That would surely be a problem for some individuals. But I don't think it's a systemic problem. We only need to find 0.00013% of the US population to fill the Senate and House together; surely there are that many people who are both competent and willing to put the public interest ahead of their own.
So it's kind of on the honour system - your broker probably won't ask you for payslips proving you don't work in the industry - but a lot of people are incentivized not to let it happen.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/insider-transactions/
When the public was angry, Congress passed the STOCK act. After the news cycle was over, they repealed disclosure unanimously.
Also, it's mandated 45 days after trades - not in advance as many here are calling for.
"The amendment also eliminated the requirement for the creation of searchable, sortable database of information in reports, and the requirement that reports be done in electronic format, rather than on paper."
Obviously there would be complications, but are you advocating society shouldn't strive to clearly separate governance of the public from private, conflicting pecuniary interests? I can't tell if you're dismissing the problem or saying there's a better solution ...
Eradicating politicians doing insider trading is a much longer slog that we are mostly just hoping "those with the power" will enact against their own self interests.
Anyway, that obviously isn’t legal advice. And I agree that people should expect legislators to act with high integrity, but that’s not really how they vote.
That more analogous to the politician trading. They do have inside information, but it's not from inside the company they're trading.
I agree in principle, but a lot of these people literally serve until they drop dead, which is a different problem with congress. Might be a bit much to tell someone not to invest for 40+ years.
It is why I like the fact that they just have to announce their stock trades ahead of time, it still allows them autonomy, but also there is no sense in front running them if they are not trading on insider knowledge. Their performance should essentially be in line with the market, not like Mr. Gottheimer that seems to have tripled his net worth in FY2020.
Of course, if they held widely diversified Index funds there would be fewer conflicts - but not zero as evidenced by legislators trading around COVID briefings.
Politicians already long on certain stocks can also profit from legislation that they are passing. Being privy to insider info which leads to continuing to stay long a stock is an advantage that wouldn't be detected by just sharing recent trades.
In addition to trying to eradicate insider trading - just shedding light on existing holdings by US office holders will have a huge cleansing effect that will go a long way to showing potential biases/conflicts of interest.
In any case, the Trump movement's whole response to this kind of thing was a combination of denial and "lol everyone does it", and it seems like that was enough for many in that camp.
>> For sure there are many factors that influence someone's vote. I think you're right - its more likely to cause leadership rotation within the parties where the rest of the factors are more similar (i.e. stance on gun rights, etc.). The challenge today is that incumbent politicians within their own party tend to have great name recognition among voters - but are more likely to be in the pockets of corporations. This would enable challengers within the party to potentially have an issue they can highlight.
"lol everyone does it"
>> And perhaps articles prove in a data science-y way that perhaps this is true - many politicians are doing it.
The only practical solution is having less centralisation of power, so no-one can easily manipulate the market.
It's not just Nancy Pelosi, most people in her position would do that. The position of power corrupts people.
Trades could be scrutinized for insider trading by both the SEC and independent traders/firms, just as there are independent services scrutinizing the crypto blockchains.
Insider trading could then even plausibly be legalized by eliminating the advantage of insider trading (it'd have to be based on a lot of study of the data). If we (or other funds) can setup triggers to act on the trades of insiders as soon as they hit the wire, the market will move against them, and we can also share arguably the same advantage by doing so.
No need for foreign government -- the whole world can do it.
People should not be able to make bets on matters over which they secretly control the outcome.
That means any federal official should have their investments behind a blind trust of some sort, no exceptions.
Are federal representatives immune?
I think people should give up all of their right to privacy (when it comes to business, finances, travel, and even conversations) when they acquire a large amount of power. In my head, a US senator would have that much power and that little privacy, whereas a US representative in the House would not.
Maybe we should use sortition then instead of elections? What could be more democratic than random average people (meeting some criteria) taking a turn at the wheel?
Granted, neither do a significant percentage of the currently serving congress if current policy is anything to go by.
I think they understand just fine, most of the time, but are more interested in enriching themselves and their cronies than looking out for their constituents or the health of the system as a whole.
unfortunately, this is also true of our elected officials
Take the existing system and have the house and Senate argue every official act to the sortition for a vote. How would this be worse than the current crony capitalism we suffer under?
I realize that just saying that may cause some consternation among some, but it is objectively the best selection system one could possibly devise, for any people anywhere, regardless of whether people like it or not.
