Spencer Bacchus made a trade on September 19th, 2008 that effectively bet that the stock market would drop. It was a brilliant bet because his investment nearly doubled over the next four days.
The day before he made this trade, Bacchus was sitting in a room in a private meeting with the top officials of the U.s Treasury and Fed. He was told that it was a matter of days before there was going to be a meltdown in the Global Financial system.
We have used all of the financial disclosures to make a list of the best investors in Congress, and we want to explain how their insider knowledge may help them make the best bets on Wall Street.
Western countries love a free market, but we have laws to stop people with insider information from gaming the system. Insider trading laws prohibit people from selling an investment like stocks using non-public information, including tipping this info to other people who then go buy the stocks based on that info.
Western countries love a free market, but we have laws to stop people with insider information from gaming the system. Insider trading laws prohibit people from selling an investment like stocks using non-public information, including tipping this info to other people who then go buy the stocks based on that info.
While insider trading laws are very clear when it comes to business Executives, there is a group of people in our society to whom these rules kind of don't apply: lawmakers.
This study recreated all of Senators trades over four years in the 90s and found that they consistently had abnormal positive returns, beating the market by 12 percent per year.
The study suggests that either these civil servants were super Savvy investors or they knew the appropriate time to buy and sell their Common Stocks.
Betterhelp is a platform that makes therapy more accessible to people. It is useful for people who have clinical mental health issues, but everyone could use a professional to speak to.
Better help matches you with a therapist in their network of tens of thousands of licensed professional therapists that you can start communicating with immediately. You can do a video call, a phone call, or even just do texting back and forth.
Better Help is a game changer for making therapy more accessible, and it gives you 10 off your first month so you can try it out at a discount.
In 2008, as banks in the stock market were collapsing, lawmakers made headlines with their surprisingly successful and suspiciously timed trades. This was a blatant display of Insider knowledge that was not a great look at a time when millions of Americans were losing their life savings.
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act requires Congress to publish all of their trading activity.
After being briefed on secret information about the Coronavirus pandemic, Republican Senator Richard Burr from North Carolina sold a hundred and ten thousand dollars worth of stocks the same day.
Senator Burr sold all of his stocks in February of 2020, and then moved over a million dollars from stocks into treasury Securities, which is super safe during an economic downturn. But while he was downplaying the severity of the pandemic in public, in private he was spilling the beans.
Burr passed his private info to his brother-in-law, who dumped between 97 000 and 280 000 US dollars in shares. The Sec and Department of Justice investigated this, but ultimately dropped the matter.
Since 2019, Congressman Kana's family has made at least 10 500 trades involving nearly 900 companies. Of these trades, 149 were done through a trust that belongs to his wife and kids, and Kana likely had non-public information about these companies because of his role as a Congressman.
Kana's wife and kids were trading in companies that were being actively investigated by Kana himself at the same time. This feels kind of like a blurry line, but it also feels really clear that you shouldn't be able to trade stock if your husband is investigating the company.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is married to an investor, and their net worth grew 220 percent in the two years following the 2008 Financial crisis, and 60 percent in the two years following the pandemic. This presents a major conflict of interest in my opinion.
I know it's tricky, but when lawmakers are making bank during financial meltdowns and recessions, it feels off to me. The Pelosis have a successful investor lawmaker combo that people have started copying.
Nancy Pelosi is back at it again and she locked in a 20 game for me. When a journalist asked her about these allegations of insider trading, she responded, "No."
No, I don't know to this second one because this is a free market and people should be able to participate in that, but a free market is not a fair market if some people are operating with information that affects the market and using that information to get rich.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green invested in Lockheed Martin and Chevron a little over a year ago, and the next day she put out a tweet war and rumors of war, and the day after that Russia invaded Ukraine, her investment made her a good amount of money.
Senator Kelly Loffler was in the room in January 2020, getting briefed on how bad the pandemic was about to be, and she sold off between 50 000 and a hundred thousand dollars of stocks right before the big market crash on February 20th.
The New York Times did a deep dive on Purdue's trades and found that he regularly bought and sold stocks in companies that fell under the Senate Oversight Committee, which he was on. He made up to fifteen thousand dollars off of his investment in Fireeye.
Conflict of interest laws should regulate companies that you are personally invested in, but the stocks act was passed in 2012 and doesn't seem to apply anymore.
It's illegal for members of Congress to partake in insider trading, but the legislation is incredibly weak, and there have been at least 78 instances where Congress has violated the law very overtly. Members of Congress can make tens of millions of dollars with privilege information, but the penalty for failing to report these purchases is a joke. The speaker has employed stall tactic after stall tactic in order to keep delaying a vote on a bill banning stock trading.
The tragedy in all of this is that trust is an important component of our democracy and society. If we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials.
A Republican senator introduced the Pelosi Act, which spells out Nancy Pelosi, but does not actually do anything.
The Optics are the problem. Trust in our democracy is delicate and when we erode that trust, we erode our democracy.
I designed a map poster with a bunch of map projections on it and we also have Luts and presets if you want to color your photos or videos.
I should tell you about our community over on Patreon called The Newsroom. The Newsroom is a place where the community supports the journalism we are doing here and you can get a new video every month that is only available to patrons.
Comments