Congress Needs to Crack Down on Government Insider Trading
How some politicians profited from stock trades during COVID
Ric Edelman: It's Wednesday, February 15th. Yesterday, we talked about scams. There's another big scam worth covering, only I don't see many in the media calling it a scam. Think back to when COVID started. You weren't the first to know about it, you know. Before the news got out, before we all knew what the government was going to do about it, the shutdown and pretty much closing the economy for - at that point - an unknown period of time, people working in the federal government knew what was going on, what was going to happen, because they were the people making it all happen.
A Wall Street Journal investigation has now revealed that federal officials who were working on the government response to COVID-19 personally made financial trades at the start of the pandemic, both as the markets fell and later as the markets recovered. The Wall Street Journal says that one of Dr. Anthony Fauci's main deputies sold his shares of mutual funds and stocks just before news of the pandemic went public. He sold somewhere between $150,000 and $480,000 worth of securities.
And he wasn't the only one. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services collectively reported 60% more sales of stocks and mutual funds in January of 2020 than they did in the previous year. Elaine Chao, who at the time was the Secretary of the Department of Transportation - she bought more than $600,000 in two stock funds, and she did it while her agency was involved in the pandemic response.
And while her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell, was leading negotiations with the White House over the multi-trillion-dollar stimulus bill, a Treasury Department official bought stock in Boeing and GE while he was administering an aid package to both companies. All told, at the Treasury Department, officials there did 30% more stock and fund trades than usual. And about 240 officials at health agencies and at the Pentagon, says The Wall Street Journal, personally traded collectively tens of millions of dollars in stocks in drug companies and biotech companies that got federal contracts related to COVID-19.
Another 400 officials across 50 agencies had investments in stocks and airlines and resorts, hotels, restaurants, cruise companies. In early 2020, when COVID hit, trading hit the roof. The Wall Street Journal says these officials did nearly 12,000 trades as COVID started, 44% more trades than in any other month.
Is this a scam? Do these federal officials personally profit or protect against losses based on the inside information they had - insider trading that would be illegal anywhere else by anyone else? Federal agencies have ethics rules. In most cases, though, those rules dictate what kinds of stocks officials can buy and sell. It doesn't say when they're allowed to trade. And there are also no restrictions on the trading of mutual funds. If this isn't a scam, I don't know what is.
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