It's not even a selection system that is not used all over the place from choices within your family where there are certain prerequisites like being an adult or a parent or having to be a member of the union in order to vote on union matters, or having achieved certain certifications and qualifications before you can make decisions about building a highway bridge.
It is and has not been a net benefit to any of us that "democracy" was first imposed and then expanded when the founders of the USA were very explicit about the fact that democracy was a recipe for disaster and would invariably cause destruction … as it has. Personally, I would very much have been ok with benefitting from properly qualified people making decision for me that I have no competent capacity to make for myself, rather than having lived in a society where everyone thinks they are equally smart and competent and my vote counts the same as some fool who does not know that a week is seven days (something I heard someone in her early 20s say yesterday. She thought the week excludes the weekend)
Your determination of objectivity seems a little... subjective.
Maybe this was objectively best at the time but at minimum the race part seems to no longer be true.
> I realize that just saying that may cause some consternation among some, but it is objectively the best selection system one could possibly devise
Combining these two statements suggests that you would advocate for white supremacy. Is that a correct deduction of mine? I would rather ask than just jump to conclusions.
The career politicians, intelligencia, and c-suite technocrats have been running shit for the past half century or more - you see where it's gotten us, to the ruin you describe.
It's kind of the same reasoning I use for extending the vote to children. In a country of 330 million, each individual vote is nearly meaningless on it's own so I figure the risk is much lower than the benefit of getting people involved at a younger age in a future that they should care deeply about. HN did not collectively appreciate this suggestion when I made it, however :).
Some people actually care.
I don't like this corruption, but there are many worse things our rulers could do.
This article isn't even about self-serving decisions that may benefit politicians down the road...it's about politicians who are actively using politician-privy inside information for short term profit at the expense of their constituents. But hey let's keep crying about orange man bad!
This is getting tired. If you are interested in his cronies’ self dealings just look it up. They did all of these things and more but also did them more explicitly. Which is a bit more honest in a way I guess?
But the worst part about 2017-2020 was the way he cozied up to enemies of democracy, undermined democracy himself and made a point of sowing and igniting division.
Back to the article, this behaviour is despicable and should be punished for everyone, D or R.
Can you provide a single example with a source that proves this? And please provide an example of how he "undermined democracy". Sounds like you watch a lot of CNN.
I agree it should be punished equally not depending on D or R.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/10/us/trump-prop...
This is a closed system, and most are not allowed anywhere near the control room.
It, including these trades, is working as intended.
You can view the US in a lot of cynical ways but it was not created as a vehicle to allow the wealthy to continue to gain wealth at the expense of the poor. Insider trading between congressmen using their posts to fleece the public was never an intent of the government.
"...our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered"
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...
I mean the American revolution was spearheaded by wealthy land and slave owners who were tired of taxes.
Pelosi's husband has been very bullish for a long time on Tesla, Apple & tech in general I do believe.
Gottheimer did what I think is a Bull Call spread which means in February, after a crazy run up in market prices in January, he bet that MSFT would go up a little more but would eventually come back down or at least trade sideways & not go over $160 by 6/18. If he sold his ITM calls before March or in early March, he probably did good. If he held on to them until closer to the 19th, he might have got crushed. This doesn't say when he sold. A lot of people argued stocks were overbought after January. Also, if he owns a large share of MSFT it's common to sell calls when you want to keep your shares but think the price is at the top or there is a lot of volatility that will soon go away. It's a way to earn some income without selling.
- None of this is financial advice & I'm fairly ignorant on this topic.
Insider trading requires not only material, non-public but also some kind of duty of confidentiality to the company you are trading.
Congress doesn't have that type of relationship, so they are not insiders. Their spouses aren't either.
There are some additional rules that apply to people who gain knowledge in an official capacity[1], but these were enacted fairly recently and haven't been effective at keeping Congress from trading using the non-public information that they receive.
I'm curious where you are reading about Paul Pelosi's stock picks. Regardless, so what? He has no business owning and/or trading shares of companies the person he shares a bed with has influence over.
I have no position on your 2nd sentence. I agree in philosophy but acknowledge the details are complicated.
Even if you take a pretty hard-line attitude about members of Congress being prohibited from doing things like trading their own portfolios, it's hard to make a cogent argument that Paul Pelosi, who is by all measures a private citizen, should be restricted from trading specific stocks.
