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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In the wake of reports last month that four US senators sold stocks shortly after a classified briefing on January 24 about the risk posed by the novel coronavirus, Timothy Carambat, a mechanical and software engineer, created a website to make stock sales by every senator more visible.
In an email to The Register, Carambat, who runs a design firm based in Covington, Louisiana, called Industrial Object, explained he was motivated to create Senate Stock Watcher after news broke that Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) had dumped stocks before most people in America understood the implications of the outbreak. It is illegal for senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information.
Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been sued for alleged securities fraud, a charge he has denied. It is said he unloaded up to $1.7m in stocks in mid-February, particularly in hotel groups that would be later hit hard by the virus pandemic, all while receiving daily confidential briefings about the impact of the bio-nasty – and reassuring the public everything would be fine.
"As public servants, there are some senators making alarmingly large money movements at what would seem to be very fortunate timing in the market," Carambat said.
"I understand some senators were previously very accomplished businesspeople, but in my opinion, the level of access they have to information currently is highly privileged and it would only make sense to keep their own financial best interests at heart."
Details about the stock sales in news reports prompted Carambat to look into the source of the data, which turned out to be the US Senate Financial Disclosures website.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @05:25AM
That sounds like a bad idea. The best time to sell would have been before the market crashed and before the government started rolling the presses to buttress the market.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @05:40AM (16 children)
This isn't true: "It is illegal for senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information."
Correction: It is illegal for non-senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information.
They wrote the law. They exempted themselves. They can do insider trading as much as they like.
They also get to hire little kids as congressional pages, since they wrote the child labor laws.
They also are exempt from Obamacare.
See a pattern?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:26AM (8 children)
"They wrote the law. They exempted themselves. They can do insider trading as much as they like."
Which is why I think all elected federal officials should be required to put all their investments into a blind trust while they are in office; even cabinet level and elected officials at the state level should be required to do this. It's outrageous that this hasn't been put in place yet. Of course, even this wouldn't stop all abuses. For example, much of Trump's business dealing is not much more than name branding. How do you stop him from using the power of his office when he can't be truly divested of those investments?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:44AM
Kick him out of office?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:53AM (3 children)
Politics started to change in a lot of ways after JFK was murdered. In particular, Gerald Ford became the first [thoughtco.com] president to charge speaking fees. Up until then it was an unspoken rule that presidents didn't do this since it was seen as compromising the integrity of the office. It's easy to see why. Obama, for instance, chose to not only chose to not pursue charges against the bankers who destroyed the world economy, but then gave them hundreds of billions of dollars in a massive bailout. Then, after office, he went and collected near half a million dollar speaking fees from these same organizations, repeatedly, to give brief little chats with them. That's really really screwed up.
But the real point here is not about Obama, Ford, or anybody in between. It's that after JFK our politics started to becoming more and more for absolutely shameless personal enrichment. And somehow people stopped giving a shit. And so no solutions of the sort you're proposing would ever be implemented, because the status quo in DC is defacto personal enrichment, so why would anybody support such rules?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @04:39PM
You sound like a commie.
Why do you hate America?
That's a nasty question.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 15 2020, @05:08PM (1 child)
People always say the bankers should have been thrown in jail. But, what laws did they actually break?
When the republicans deregulate all those institutions you can't just turn around and say throw them in jail for not following the repealed regulations...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @09:38PM
Sorry bud, Clinton repealed glass stegal act, not a repub
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 15 2020, @11:51AM (2 children)
A better solution would be to audit elected officials' holdings when they take office and require them to pay as tax any profits from their investments from the period that they are in office and a few years afterwards that are more than one or two percent above some index tracker. If they make the entire market do well and their portfolio keeps up (or very slightly outperforms the average), great, they make money. If the market does okay but their portfolio does spectacularly, they pay that difference as tax.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @02:48PM (1 child)
And what do you suppose the tax rate on presidential earnings would be set at?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:48PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:44AM (1 child)
"They also are exempt from Obamacare."
I currently work for US DoD. As a federal employee, I have access to an insurance pool. There are roughly half a dozen to a dozen insurance plans to choose from in the pool I have access to. Every year during open enrollment (roughly around the beginning of a new fiscal year), I have the option to change my insurance coverage. I could be wrong about this but I believe elected officials have a similar set up. It looks to me like Obamacare basically brings the access that I and other federal employees and elected officials get out to everyone else in the country, with the added stipulation that you must choose one or pay a tax penalty. At least that's what it looks like from my vantage point.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @12:08PM
Actually, if Congress wants the Government-supplied health care, they have to get it off of the Obamacare exchanges [npr.org]:
Here [opm.gov], from the OPM site:
During open enrollment there is a spot when you are walking through the yes/no type of questions on the web site where it asks you if you work for Congress.
