Why wouldn’t they? Americans continue to allow it.
And there will be no measurable consequences even if all evidence should happen to point to insider trading. If there’s even an investigation I’ll be amazed.
And THAT is what “undermines faith in government and the markets.”
They did it before covid too and got away with it. Now they manufacture their own crisis anytime they want to pump and dump
Insider trading makes you a Based Chad. This only proves that the people running the country are incredibly smart and deserve the money they’ve racked in bilking and swindling their peers.
Now they can flaunt their wealth in order to prove their superiority, possibly by purchasing one of our many exploding trucks or crashing planes. Or perhaps by paying a team of streamers to power level a Diablo character on their account in order to look cool on Twitter.
Anyone who suggests this isn’t Sigma Male behavior is jealous and also probably a pedophile terrorist.
I imagine that number is off by an order of magnitude
I bet they bought it back too after the plunge and sold when it was put off
Little late on this, but okay.
The Art of the Grift.
TL;DR:
Over a dozen U.S. government officials and congressional aides sold stocks just before Trump’s major tariff announcements, which later caused market drops. While there’s no proof they used insider info, the timing is extremely suspect
Officials who sold their stocks include a White House lawyer, a State Department official, and a Trade Representative director selling shares before key announcements. Experts argue such trades undermine trust in government and markets.
- Make illegal any trading by legislative/judicial/executive and anyone closely linked or related
- There is no #2
To enforce #1 we require they move all investments to a market-wide USA ETF (or US bonds) before they can take their position and disallow sales or any unscheduled purchases while they hold that position. If they’re not comfortable investing in the market they now have a part in keeping healthy then they are absolutely welcome to hold it as cash.
I’m in favour of banning government members from trading stocks, but it didn’t exactly take an insider to predict that the tariffs would bring the market down.
it didn’t exactly take an insider to predict that the tariffs would bring the market down.
Nope, but it took an insider to know the timing before everyone else and thus get a head start before things start plummeting. There’s a shitload of money to be pilfered that way.
Brief Devils advocate here: the tariffs were public knowledge since at least February. I also sold a bunch of stocks before the market tanked.
Trump is quoted saying “there is going to be some pain” in early February while discussing tariffs on Mexico and Canada. That’s enough insight to make me sell, and that was well before most of these insiders sold their position.
It’s very, very, very difficult to prove insider trading unfortunately. It does look bad from a trust standpoint however, and I agree with that sentiment. It looks especially bad when the president and CEOs laugh about how much money they’ve made while standing in the Oval Office.
Insider trading or not, the optics don’t look good.
They sold immediately before the announcement. They knew the exact timing to gain the most money they could, using their prior knowledge. They weren’t guessing what would happen in the vague future. They had concrete knowledge the announcement was going to happen, how much the tariffs were for, and when.
Were you also buying contracts on SPY when it was hanging out around 515?
How many had SPY puts
I’m too regarded to understand puts. I only buy calls.
If I had balls I would have. Can’t gamble our house money though. I did sell near the top.
That’s it? Seems like a small number
It’s simply unbelievable that that would occur.
Well, duh! It was obvious Stock Manipulation Fraud from the beginning. He even put out a tweet saying that it’s a good time to buy, just a few hours before he postponed his most recent tariffs.
Corruption!
Lol, yea… I sold off a bunch of stuff before Trump’s tariff’s too. Guess what else, I also bought a few contracts of SPY when it dropped as a result. I’ve made a bunch of money off the Trump corruption. You can too.
It’s entirely fucked up that this is happening, but you’re a fool if you’re not taking advantage of the system that they’re manipulating right now.
General advice at this point, check the dumb shit he says on Truth social every once in a while, and consider buying really cheap SPY calls after the man-made dips.
What are SPY calls?
To add on to this, what I’m doing specifically… wait for Trump to say or do some really dumb shit, watch the SPY ticker… watch it drop off a cliff, and every time you see a giant red line with the thing going down, you buy as much as you can afford for a date that’s like 3 weeks out (to make it as inexpensive as possible). I bought $40 worth of call options about 5 weeks ago and made around $1800 off it.
Oh and this is not financial advice, I’m a cloud engineer not a banker.
I’m super happy and excited that someone on Lemmy asked me! It’s buying a “call option” on SPY (which is an ETF of the S&P index - otherwise, it’s basically a way to invest in the “stock market” blindly). So when you break it down… it’s like saying "I can buy a lotto ticket that says “SPY will be > x as of y date” - If you’re not familiar with how the market works *(and I sure as hell wasn’t 2 years ago), if you buy an option, it’s a contract to buy 100 shares of a stock. If you buy 10 options, you’re basically on the hook to pay for 10x 100 shares of a stock; but here’s the kicker… when you buy options, as long as you sell your options contract before the expiration date, you don’t have to actually pay for the stock - so while your random ass gamble is becoming more and more likely; you can just sell off the profits you made to cash in before you’re shelling out $44k on stock.