No it's not. If you grant that Nancy Pelosi should be treated similarly to a corporate insider, then it is pretty obvious that her spouse should be treated like an insider's would be.
The honest way to see if politicians get an outsized return from this type of trading is to run a backtest, with appropriate hedges where you buy whenever anyone buys and sell whenever anyone sells and hold for a medium amount of time (3-6 weeks seems reasonable). unusualwhales know this so the fact that this sort of analysis is missing is telling. In particular, note how they provide stats for what the trading trends are, but not for the outsized performance.
The charts at the end of the article are a lot less impressive and they don't obviously look better than random.
The fact that he appears to trade mostly $MSFT while also being a former MSFT Executive and seems to be extremely accurate in his options trading of that $MSFT, only really adds to the extreme suspiciousness.
Is there no entity that even just tries to keep tabs on or possibly investigates these people, let alone charge them with crimes where appropriate? It seems that where there is smoke … and fire … there may actually be fire.
[1] https://www.nj.com/politics/2019/07/the-richest-new-jersey-m...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/richest-member-congress-state...
well there's this thing called the IRS that seems to spend most of their time auditing random citizens when the numbers they submit on their tax forms doesn't match the numbers the IRS already calculated on their side. maybe we could streamline that absolutely ridiculous process & their efforts could be used elsewhere
How quickly are these trades made public? Maybe we should just copy the congress people's trades and make some profit ourselves :P
The problem with Pelosi and others is that the money comes from abusing their power, and is in effect taken from other investors.
What kind of attitude is that? If you have savings, one seeks a return on said savings by investing them. That's perfectly normal and rational behavior at all wealth levels.
Say you have $100,000 in the bank, and you want to spend $10,000. What's the best use of that money? For a normal self-interested person, a rational use would be to invest in whatever will give the largest return, in order to have enough money for living expenses, retirement, children, whatever.
Now, say you have $100 million, and you want to spend $10 million. What's the best use of that money? Seeking a purely financial return is completely pointless. It will have absolutely no impact on your life or future, or those of the people you care about. So as a person with a normal amount of self-interest who also cares about other things in the world, the most rational behavior would be to donate it to a cause you care about, or start some purposeful organization, or anything that will have a positive impact on something or someone you value. At this level of wealth, just making more money has no positive impact on anybody, even yourself.
I guess it's possible that Pelosi is saving up in order to start a SpaceX competitor or buy an NBA team or something once she leaves Congress, but she's 81 so that seems unlikely.
except that having capital makes it easier to gain more capital, so you could very well end up with more impact by aggressively investing for a few years before donating.
And again, I'm talking about 10% of what's in the bank. You could donate $10 million, invest $60 million, and still have an absurd amount left to buy a few houses or whatever you want for yourself. All while risking nothing, if you hold onto $10 million or so to secure your future.
My argument is that there's some threshold after which you have enough money to support yourself, and to invest to maintain your way of life, and to do something purposeful with the rest. And I think that threshold is below $100 million. I agree that it takes money to make money, but as you say, after "a few years" of investing, you do something with it. When does that happen? Do you need to hit a billion first?
If you invest your capital, it's not being hoarded in a money bank like Scrooge McDuck. It's being put to use by the companies and institutions you invest in to provide products and services.
Now I'm all for donating to charity, and it's a much better option than leaving massive wealth to your offspring, in my opinion.
But investing your money is totally rational at any wealth level and it's good for society, and necessary for capitalism to function.
What happens is your money goes to whoever owned the shares and they use it somehow. That same money could theoretically be used to buy shares infinitely, except for fees, and the company would see none of it.
The effect on the company though is demand will drive the price up. Shareholders like higher prices so tend to reward CEOs who get them. This (hopefully) leads to an efficient company where they try their best so shares go up in value due to present or expected future performance which is good for the economy on the whole compared to having a bunch of inefficient companies.
If you have $100 million dollars, and you're investing in the stock market purely because that's the way to get the highest financial return, that is not rational, unless money is literally the only thing you care about. Presumably there's something else you care about, like the environment, or some political movement, or eradicating malaria, in which case investing all of your money in making more money is not the best choice. You probably still want to invest some of it, to maintain your lifestyle and maintain enough cash to use for the stuff you really care about.
