81–90 of 493 posts
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I don't know if specific trades are sketchy or legit, but I do think there should be some sort of log of net worth when you join congress, senate, houses of parliament etc and politicians be expected to explain any large gains over their time in office.
Frankly, it's insider trading and should be restricted/prosecuted as such.
Members of congress should only be allowed to invest in SPY/VOO, VTI, and a few other broad ETFs, long only, no options.
This is more or less what everyone in the registered investment adviser & mutual fund world must do. There’s quite a lot of compliance software to facilitate approval and checks before and after a transaction is effected in a personal account and the personal transaction history is compared, broadly, with market performance and internal fund transactions periodically to check for overlapping trades (+/- a week) in th…
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Or get a handle on the wealth inequality that makes the way we compensate our top elected officials seemingly insignificant.
Maybe we could stop making fun of (the very few) people using their stimulus checks to buy stocks. When I hear that, I’m like, great. Don’t bail out corporations, give people money directly and let them decide if they want to acquire a stake or not.
My first instinct was to give it all to a large tech company in exchange for some marvelous electronic bauble from China, but that seemed counter-productive after some deep thought.
> For example, Pelosi in Dec 22 was against more stimulus. Her husband buys deep ITM TSLA and AAPL calls that day. December 23rd, she is suddenly for stimulus again, with those same companies ralling 5%, giving her an instant +30 return. > 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…
How else is Pelosi expected to afford her $20k sub z fridges filled with 13 dollar a pint ice cream?
The very people whose job it should be to stop this sort of thing are the ones who are profiting from it. How do you change this? No really, how can we force congress to change the rules so that elected officials can't profit from inside information? Why would they ever vote for such a bill?
I think we need to acknowledge that, in the same way that the people with the power to stop this are profiting, they are also the people with the power to change who is in power or how they get in power. Elections are not effective ways of changing systemic power structures anymore. Society pretty much needs an overhaul, especially in the face of serious existential risks like climate change or looming military conflicts.
The very people whose job it should be to stop this sort of thing are the ones who are profiting from it. How do you change this? No really, how can we force congress to change the rules so that elected officials can't profit from inside information? Why would they ever vote for such a bill?
Since the media and intelligence agencies are great at vilifying any dissent (see "Capitol Riot" and how difficult it is for them to even get representation), there is no hope. The US is not going to get better as corruption is rampant and most are in the dark or powerless. Politicians like Bernie Sanders give hope, but they are few and far between, and muzzled. Perhaps the migration away from centralized news source…
They are neither left nor right. There is a middle elite group that exploits politics on either side of the aisle to maintain power. And that's all it is. And they get filthy rich, but so too does the CCP which is left-wing. Taking advantage of power for personal gain is not an exclusive domain of one wing or the other. At any rate these oversimplified analogies break down among many lines upon closer inspection. There are elite insiders and then there's the rest of us.
They are plainly there to shove through their friends interests, profit off of insider information, and get out without going to jail. Every single one of them.
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Dec 22 democrats had reached an agreement to provide $600 in stimulus, this was an agreement that had buy in and should have been pushed forward. 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…
As a member of Congress she has much better colour on what's about to happen than everyone else. She can basically count up the votes before before anyone else. 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 r…
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.
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Constitutional amendment?
And who would be voting on those? > An amendment may be proposed and sent to the states for ratification by either: > The U.S. Congress, whenever a two-thirds majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives deem it necessary; or > A national convention, called by Congress for this purpose, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states (34 since 1959). The convention option has never…