The Panican Ledger

Dignity Wraith

Secretary Howard Lutnick - The Merchant of Strategic Misery

Wraith Class: Finance Ghoul; Title: Secretary of Commerce

It began, as such hauntings often do, with a tragedy and a Bloomberg terminal. Lutnick, once the somber-faced CEO who monetized mourning post-9/11, emerged not just as a man of markets but as a prophet of profit through calamity. Having risen from the ruins with spreadsheets in hand and slogans in his teeth, he now presides over Commerce like a Dickensian debt collector — peddling tariffs as liberation, and calling supply shock “the invisible hand giving a firm shake.”

Secretary Howard Lutnick no longer speaks so much as emanates. His utterances drift across airwaves like vapor off a fetid ledger — ephemeral pronouncements with the half-life of a chyron, gone before the fact-checkers finish their first sigh. In his most recent visitation, the Wraith of Commerce opined that elderly citizens asking where their Social Security checks have gone are likely committing fraud, for only the guilty take note when the grift changes direction. It is not policy — it is gaslight as governance, the bureaucratic séance of saying the quiet part louder and in three-piece pinstripes.

He hovers now above the ruins of the supply chain, having declared Liberation Day — the ceremonial celebration of his tariff crusade, in which duties were levied on friend and penguin alike. From the Heard and McDonald Islands to the Port of Los Angeles, no trading partner, flightless or otherwise, was spared his spectral logic: that economic constriction is merely capitalism tightening its belt.

Lutnick is the rarest class of Dignity Wraith: not merely a former man, but a monetized shadow. He speaks in indexes, signs memos with disappearing ink, and calls hardship "a recalibration of expectations." What he cannot privatize, he pathologizes. What he cannot justify, he monetizes. And if your shelves are bare, your checks missing, and your dignity revoked — fret not. According to the Secretary, it's all “working exactly as intended.”