At te very least with a good chunk of it. Again diversification is good.
This is the crux of the issue. If you have $100 million and you can't think of a single worthwhile use for any of it besides making more money, that's either a literally unbelievable lack of imagination, or incredibly cruel. It is so, so easy to do a huge amount of good with that much money. It's not easy to figure out how to do the most amount of good possible, that's probably an unsolvable problem, but it's not necessary.
I understand that investing in the stock market is supporting the economy and increasing liquidity and potentially helping a company and that's all good, but it is laughably easy to think of something better, if you don't need to worry about a financial return.
After all, you wouldn't want me telling you how to spend your money.
Something of it smacks of hypocrisy. I think you should be guilted into donating 5% of your wealth by that reasoning. Yeah you don't have 100M, but just like them a 5% donation won't materially affect your quality of life. How do you feel about that? Do you still feel it's anti social behavior not to do that?
Because I call hypocrisy otherwise.
Only if you pretend that all stock trades happen when new stock is issued. That definitely isn't the case. As far as I understand there is a lot of trading between portfolios, where the company that originally issued the stock doesn't necessarily benefit except by increasing the value for future stock issues.
Why is that better than these companies living off their profits, and their loans? You talk about it and if it's a given. It's not.
That's a straw-man. I've said nothing questioning capitalism. The stock market isn't a necessary component of capitalism any more than subprime lending is.
The cost of the stock market is clear. The stock market causes and amplifies inequality. This isn't controversial.
But I find proponents of the stock market have trouble defending it, when asked to really be clear about the benefit to society -- to people.
The stock market, no, but the ability to invest/allocate capital is quite fundamental to capitalism. The stock market is merely one incantation of that. Let's take your criticism as only pertaining to the stock market.
> The cost of the stock market is clear. The stock market causes and amplifies inequality. This isn't controversial.
I'm not going to give you that one. The stock market enables the public to invest in these companies. That's why they're called public companies.
If you ditch it, suddenly only wealthy venture capitalists can do that. This has been happening more and more with companies starting private longer and longer thanks to abundant private capital that doesn't bring the onerous regulations of being a public company. Unfortunately that seems to be increasing inequality, as the public has been cut out of these kinds of riskier but high growth investments.
I'm sure there is a better way of doing it, but it isn't as cut and dried as you suggest.
"All wealth levels" are not the same.
Which is what these politicians seem to be doing. Sure it is not illegal, but is it ethical?
I made a much more general statement in my comment, which you seemingly objected to.
How much money is enough if you already have $100M and to gain more, you have to manipulate and cheat?
But even without changing the question, $100M invested in a very low risk manner will generate considerable cash flow (if you regularly take some profits). So without even spending your "savings", you can live very comfortably.
However, a special thing happens when you are high net worth. You suddenly have a lot of lenders begging to loan you money at very low interest rates. They need a place to put money, and they know you have assets to cover any loan they might give you. So you, the wealthy individual with $100M in assets, CAN still go buy nice stuff even if your cash flow from your investments isn't huge.
Honestly, unless you just need to show people how much money you can drop because you're so rich you don't care, you don't actually have to spend any of your money to live bigly.
Yeah, that's not a good at any wealth level.
> But even without changing the question, $100M invested in a very low risk manner will generate considerable cash flow (if you regularly take some profits)
Sure. But individual risk appetites vary and at that wealth level you can afford to diversify like crazy - and should in my opinion. I'm not sure what that had to do with anything.
(I'm not endorsing this, I'm just saying these are the rules of the game that's been set up)
And to answer your second question - not quick enough for the public to act on it.
I am not against non politician people having tons of money. I am against politicians getting rich using insider trading. And the same politicians also accusing their political opponents of doing the very thing they are doing themselves - even more. Hypocrisy and double standards is what makes me disgusted.
There's not a single profession I can think of where someone would gladly be working when they are 80 years old. House and Senate needs term limits. 8 years max. No one should be allowed to become a life long politician and get rich off of it.
But unfortunately, what we want is different from what we get. There's no way these politicians will pass bills to limit their own terms. These people convince the ordinary people that they are all moral and care about them. But meanwhile they are getting rich off of public's trust in them.
Every day I become more and more convinced that all politicians are basically the same - chasing self-interests, power, and prestige.
[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/income-inequality-in-califo...
