Maybe the first 3? I know, I’m being unrealistic.
As much as I love Republican bashing for the stupid shit they do, in this particular circumstance, I’m not really seeing the direct cause & effect links here. The Senate briefing was Jan 24th, Wuhan announced it’s lockdown on Jan 23rd, the first confirmed case on US soil was on Jan 21st. By the start of Feb, people already knew the US was woefully behind on testing although it was not clear to anyone why it was the case yet. The Diamond Princess news was announced on Feb 4th and there was daily coverage for weeks after that point.
It’s not clear what Burr would have known by Feb 13th from a Jan 23rd briefing that wasn’t already out in the public at that point. Indeed, the big question for the markets wasn’t why they cratered, it’s why they spent almost the entire month of Feb blissfully unreactive when all the warning signs were in place well ahead of time? Anyone could have looked at the signs from Wuhan, from Diamond Princess, from Singapore, from detected cases on US soil and from the criminal lack of testing and independently concluded the US was a ticking time bomb and it was time to sell.
Also, if Republicans were receiving some kind of special secret information the rest of us weren’t privy to, why didn’t they show it in their actions as well as their stock trades? You would have expected Republican leaders all to have disappeared into their private bunkers by now. Instead, you have Republican senators getting tested, then eating lunch with fellow senators and going to the gym before getting their tests back positive. You have senators going to CPAC and then continuing to do large rallies and gatherings. You could argue that the senators were trading on news of the lockdowns, not the virus but it’s clear that the white house itself didn’t even know what tomorrow’s lockdown decisions were today.
In short, I’m not saying it wasn’t Burr’s intention to trade the market based on this news. But at the same time, I’m not seeing a clear mechanism for him to do so, especially because he waited so many weeks after the briefing to sell. He had no idea the market would stay strong for so long, it could have cratered the day after the Wuhan lockdown.
Inhofe and Loeffler both made numerous trades on Monday 1/27. This was the first time the markets were open after the the senators only briefing on Friday afternoon 1/24.
Loeffler not only dumped a wide range of stocks, but also invested in Citrix which makes remote desktop/work from home software that same day.
You couldn’t have inferred from 1/10th of the world going under quarantine that working from home would become more popular?
Lol, nice try, but when you coordinate their sales with their statements, it’s obvious they were talking up the markets so that people could bail out.
What I could have inferred is not particularly relevant.
Loeffler received a private briefing and then made several stock transactions at the next available opportunity. You said you couldn’t see cause and effect, but this it what cause and effect looks like.
Furthermore, even if her actions were completely legal, there is no excuse for her private actions (prepping her portfolio for a corona induced recession) being completely at odds with her public statements (Trump is doing a great job and Dems are blowing this out of proportion for political reasons). So even if she didn’t commit a crime, she was not serving her constituents.
Yeah, there could be a small sliver of justification if both of them were making public statements on how bad things were likely to get, however these two were not just selling stocks off but they were making public statements about how everything was dandy and under control.
I agree that all top government officials should be placing their investments in a blind trust precisely to avoid the appearance of any impropriety like the above.
But if he did invest in Citrix stock on Jan 27th, then he made a poor trade. If you look at the stock graph, Citrix zoomed up from $119 to $128 on Jan 23rd (when it became obvious working from home was going to become big), it was $126.90 on Jan 27th and is now at $121.60. There was only a single day (March 18th) where anyone could have sold Citrix stock at a profit.
If there was some sort of super secret government information contained in those briefings that the public is not yet aware about, it sure hasn’t shown in the government officials’ actions. No Republican senator seems to be taking any special extraordinary measure to avoid themselves getting infected or have federal/state/local officials announced any public policies that depend on knowing anything more than what’s been available in the public for months at this point.
I suspect the “secret Jan 24th briefing” wasn’t much more than some super smart people giving a summary of mostly what was already publicly available information because we would have seen evidence if it weren’t.
Yawn.
David Purdue selling shares of Caesars, buying Big Pharma on 2.28.2020 while GOP is still talking up the market and talking down the plague.
However, here he is on March 1st, after he made his transactions.
I suspect your arguments are made without really correlating their stock transactions with their public statements.
That’s naive. Why would they have the meeting be secret if it only contained publicly known information? Why wouldn’t they, as soon as they were accused, leak the contents of this meeting so we’d know that there was no insider trading. If it’s all public information, there’d be no harm, right?
When you have a secret meeting, and then people change their stocks, you suspect insider trading. It has the look of impropriety, so it is up to them to show it was not improper.
It’s not up to us to come up with evidence to counter them. Let them give their evidence, and we just wait. Never give ideas to people who may be lying. If your idea is the truth, they’ll say it on their own.
