> Some analysts say it bears the hallmarks of illegal insider trading, whereby bets are made by people based on information that is not available to the general public.
> Others say the picture is more complicated and that some traders have become more adept at anticipating the president's interventions.
This and the title are journalistic malpractice. This is an article designed to report on obvious insider trading, and the writer clearly knows and agrees that it's obvious, but goes out of their way to throw in concessions and a build a veil of neutrality. You are legally allowed to accuse public officials of crimes. You do not have to gesture at "looming suspicions." A neutral reporting of the facts would make such an accusation, and tie it into the broader pattern of criminality. But it's more important to perform neutrality than to be honest, so we get this garbage. "Mr President, would you please comment on the allegations that-" "Shut up, piggie."
It may be different in the UK. They have defamation laws that seem insane to a USA person. (Burden of proof on the speaker to prove what they said is true iirc)
Allegations of insider trading are not the same as convictions of insider trading. No publication should be in the business of allocating criminal responsibility in advance of legal proceedings. If a crime is suspected, then it should be reported to the authorities.
Given the scope of all government officials it should just be the case that you cannot trade individual equities, stocks or have any outside investments wholesale.
Otherwise how could you stop it? It’s not like when you work at big co and you just stop trading their stock. You get access to information that clearly will be material potentially months in advance.
How about we start with congress and see how that goes? Been a point of discussion for a long, long time and politicians do not seem to be interested in regulating themselves at all.
Yeah. Lots of problems. If I could only get three wishes I’d choose implementation of score voting for presidential election and congress, introduction of recall votes and introduction of national ballot questions.
I'd add to that list the option to vote "no confidence". About half of Americans do not vote, and I strongly suspect that for a large chunk of them it's because they feel there's no candidate which represents their interests.
Personally I think they’re inherently linked. How exactly would it look like for money and politics not to be linked? Money is political. There are some low hanging fruit though like corporate personhood and super pacs.
Start with public campaign financing, and saner election procedures. Primaries, caucuses, first last the post, and electoral college? It all contributes.
My spouse was a minor elected official in california, so we had to fill out form 700. I was already pretty much ready to go on broad based mutual funds, but needing to fill that out for anything that isn't a broad based mutual fund put any thoughts of individual equities out of my mind. (Other than employment based stock, which we reported out of caution, even though my employer had no operations in or near the district)
They'll just do something similar to what some engineering managers do in the software industry. They'll tip off their cousin or friend of a friend of some opportunity (like needing to hire 10 engineers for a new initiative) and when they make money by acting on the information they reward the tipper with cars, vacations, homes, etc.
Sometimes managers will only hire through staffing agencies owned by family friends and get indirect kickbacks.
When I first heard about this my initial question was how do they not get caught when the assets are gifted or transferred to the manager's name. Turns out they don't actually transfer the assets to the their name but they effectively own it through free usage.
Congresscritters like personal power. Trump has neutered even his own party's legislators and they do not like it, even if they fall in line out of fear. Keep in mind even when Trump is in power, his own party goes through processes like "pro forma" sessions which prevent him from making recess appointments.
That seems highly questionable given how little pushback Trump got in congress, and it was almost entirely along party lines. What makes you think they'll suddenly grow a spine in 3 years?
The issue is people are afraid of him. There was plenty of Republican opposition to Trump but people either fell in line or got pushed out. (The main problem is that people didn't have the courage to oppose him all at once, he can easily handle one threat at a time.)
I suspect even of Republicans voting in the lines today, they don't like him or his behavior but are too self-interested to do anything about it. When a new administration comes in, between Republicans happy to avoid a Democrat or one of their own have that power again, and Democrats ready to ensure another Trump can never happen again, we'll have bipartisan support for crippling presidential power.
There are plenty of rules in place today which say the President cannot do X thing. I do not see how adding rules to the book changes anything if the Congressional/judicial enforcement becomes so impotent to use the tools at their disposal.