It’s easy to have low inequality when everyone is very poor like West Virginia.
They traded deep ITM calls 4 months out for deeper ITM calls 1 month out. My guess is that this particular trade is part of a risk management strategy, not an adjustment based on insider information.
The primary concern here is whether or not this influences their decisions when it comes to governing, whether they choose the option that is most profitable rather than best for their country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Arguments_for_...
The problem is in the grey areas. Take the Pelosi example. The material nonpublic information was her personal policy position. Assuming she acted purely venally, are your own intentions insider information? If I know I'm going to get Chipotle for lunch tomorrow, is it insider trading to buy Chipotle shares?
If, on the other hand, her husband took a conversation he had with her about policy and then traded on it, that would be insider trading. Unless they did it over text message, however, the odds of proving it are zilch.
Once she announces it in the media, wouldn't it be a professional policy opinion? CEOs are similar. They can believe what they want, but what they say to the media can be punished (like Elon was). The real sticking point is how is she of one opinion then flip to the complete opposite the next day without giving a reason. If they have to report their intended trades then it could avoid this short term play.
Spouses and household members are held to the same restrictions as the regulated individual, regardless of the conversation or not. The only reason it's hard to prove is because they are in a position of power. The SEC would jump on any normal people doing the same thing.
Again though there's plausible deniability, as you say. It needs to just be outright banned.
First of all, Congress passed a stimulus bill on Dec 21, the day before her husband bought those calls. Any 5% gain over the next couple of days or so is for more likely in response to that, and in anticipation of Trump signing the bill soon, than it due to Pelosi changing her mind about some possible future stimulus that hasn't even started being negotiated yet.
Second, the 5% "rally" for AAPL only lasted a week. TSLA's rise lasted longer, but it was rising before this. The article doesn't say anything about whether or not they actually exercised their options to buy the stock, and then sold it to actually profit. If they didn't, then this "rally" had no real effect on them.
Third, looking at other tech stocks, GOOG pretty much did nothing around or for a while after Dec 22. AMZN fell for a day or two, spiked up, came back to around what it was. FB was kind of like AMZN, but the spike was smaller and the fall was deeper. Looking beyond tech stocks, the Dow and the S&P 500 don't show anything happening around the time. Most things continued the trends they had been on before.
That suggests that Pelosi's change of heart about possible future stimulus bills didn't have much effect on most stocks. So why did they buy AAPL and TSLA? Even if they thought there would be an effect and wanted to exploit it, buying TSLA to do so makes no sense. AAPL makes a little more sense, but not much. AMZN or some other company whose products people would actually likely spend stimulus money on would make more sense.
Does anyone know?
It is all practically very corrupt, viewed from most angles. The few well-meaning politicians either don't get elected or don't stay in office, because it costs too much to get there and stay there (funding); so to get there and stay there, you have to play the game. And playing the game means ensuring your wealthy donors get what they want from you in terms of legislation.
Not when said action occurs a week before the Congressional act is announced. Is this HN thread flooded with bots or something? Have never seen this level of sympathy for politicians.
Disclaimer: not American, no strong opinion on these people.
Being a representative isn't supposed to be a "get rich quick" scheme. They already make a lot of money and IMO if they're going to invest in stocks they should play by the same rules as everybody else.
Edit: On second thought, considering how much they can influence stock prices, maybe they should have stricter insider information regulations. It's a huge conflict of interest.
For example will a lawmaker holding a large portion of their wealth in Apple shares want to introduce legislation that forces Apple to allow alternative app stores (costing Apple the 15%-30% cut of all the app store sales)?
Within an organization making a decision that advantages oneself is unethical since the purpose of the most organizations is not to fulfill the personal interests of its employees.
It would make some sense to convert all property holdings of a government employee to financial instruments related to the health of the government such as treasury notes. That way their personal interests are at least aligned with those of the government. To the degree that the instruments measure aspects of the government that are not totally aligned with the governed is a problem however.
But even if you're one of those proponents of insider trading, surely this is clearly different and worse than that, because prominent politicians surely have some power to influence winners and losers.
You are right that if the officials actually cared about companies, it would not make sense. I was thinking more like hedge fund-like cold speculation. As people guessed correctly, the point is to make the job very appealing but with little ties to powerful interests. Of course is not a serious scheme, but I'm amused by the concept I guess.
