OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi just got some tough news from her fellow Democrats.
Democrats plan to introduce legislation next month that would prevent stock trades by members of Congress and their spouses, Punchbowl News reported.
“Punchbowl News: House Democrats plan to announce a proposal next month to ban lawmakers, their spouses, and senior staff from trading stocks, according to multiple sources close to the issue,” Kyle Griffin said on Twitter.
“The framework would force members of Congress, their spouses, and senior staff to place assets in either a qualified blind trust or completely sell them off. Lawmakers, spouses, and staff would still be able to hold mutual funds,” The Daily Mail reported. “Leadership’s goal is to get the legislation through the House in September, according to Punchbowl News. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who as head of the House Administration Committee has been tasked with reviewing the different proposals, told DailyMail.com on Friday the framework would be out in the coming weeks.”
“This issue of whether and how Members of Congress engage in various financial transactions deserves scrutiny by the Committee,’ Sen. Josh Hawley said in a letter to Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
“In 2020 Speaker Pelosi and her husband outperformed the S&P 500 by a whopping 14.3 percent,” he said. A report showed that 90 percent of investment funds that are actively managed do not do that.
Speaker Pelosi was not in favor of any type of ban but in February she changed her opinion if it involved the entire government.
“It has to be government-wide,” she said. “The judiciary has no reporting. The Supreme Court has no disclosure. It has no reporting of stock transactions, and it makes important decisions every day.”
“We’re a free market economy,” she said in December. “[Lawmakers] should be able to participate in that.”
Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is being hammered for purchasing $5 million in stock in a chip manufacturer as Congress is set to vote on legislation that could hand $52 billion to semiconductor producers.
According to a report, Pelosi was back to making a number of notable moves in the stock market in June, including “investing millions in Nvidia Corporation” while selling “large quantities of Visa and Apple stocks and call options,” The Epoch Times noted, citing a disclosure from the Speaker, a California Democrat.
The outlet reported:
According to the filing, Paul Pelosi exercised 200 call options, or 20,000 shares, of Nvidia at a strike price of $100 and expiration of June 17, 2022, worth between $1 million and $5 million.
On that same date, her husband also sold 50 call options in Apple at a strike price of $100, with the transaction listed with a value of between $100,000 and $250,000.
Call options are a contract between a buyer and a seller to purchase a certain stock, bond, commodity, or other assets at a certain price up until a defined expiration date.
Paul Pelosi is a financier whose estimated wealth is north of $100 million. He also sold 10,000 shares of Visa that were worth between $1 million and $5 million on June 21, the filing by his wife noted.
Earlier in June, Nancy Pelosi disclosed that Paul bought options to purchase shares of Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that were worth nearly $2 million. Paul owns and operates a real estate and consulting firm based in San Francisco.
But it was the shares in NVIDIA, one of the biggest semiconductor manufacturers in the world, that got attention.
“It certainly raises the specter that Paul Pelosi could have access to some insider legislative information,” government affairs lobbyist for the left-wing think tank Public Citizen, Craig Holman, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This is the reason why there is a stock trading app that exclusively monitors Paul’s trading activity and then its followers do likewise.”