I think it'll be interesting to see what the consequences are. In India, it used to be (I haven't lived there in decades) pretty par for the course for a new party to come into power and jail all the previous party's heads for corruption and then when it yoyos over the inverse would happen. That would be a worse outcome for the US, I think. It would stall any significant action from the government.
I think we allowed a sense of decorum and a hope we could just "move on" to avoid that happening in 2021, and now we are suffering the wrath of not doing it. I suspect we will not make the same mistake in 2029.
> we allowed a sense of decorum and a hope we could just "move on" to avoid that happening in 2021
2021 was exactly like India - Trump was going to go to prison for overestimating the floorspace of a building in New York to get a loan, which is apparently very commonplace and did not concern the bank.
The problem is Trump’s family and friends and donors and people who have otherwise bribed him all can benefit from actions the administration takes. It’s not as simple as restricting the current officials.
Despite the apathy of Americans, I continue to have hope that there will be consequences for all recent and past actions. It's unfortunate that recent events are only the tip of the iceberg, too many to even remember.
You seem to think you’ve found some sort of gotcha. There were plenty of crimes committed in the MBS world. See GS, Credit Suisse, and others. However very few were prosecuted at the individual level.
Or we can use this camel's straw to finally draw a bit of inspiration from our French compatriots. The power these people wield is artificial, and we're capable of taking it away.
In such a scenario, people shouldn't acquiesce. Be creative and find ways of bringing hurt to those in this administration who feel they can dodge consequences. If no example is made of them, it will happen again.
While insider trading is always a possibility, what often happen is trades are made in anticipation of an announcement without knowing what the announcement actually is, and Trump really is fairly predictable. You know hes going to TACO, question is when.
I would be more interested to know if the traders had insider knowledge of timing of the announcement or if it was leaked.
1. The Supreme Court is not some neutral arbiter of a hallowed intractable document. They are political actors. Just like history books now write about the disastrous Court of the 1850s that went completely off the rails (Reconstruction wasn't much better), history will likewise write about the Roberts court as (IMHO) the worst in American history, particularly Citizens United and Trump v. United States. The latter is most directly responsible for all of this. There is now absolutely no prospect of consequences for any of this. The president himself is immune and is now free to openly sell pardons for anyone gets indicted. And let's be real, nobody is getting indicted. This is brazen, unfettered kleptocracy; and
2. The Democratic Party itself, the donor class and the consultant class is completely on board with everything that's happening.f The term here is controlled opposition. Now you just feckless pronouncements like "Trump bad" but, for example, no objection to policy. Instead the objection is to process. For example, Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should've authorized the Iran War. That's not an objection to the war. The Democratic establishment likes the war. All of these political careers are just stepping stones to their eventual private industry paydays. It's their children getting fake jobs at thinktanks, management consultancies, lobbying firms and so on.
My personal opinion is that nothing will be solved. It's too late to do anything about this with electoral politics. Democratic politicians and the mainstream media has spent more effort attacking Hasan Piker in the last month than attacking Trump's foreseeably disastrous war or outright corruption with insider trading and pardons.
This feels like a "So long and thanks for all the fish" moment.
Princeton did a study on the effect of public opinion on what Congress does, specifically the impact of popularity of a bill passing and it actually passing [1]. It should surprise no one that public opinion has almost zero impact.
> For example, Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should've authorized the Iran War.
Did he say, "Congress should have authorized the Iran War," or did he say "Congress should have to authorize the Iran War." Those are two very different statements.
More to the point, did he say he would personally vote to authorize the Iran War? Did he say Democrats should vote to authorize the Iran War?
> More to the point, did he say he would personally vote to authorize the Iran War? Did he say Democrats should vote to authorize the Iran War?
Jeffries does not support the war with Iran; he has strongly criticized it as a "reckless war of choice". He is actively leading efforts to pass a War Powers Resolution to force the immediate cessation of hostilities.
I don't see any actual evidence given in the story by the author.
The BBC is not exactly known for unbiased reporting. It's been accused of systemic anti-Trump bias, including the misleading 2024 Panorama edit of his Jan 6 speech for which the network was forced to apologize.