Now, as you probably know, back in the 80s Congress stood up the new 401-k-like retirement system and moved the whole Government over to it, except for themselves. They were selling how awesome the new system was, except that they were going to stay on the pension-based system.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:57AM (3 children)
Interesting how the dear senators reacted to the warnings when their money was at stake but didn't react when other people's lives were at stake.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday April 15 2020, @12:05PM (2 children)
I guess it's interesting. It's just human nature. That's why we have checks and balances and oversight built in. It seems like most of these systems have either broken down or been subverted over the last 150 years or so. Our only option is to vote them out next election.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @03:09PM (1 child)
I don't think the basic structure of oversight has broken down or been subverted, it is unfortunately is just being ignored. Think of how many Benghazi oversight hearings the Republicans had when they had the House majority, and how many email server hearings they had. Dozens of hearings and hundreds of hours on each one spanning YEARS. In the fall of 2015 everyone (including Trump) expected Clinton to win, the head of the oversight committee (Jason Chaffetz) said they were looking forward to years of investigations [washingtonpost.com] for things they had already been investigating for years. Then Trump unexpectedly won and the Republicans did ZERO oversight. Absolutely NONE on all the criminal and potentially criminal things he did. At least two Oversight Committee chairmen resigned out of Congress because they knew how awful it would be to stay in that job and turn a blind eye to everything. Then when the House flipped and some real oversight was actually being carried out, the Senate stepped up and refused to do anything. Actually they were worse because they actively worked with the White House to allow oversight to occur.
Maybe one can argue that dereliction of one's Constitutional duty is subverting the process, but I don't think so. With subversion one is actively working around something where with dereliction one is simply refusing to do one's job and uphold one's oath.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @03:13PM
Sorry, meant to type "disallow oversight to occur"
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday April 15 2020, @03:33PM
It is now illegal for members of Congress to do so. That loophole was addressed [wikipedia.org] in a timely 2012, only 75 years after federal level law on insider trading was passed (1933).
For another example of the privileges that Congress enjoyed, the power to the Capitol (and much of Washington, DC is supplied by a power plant which for decades was a coal power plant exempt from EPA regulation and responsible for more than half [wikipedia.org] of particulate matter pollution in Washington DC proper.
And don't forget baseball [slate.com].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:37AM (4 children)
By late January America had already had its first case. Anybody with more than half a brain cell had already realized we were likely going to hit the shitter fairly soon, let alone by mid February. Even the CDC was telling people as much, though in less panic inducing terms. It was also just reasonable prophylaxis. What do you stand by unloading investments in e.g. hotels, etc for a couple of months? Whatever those stocks might appreciate during those months which, given the clearly escalating pandemic was going to be minimal *at best*. What do you stand to lose if shit hits the fan? Immensely. It's a very obvious risk:reward scenario.
No love for any of these guys, to say the least, but I think allegations like this are stupid since they make more meaningful things look just as spurious - when they are not.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 15 2020, @11:55AM (3 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @01:04PM (2 children)
Maybe buying more now is a better thing?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 15 2020, @02:33PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @07:26PM
Something I'd mention that's as obvious to me as this thing was in mid February: Right now we're starting to bring the curve down, but that's only by completely suiciding our economies and engaging in massive lockdowns. Many countries, including South Korea, have reported multiple repeat infections. And there are also at least 8 known strains in the wild. Even people who overcome the virus are, sometimes, inexplicably showing no antibodies against the virus.
The point of this is that both natural immunization and vaccine based immunization are likely going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. And the point of *that* is that once you reopen the economy, this whole thing's just going to start all over again.
There's an extremely good chance we're not only not at the bottom, but nowhere even remotely near it. And keep in mind that the current rebound is almost entirely fake. The Fed is pumping obscene amounts of funny money into the economy to try to give some chub to our otherwise limp and shriveled cock of an economy. Once the funny money stops, so does the chub. And at the same time, if you pump too much funny money into the economy, your risk the entire dick just falling off.
And seriously if you can't take financial advice from an anon using dick metaphors on the internet, who really can you take advice from? However, I am right.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday April 15 2020, @11:50AM (1 child)
Is there no way to sort/search by senator? Kinda limited functionality otherwise.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 15 2020, @01:03PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Insightful) by landshark on Wednesday April 15 2020, @01:55PM
The book "Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison" by Peter Schweizer is both interesting and very depressing about this subject.