Not that I expect people would be comfortable paying politicians more (see how many complain about e.g. CEO pay) so I guess we are stuck with incentives for corruption instead.
This is not true. It’s very odd to see the kind of right-wing conspiracies based on outright fabrications spread on HN as literal truths. Here is an article from December 22 were Pelosi is calling for more stimulus:
www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/12/22/trump-calls-covid-relief-bill-unsuitable-and-demands-congress-add-higher-stimulus-payments.html
Here is her direct tweet dated 12/22:
https://mobile.twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/134155753573...?
Edit: There are outright lies in the source article. Sad day for HN that the lies are getting so much traction and fact checking with 1st hand sources is getting downvoted.
I also found this article on 2020/12/21 where Pelosi says she wanted more stimulus, but the $600 checks were significant.[1] So it seems all the more unlikely that she said she was against further stimulus at any point on the 22nd.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/nancy-pelosi-wanted-more-600-22542493...
Some democrats were urging her to accept it in October: https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1315078896853843970
The House had passed the HEROES act for additional stimulus in May 2020. The Republican senate refused to even put it up for a vote. She was always for passing of the HEROES act even during this October - December period. She was always pro stimulus.
Does anyone else cringe at this American obsession with naming acts of congress so as to create "inspirational" acronyms?
The top article in your Google search (lol) link is the Sun. A British tabloid with the same owner as Fox News.
Also calling me “r****” is definitely against HN civility rules.
You know the entire establishment media is owned by a select few people right?
She was very clearly against stimulus before election because she didn't want to give a win to her political opponent.
We can say whatever we want about her political opponent but he had made it very clear on Twitter that he would instantly sign a stimulus only bill without pork if it's brought to him. Pelosi on the other hand played politics and blamed it on her political opponent as she didn't want cheques with his name going out before elections.
Here's her interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer criticized by the left:
Here's a left leaning source:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/pelosi-says-no-cov...
Here's a right leaning source:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/pelosi-trump-coronaviru...
> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped into the White House's latest $1.8 trillion coronavirus relief offer during a combative interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, accusing President Trump of only wanting to send out a second round of stimulus checks to juice the economy and boost his election odds.
> The Trump administration's proposal -- its largest yet -- drew criticism from both Republicans and Democrats, dimming the odds of another round of emergency aid before the Nov. 3 election. It was expected to include a second round of direct payments of up to $1,200 for adults and $1,000 for children; expanded unemployment benefits at $400 per week and additional funding for state and local governments.
> Blitzer pressed Pelosi about her decision to reject the deal, even as some Democrats, including former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and California Rep. Ro Khanna, urged her to accept the offer. (Khanna tweeted that Pelosi should "make a deal & put the ball in McConnell court").
Do you have a direct quote from her that says she doesn’t want stimulus compared to the avalanche of quotes supporting more stimulus?
> “If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” Trump tweeted.
> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped into the White House's latest $1.8 trillion coronavirus relief offer during a combative interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, accusing President Trump of only wanting to send out a second round of stimulus checks to juice the economy and boost his election odds.
> The Trump administration's proposal -- its largest yet -- drew criticism from both Republicans and Democrats, dimming the odds of another round of emergency aid before the Nov. 3 election. It was expected to include a second round of direct payments of up to $1,200 for adults and $1,000 for children; expanded unemployment benefits at $400 per week and additional funding for state and local governments.
So clearly she didn't want any stimulus before elections. Else she would have gotten the $1200 stand alone bill done and signed instantly.
Once the elections were over:
> Trump calls for $2,000 stimulus checks as $600 payments start being deposited
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/30/trump-calls-for-2000-stimulu...
https://thepostmillennial.com/pelosi-says-600-per-household-...
> Pelosi says $600 stimulus payment after 8 months is SIGNIFICANT
> We also have in the legislation, uh, direct payments which were not in the Republican bill, to America's working families. I would have liked them to be bigger, but they are significant and they will be going out soon."
This is obviously a lie since her political opponent had tweeted several times "If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?" and "$2,000 stimulus checks"
Is $600 more significant than $1200 or $2000? Is that "not having enough stimulus"?
And now her party holds all 3 - house, senate and presidency and yet there's no $2000 cheques. If her political opponent was willing to give $1200 and then $2000 and yet her own party hasn't gotten that done, then who's worse?