Again, proof or evidence? No direct names mentioned of insiders, or any leaks traced. I do not see it. The BBC cites trade volume spikes that were timed to the announcements and analyst opinions. But is that not how Forex and Future exchanges/trades work? Are they not driven by geopolitics? If anyone is calling for a SEC probe, then the investigation should start with the entire congressional body. If it were me, I would start by enacting term limit legislation for senate and house. I'd then start speaking to any politicians that have been expelled out or sacrificed by their own political parties. I'm sure they'll have a rather good story to tell. It will be interesting to see how many of these people will be open to public hearings on the matter.
> Some analysts say it bears the hallmarks of illegal insider trading, whereby bets are made by people based on information that is not available to the general public. > Others say the picture is more complicated and that some traders have become more adept at anticipating the president's interventions.
This and the title are journalistic malpractice. This is an article designed to report on obvious insider trading, and the writer clearly knows and agrees that it's obvious, but goes out of their way to throw in concessions and a build a veil of neutrality. You are legally allowed to accuse public officials of crimes. You do not have to gesture at "looming suspicions." A neutral reporting of the facts would make such an accusation, and tie it into the broader pattern of criminality. But it's more important to perform neutrality than to be honest, so we get this garbage. "Mr President, would you please comment on the allegations that-" "Shut up, piggie."
It may be different in the UK. They have defamation laws that seem insane to a USA person. (Burden of proof on the speaker to prove what they said is true iirc)
Allegations of insider trading are not the same as convictions of insider trading. No publication should be in the business of allocating criminal responsibility in advance of legal proceedings. If a crime is suspected, then it should be reported to the authorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
Once you start seeing all the "both sides" and "sanewashing" you can't unsee it. And they lean on both so hard.
Thank you. I was going to simply comment "Suspicions"!?!
… but you've explained it more thoroughly.
Given the scope of all government officials it should just be the case that you cannot trade individual equities, stocks or have any outside investments wholesale.
Otherwise how could you stop it? It’s not like when you work at big co and you just stop trading their stock. You get access to information that clearly will be material potentially months in advance.
How about we start with congress and see how that goes? Been a point of discussion for a long, long time and politicians do not seem to be interested in regulating themselves at all.
Yeah. Lots of problems. If I could only get three wishes I’d choose implementation of score voting for presidential election and congress, introduction of recall votes and introduction of national ballot questions.
Those should fix most of the problems with time.
I'd add to that list the option to vote "no confidence". About half of Americans do not vote, and I strongly suspect that for a large chunk of them it's because they feel there's no candidate which represents their interests.
Until money and politics are commingled there will be no solution
I think you may mean disentangled?
Personally I think they’re inherently linked. How exactly would it look like for money and politics not to be linked? Money is political. There are some low hanging fruit though like corporate personhood and super pacs.
Start with public campaign financing, and saner election procedures. Primaries, caucuses, first last the post, and electoral college? It all contributes.
Ok, let's make it Congress and everyone working an elected position or political appointment in the executive branch as well. All good!
My spouse was a minor elected official in california, so we had to fill out form 700. I was already pretty much ready to go on broad based mutual funds, but needing to fill that out for anything that isn't a broad based mutual fund put any thoughts of individual equities out of my mind. (Other than employment based stock, which we reported out of caution, even though my employer had no operations in or near the district)
They'll just do something similar to what some engineering managers do in the software industry. They'll tip off their cousin or friend of a friend of some opportunity (like needing to hire 10 engineers for a new initiative) and when they make money by acting on the information they reward the tipper with cars, vacations, homes, etc.
Sometimes managers will only hire through staffing agencies owned by family friends and get indirect kickbacks.
When I first heard about this my initial question was how do they not get caught when the assets are gifted or transferred to the manager's name. Turns out they don't actually transfer the assets to the their name but they effectively own it through free usage.
Nit: MNPI (material, non-public information) has strict definitions. Not all internal information are considered MNPI.
The vast majority of government employees would not have access to MNPI.
Why does making this rule matter? The pardon makes it all irrelevant.
