this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Would love to see some bipartisan support for banning congress members from trading stocks. Both sides are doing it to such a degree that they are more likely to be replaced before any legislation regarding this gets passed. Obligatory Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker link: https://twitter.com/PelosiTracker_/
Nancy Pelosi gets a bad rap, but she's actually not one of the most successful traders in congress. Of the 26 traders in Congress who beat the S&P 500 in 2022, Nancy was not one of them.
She also doesn't actually trade any stocks. She married a man in college who now owns a brokerage. To ban her from owning stock trades would be the same as asking her to divorce her husband or be removed from office.
One of the biggest controversies she's ever been in was when VISA lobbied her and made meetings with her before an influential vote, at which point her husband bought large shares in VISA, and then she...
voted against VISA's interests anyways...
The best part of all this is Paul Pelosi still made money selling the shares because society as a whole has duped itself into thinking following Pelosi is the ultimate grift for decades now. The fact is that we only even know about their trades because of legislature that Pelosi helped pass in the first place.
I wouldn't complain if this happened without needing this kind of legislation.
That said I do agree that people like her would be in a pickle and I don't think it should necessarily be straight banned, but instead politicians in her situation and their closest associated people should have their trades regularly audited for insider trading.
That's just the system we have now, then. We have the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the STOCK Act of 2012. Clearly I think more should be done, but I also don't agree with forcing people to divorce their loved ones and leave their families while in office. Maybe something that makes future members of congress ineligible for office if their spouse trades stocks as an income source?
We only started tracking trades in 2021. Pelosi has been in office since the 1987 and her husband's venture capital firm Financial Leasing Services, Inc. is the primary reason for the family's $115M household valuation. A big part of the FLS holdings is sports venue real estate. And a big part of the profitability of that real estate stems from city, state, and federal grant money. So... shrug
But no, this isn't just Nancy Pelosi personally getting in on the ground floor of Facebook, Google, or Amazon, back before they were major recipients of NSA money for data collections and warehousing.
We've been tracking trades since the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 which was expanded upon by the STOCK act of 2012.
So... shrug
Can you show me what stocks Pelosi owned in 1987, when she took office? I'm unable to find anyone hosting this data.
Given EIGA predates the internet, the archives are probably stored as papers somewhere in the library of congress or the SEC, let me know if you find anything online.