During a recent appearance on “Squawk Box,” a program on CNBC, Former Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher remarked that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with her husband, Paul, have benefitted handsomely from insider trading.
Noting that Pelosi’s husband is receiving “a lot of attention,” Fisher offered his thoughts on a recent report from Punchbowl News, which indicated that Democrats will announce a proposal in the coming weeks regarding legislators trading stocks.
Specifically, the proposal would ban all legislators, their spouses, and senior staff from engaging in any stock trades.
“Clearly people have taken advantage of inside information forever,” he continued, adding that he was not opposed to the “them tapping that down.”
“I’m sorry to see that Paul Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi and others appear … to have taken advantage of insider information,” he remarked, emphasizing that at the moment, everything is merely conjecture and appearances, not absolute facts.
Still, Fisher admits that “something needs to be done” with regards to the House Speaker’s egregiously obvious benefitting from the stock market.
Recently, Paul Pelosi procured $5M in Nvidia stock, just before a vote regarding wide ranging legislation that would provide billions of dollars in subsidies to the semiconductor industry, chiefly in a bit to boost chip production.
On June 17, Pelosi purchased 20,000 shares, which were valued at a minimum of $1M.
According to Craig Holman, who serves as a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a public think tank, the actions taken by Pelosi “certainly [raise] the specter that [he] could have access to some insider legislative information.”
Holman notes that Pelosi’s trades have oftentimes been so lucrative that a mobile app has been created exclusively for the purpose of following his trading activity.
In January, a poll conducted by a Convention of States Action and Trafalgar revealed that more than 75 percent of Americans believe that legislators have an unfair advantage when trading stocks, and they believe that they should not be permitted to do so while actively serving.