Why do any rules matter for government officials? Should we just make all laws not apply to them because of the pardon?
My hot take is that the presidential pardon will be eliminated in our lifetime.
This would require a Constitutional Amendment - a pretty high bar.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...
I suspect in the aftermath of this administration, the power of the President as a whole is going to be massively stripped back.
Has not happened after other catastrophic administrations. Each party likes the power when they get hold of it.
Congresscritters like personal power. Trump has neutered even his own party's legislators and they do not like it, even if they fall in line out of fear. Keep in mind even when Trump is in power, his own party goes through processes like "pro forma" sessions which prevent him from making recess appointments.
That seems highly questionable given how little pushback Trump got in congress, and it was almost entirely along party lines. What makes you think they'll suddenly grow a spine in 3 years?
They're probably counting on the majority of the current Congress losing their seats over this.
The issue is people are afraid of him. There was plenty of Republican opposition to Trump but people either fell in line or got pushed out. (The main problem is that people didn't have the courage to oppose him all at once, he can easily handle one threat at a time.)
I suspect even of Republicans voting in the lines today, they don't like him or his behavior but are too self-interested to do anything about it. When a new administration comes in, between Republicans happy to avoid a Democrat or one of their own have that power again, and Democrats ready to ensure another Trump can never happen again, we'll have bipartisan support for crippling presidential power.
There are plenty of rules in place today which say the President cannot do X thing. I do not see how adding rules to the book changes anything if the Congressional/judicial enforcement becomes so impotent to use the tools at their disposal.
I think it'll be interesting to see what the consequences are. In India, it used to be (I haven't lived there in decades) pretty par for the course for a new party to come into power and jail all the previous party's heads for corruption and then when it yoyos over the inverse would happen. That would be a worse outcome for the US, I think. It would stall any significant action from the government.
I think we allowed a sense of decorum and a hope we could just "move on" to avoid that happening in 2021, and now we are suffering the wrath of not doing it. I suspect we will not make the same mistake in 2029.
> we allowed a sense of decorum and a hope we could just "move on" to avoid that happening in 2021
2021 was exactly like India - Trump was going to go to prison for overestimating the floorspace of a building in New York to get a loan, which is apparently very commonplace and did not concern the bank.
That might work out well for the Republicans - "rule by executive order" started under the Obama administration.
Based on this:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...
Looks like it really started under Teddy Roosevelt. Obama's 276 is lower than most of his predecessors.
I thought that would happen after the first Trump term. It did not.
The second one has made an even stronger case for doing so though.
The problem is Trump’s family and friends and donors and people who have otherwise bribed him all can benefit from actions the administration takes. It’s not as simple as restricting the current officials.
Despite the apathy of Americans, I continue to have hope that there will be consequences for all recent and past actions. It's unfortunate that recent events are only the tip of the iceberg, too many to even remember.
What were the consequences after 2008 financial crisis?
We created a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to try to head off that kind of crisis before it happened again.
We got rid of it last year.
Nothing
Stock market at all time highs
Miami houses selling north of $150,000,000.00
No one cares about that crisis anymore
The markets keep ripping no matter what
Just some hiccups along the way
You’re correct, but this is unsustainable.
Well, in order to go up, first it must go down…
Yeah both Bush and Obama ignored those crimes
What were the crimes you believe were committed in 2008 and who do you think committed those crimes?
You seem to think you’ve found some sort of gotcha. There were plenty of crimes committed in the MBS world. See GS, Credit Suisse, and others. However very few were prosecuted at the individual level.
I wasn't looking for a gotcha at all. I was wondering what specific individuals are you referring to and what crimes you think they committed.
Why bother reporting this - it's obviously happening and it's obvious that nothing is going to happen about it.
For sure nothing will happen with the defeatist attitude
It does encourage you to focus on something that you might be able to fix, instead of being constantly dragged from one outage to the next.
Or we can use this camel's straw to finally draw a bit of inspiration from our French compatriots. The power these people wield is artificial, and we're capable of taking it away.