Yeah, and his “big pharma” stock is Pfizer which is down from $33.42 when he bought it to $28.49 today. He also bought Delta Airlines and GM stock on the same day which have both also cratered. From the tweet, he bought far more stock than he sold which is consistent with his story of believing this was a temporary market blip and he was hoping to pick up a few bargains along the way before the market “returned to sanity”.
Look, do I believe it’s a horrendously bad idea for anyone in government to be able to decide to buy and sell stock vs putting it into a blind trust? Absolutely 100% yes. Do I think a bunch of Republicans tried to inside trade on the market? I wouldn’t put it past them. Do I think there was a mechanism that allowed them to trade on the market? That’s where I’m doubtful.
In a way, I’d feel a lot better if I were seeing a lot of government leaders make the obviously correct and smart trades on the market because it does indicate that they know stuff that’s beyond what’s available in public and they’re ahead of us in preparing for the pandemic. All the evidence thus far seems to be consistent with them being woefully misinformed and working off the same crappy public information everyone has and not even digesting that correctly. Some of them are going to make money doing this, some are going to lose money, that’s how markets work. But so far, all the evidence seems to point to Republicans overall losing more money than they’ve gained through their “insider trading” which makes it not a very good form of insider trading.
I’m not amazed by the corruption of the GOP; I’m amazed at the ease and reflexivity with which they seem to engage in it. They breathe corruption.
So, the defense is that they did insider trade, but they’re as incompetent at it as they are at everything else, so they’re not guilty?
They had inside information that made certain trades look like they would be good. They made those trades that, according to their inside information, looked like they would be good. They took every measure available to them to prevent that information from getting out to other investors, at least until after they had a chance to make their trades. How is it even relevant that they screwed it up?
% Decrease in the DJIA since 2-28-2020: 26.8%
% Decrease in Caesars Entertainment since 2-28-2020: 52%
% Decrease in Pfizer since 2-28-2020: 14.5%
Shalmanese, your arguments do not hold up. Defend the GOP all you want, but this argument… “Pfizer is down too!”… carries absolutely no water.
Oh, the fact that a Georgia Senator bought stock in a Georgian company which is first in line for bailouts isn’t exactly a shining example of ethics or probity, and should not be used as a defense.
Same thing with GM which has lost 21.2% of its value and (a) has done better than the market as a whole, and (b) is another prime candidate for bailout money.
GM was $30.50 on Feb 28th and is $19.06 now. It’s lost 37.5% of it’s value.
But it doesn’t matter how those stocks did compared to an index. According to the tweet you just linked me, Purdue sold $23,000 - $170,000 worth of stock, bought $78,000 - $470K worth of stock, then went on TV two days later to announce the stock market was strong. You can accuse him of a lot of things but it’s hard to accuse him of hypocrisy, he was at least consistent between his private and public statements.
Look, to be clear, there’s a normal sized and catastrophic sized scandal attached to this:
The normal sized scandal was that government officials were the recipients of information that was being used to formulate the best possible response and used that info to inappropriately trade on the side. The catastrophic scandal was that government officials inappropriately influenced what the best public response was so they could trade on the side. I’ve never denied that the first is plausible. All I’m saying is that I’ve yet to see any kind of smoking gun evidence for the second.
However, if the government was releasing all information material to public health as soon as it became aware of it, then the first, while absolutely unseemly and stupid, also gave the senators absolutely no advantage on the market (besides the normal hedge fund pays an expert to synthesize a summary advantage all market investors already have access to) which changes the tenor of the accusations significantly.
With the benefit of hindsight, I’m simply not seeing what could have been put in Jan 24th briefing that the public didn’t know about by Jan 28th/Feb 14th that could have moved the markets that much. Either a) The government still has some secret knowledge from Jan 24th that we still don’t know about or b) There were things the government was aware of on Jan 24th that the public only became aware of much later than Feb 14th. Given that all the examples listed in the thread so far have been dumb trades AND the senators have continued to be dumb in their personal lives regarding risk of infection, my evidence rating for this is incredibly slim.
Anyone is free to look in my post history to find I’ve not been the biggest friend to Republicans over the years. But I do think it’s important to be precise on exactly what we’re accusing people of, especially those we’re trigger happy to demonize. There are so many legitimate scandals to hold Republicans to account for, and more and more as the weeks go by that I just find this one, while seemingly sexy on the surface, to be somewhat overblown.
This is a legitimate scandal though.
It would be if it was a Democrat, but IOKIARDI.
Honestly, the bigger issue to me is not if they had any secret knowledge. It was that they were publicly pushing a narrative that financially benefited them. It should be just as illegal to do that as insider trading. I consider this no different than a pump and dump, except being done by a public official in a way that hurts the public for potential personal gain.
At this point, we need a new acronym. It’s not just OK If A Republican Does It.
ICIARDI It’s Celebrated If A Republican Does It
It’s Corona If A Republican Does It.