Here is an actual quote from her which is a direct response to a Trump tweet:
“Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks. At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!”
It's even more odd to see the, "if you disagree you're alt-right/ a Nazi" mentality on HN.
Why does a member of congress need to day-trade stocks, let alone leveraged derivatives? It's absurd.
You believing that "right-wing conspiracies" automatically means ties to "alt-right/Nazis", I think this says more about your personal biases than the person you are responding to.
maybe on that one point, but the fact the democrats trade way more on the markets is not a conspiracy theory, it's an outright conspiracy.
why are you defending these people? because they're democrats on paper?
just call it a lie. don't need biased adjectives.
Stupid question: if you were expecting an upswing in a stock, wouldn't you get the most returns from an out of the money option? For a deep ITM you're paying the same as the underlying stock plus a tiny premium -- you might as well just buy the stock.
This is captured in the concept of Delta one of the “greeks” which is a parameter in the black scholes equation and solution that tries to measure the pricing movement of the option relative to the price movement of the stock. Owning stock has a delta of 1. ITM options have a delta closer to 1 but not exactly 1, OTM options have a delta closer to 0, but not exactly 0. ATM options of a delta around .5.
If you bought a deep itm call, it would behave almost exactly like owning a share. The stock goes up 5% , your call goes up 5% + 1% let's say for the increased iv.
If you felt like there was a 75% chance it would go up 5% and a 25% chance it goes flat or down, then your best expected value would be buying a otm call. The math would look something like ev= .75 * 400% + .25 * -100%
And even then, nobody holds an option that went the wrong way to 0, so the -100% term would be less as well.
Congress insider trading is not new. Peter Schweitzer’s book “Throw all of them out” details them. The book was released in 2011.
How is this an acceptable. Is politicians above the law?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/31/raphael-wa...
The state and large corporate interests in the USA are very tightly integrated and have been for at least an entire generation.
The American government does serve the interests of the American people: the American people who own the bulk of the land and the largest companies.
George Washington was the largest landowner in the colonies when the revolution started.
The idea that the US was originally founded "by the people, for the people" is not at all what happened. I guess we could say that the government they created was progressive for its time, at least.
Slaves would not have been a large proportion of the country as a whole--about 20% at their height. While the early US did require landownership for adult free males to vote, the US also had unusually high landownership rates. It's estimated that ~60% of free adult males had the right to vote (contemporary Britain had about 15-20% of free adult males having that same rate). So ultimately you end up with about 25% of the current franchise rate, or somewhere in the mid-high teens after taking into account the existence of children who still cannot vote.
The law doesn't require this of course, but basically all money managers get their insider trading compliance program from the same 3 outside law firms.
Dec 23 Trump announced support for a $2000 stimulus, changing the political calculus, in favor of democrats, who did eventually push through the remaining $1400 in a separate package.
Pelosi's strategic change is not a change that happened in a vacuum. Trump's announcement was all over the news and was the single most important event in the political world that day, not Pelosi's husband buying calls. Contextualizing this event around Pelosi's husband is misleading.
Ok downvote my comment all you want but this is well documented and was less than 6 months ago, and frankly it's surprising that people forgot how impactful this event was. People are still criticizing Biden over the additional check being 1400 instead of 2000.
I'd rather live in a world where reps are squeaky clean. It's much better than one where we make up some rules where people who come right up to the line end up smelling bad, and then everyone is born complaining about the corruption and enduring it with no recourse.
Ultimately it's a rules vs discretion (aka judgement) question.
I don't know if you remember, but the amount of stimulus remained 600, so Pelosi was on money on what was politically possible. The remaining 1400 only was possible after the slimmest of senate majorities after the Georgia runoffs.
[0]: https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/nancy-pelosis-h...
It's USA. Corruption is the norm.
How do you think so many people on government salaries become super rich, whilst supposedly working for the government?
> Congressman Gottheimer is absolutely an incredible options trader. He’s been selling calls at peaks on $MSFT all 2021, & seemingly buying back the contracts on dips. This in blocks of $250,000 - $5,000,000, which is incredible size given the amount of $MSFT shares he owns. For ex, on 02-12 he sold 500k $MSFT $160 strike expiring 06/18/2021. On that same day, he bought deep ITM calls of $1M-5M at $145 expiring 03/19/2021. The whale caught both of his movements as well.
This is fucking unreal.