Nothing will happen until the mid terms or 2028.
This administration highlights why the pardon provisions of the constitution need amendment.
In such a scenario, people shouldn't acquiesce. Be creative and find ways of bringing hurt to those in this administration who feel they can dodge consequences. If no example is made of them, it will happen again.
The pardon is limited to federal offenses, state prosecution is still viable.
Well, given it’s a federal crime, pardons will happen.
Is it a crime?
lol touché
"Suspicions" doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
While insider trading is always a possibility, what often happen is trades are made in anticipation of an announcement without knowing what the announcement actually is, and Trump really is fairly predictable. You know hes going to TACO, question is when.
I would be more interested to know if the traders had insider knowledge of timing of the announcement or if it was leaked.
There were bets on BRL/USD exchange rates just prior to Trump's tariffs announcement too. No doubt some people made a lot of money.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
I don't think good men have been allowed near government for many decades
It's very nearly a contradiction of terms.
The cult of personality is impenetrable. He won't be held to account, ever. Nor his sycophants in the administration.
Add onto all that Trump suing the IRS for $10 billion.
Here are the lessons:
1. The Supreme Court is not some neutral arbiter of a hallowed intractable document. They are political actors. Just like history books now write about the disastrous Court of the 1850s that went completely off the rails (Reconstruction wasn't much better), history will likewise write about the Roberts court as (IMHO) the worst in American history, particularly Citizens United and Trump v. United States. The latter is most directly responsible for all of this. There is now absolutely no prospect of consequences for any of this. The president himself is immune and is now free to openly sell pardons for anyone gets indicted. And let's be real, nobody is getting indicted. This is brazen, unfettered kleptocracy; and
2. The Democratic Party itself, the donor class and the consultant class is completely on board with everything that's happening.f The term here is controlled opposition. Now you just feckless pronouncements like "Trump bad" but, for example, no objection to policy. Instead the objection is to process. For example, Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should've authorized the Iran War. That's not an objection to the war. The Democratic establishment likes the war. All of these political careers are just stepping stones to their eventual private industry paydays. It's their children getting fake jobs at thinktanks, management consultancies, lobbying firms and so on.
My personal opinion is that nothing will be solved. It's too late to do anything about this with electoral politics. Democratic politicians and the mainstream media has spent more effort attacking Hasan Piker in the last month than attacking Trump's foreseeably disastrous war or outright corruption with insider trading and pardons.
This feels like a "So long and thanks for all the fish" moment.
Princeton did a study on the effect of public opinion on what Congress does, specifically the impact of popularity of a bill passing and it actually passing [1]. It should surprise no one that public opinion has almost zero impact.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
> For example, Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should've authorized the Iran War.
Did he say, "Congress should have authorized the Iran War," or did he say "Congress should have to authorize the Iran War." Those are two very different statements.
More to the point, did he say he would personally vote to authorize the Iran War? Did he say Democrats should vote to authorize the Iran War?
> More to the point, did he say he would personally vote to authorize the Iran War? Did he say Democrats should vote to authorize the Iran War?
Jeffries does not support the war with Iran; he has strongly criticized it as a "reckless war of choice". He is actively leading efforts to pass a War Powers Resolution to force the immediate cessation of hostilities.
I don't see any actual evidence given in the story by the author.
The BBC is not exactly known for unbiased reporting. It's been accused of systemic anti-Trump bias, including the misleading 2024 Panorama edit of his Jan 6 speech for which the network was forced to apologize.
Again, proof or evidence? No direct names mentioned of insiders, or any leaks traced. I do not see it. The BBC cites trade volume spikes that were timed to the announcements and analyst opinions. But is that not how Forex and Future exchanges/trades work? Are they not driven by geopolitics? If anyone is calling for a SEC probe, then the investigation should start with the entire congressional body. If it were me, I would start by enacting term limit legislation for senate and house. I'd then start speaking to any politicians that have been expelled out or sacrificed by their own political parties. I'm sure they'll have a rather good story to tell. It will be interesting to see how many of these people will be open to public hearings on the matter.