appointees to have past dealings that are directly at odds with their new roles - as would be the case when a banking insider is brought in as a regulator, for example.

Newmark executives for years have drummed up the company’s inroads in Mexico, at times in direct response to the Trump administration’s policies. In 2020, an executive managing director told the South China Morning Post that Chinese firms were increasingly looking to move manufacturing to Mexico following the USMCA.

“Since the trade deal this year, I think our volume is up around 30 to 40 percent,” the Newmark managing director was quoted saying. “The recently signed trade deal has helped convince them that Mexico is a better launchpad to the US than China is.”

That message was center stage in a recent Newmark document, calling its Puerto Verde project the “most ideal location for nearshoring,” insulated from the U.S. trade war with China, and war in Eastern Europe. Plus, the company said, the labor force in Mexico “is younger and cheaper” than in the United States, China or Canada.

The listing, which was online early last year, has since been pulled from the company’s site. But the brochure is still available online. Puerto Verde, it declares, will be “the new center of binational trade.”

Jeff Stein and David J. Lynch contributed to this report.