OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just got some tough news from her fellow Democrats.
Democrat lawmakers have introduced legislation that would prevent stock trades by members of Congress and their spouses.
While speaking to reporters, Pelosi said a bill banning Congress members from trading individual stocks may go to a vote as soon as this month. Pelosi, among other lawmakers, has been primarily accused numerous times of benefiting from insider knowledge.
A reporter asked Pelosi about an investigative piece from the New York Times, which found that “97 Congress members traded stocks impacted by the work of legislative committees they sit on, either personally or by close relatives.”
“The Times report did not include Pelosi as one of the offending lawmakers, though the trading activity of her husband has long been scrutinized. It remains to be seen exactly what the restrictions may be, but a bipartisan bill introduced in February by six bipartisan representatives and senators called for a ban on Congress members and their families from owning any individual securities, including stocks, bonds, and commodities,” Forbes reported.
“The proposal allowed lawmakers to own mutual funds and ETFs and suggested a $50,000 penalty for violations,” the report added. “Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi sold $4.1 million in shares of chip maker Nvidia at a loss in July, one day before the Senate passed legislation that caused the company’s stock to surge.”
An analysis from the New York Post detailed how the Pelosi family has made a fortune in the stock market, particularly in recent years.
And the Pelosis’ overall portfolio — which has also included companies like Disney and Roblox — beat the S&P 500 by 4.9 percent in 2019 and a whopping 14.3 percent in 2020, according to data crunched for The Post by FinePrint, an outfit pushing for greater transparency of financial holdings on both sides of the aisle.
The Pelosis’ exposure to tech stocks, however, may have actually hurt them in 2021, when their portfolio underperformed the S&P 500 by 15.5 percent, according to FinePrint.
When asked whether the opportunity to profit from trades could create a conflict of interest, the speaker flatly said “no” and rejected the idea of a ban on trading individual stocks. Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill did not dispute The Post’s findings that Paul Pelosi has generally outperformed the market but insisted that the trades are not an issue.
Pelosi was against stock trade bans until enough Democrats flipped on her.
During a press conference in December, Pelosi appeared to rule out banning members of Congress and their spouses from trading stocks.
When she was asked directly whether she supported a ban, she said: “No, I don’t.”
Asked why such trades shouldn’t be stopped, she replied: “Because this is a free market and people—we are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that.”
GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy, who will likely become the next Speaker if Republicans win back in the House in November, said there will be an investigation into the Pelosis stock trading.
McCarthy expressed concern over Paul Pelosi having tremendous success in picking the correct stocks to purchase and sell and recently purchased large shares of NVIDIA before the House and Senate passed legislation that benefited the company.
“I would look through it,” he said of the Democrat proposal to ban stock trading for spouses of Congress members. “What I’ve told everybody is we will come back, and we will not only investigate this, we will come back with a proposal to change the current behavior.”
“Her husband can trade all the way through, but now it becomes a crisis?” he said. “I think what her husband did was wrong.”
“I think we need to bring trust back to this institution,” he said. “I think we have to do a thorough investigation and look at what is the proper role for members of Congress and what influence they have, and I don’t think the proper way to do this is Nancy Pelosi writing the bill because we have proven that she can not do that.”
