There are many examples of sketchy investment behavior in the Federal government. I remember this one, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi and Visa. I thought I remembered her offloading $MMs of FB call options too just prior to railing against them, but I can't find an article on that one now that I'm looking. Link on Visa: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/pelosi-corzine...
Investors.com is partisan garbage. They're famously the ones who wrote that Stephen Hawking wouldn't have been able to survive under the NHS and that we found yellowcake uranium in Iraq after the invasion. Their weird authorless editorials get into all sorts of 'the lizards walk among us' areas. As for Pelosi, their claim is that she killed legislation to limit swipe fees in 2007 -- in order to take part in an IPO in 2008 -- to then pass the swipe fee legislation in 2009 (which would hurt the share price now that she owned the stock)? Meanwhile she held onto the IPO stock and bought 3x at prices of twice the dollar amount of the IPO?
I'd love to see someone diagram how that is meant to be sinister.
Not sure about the first part, but to answer your question about the Pelosi example: The idea was that she and her husband accepted preferential access to Visa shares during IPO in exchange for delaying a bill that was set to pass by 2 years, thereby benefiting from 2 years of share price growth, not to mention a lower share price penalty given Visa had years more time to prepare for it. Did I do a good enough job articulating that without a diagram?
That makes much more sense than they laid out.. then again there was that whole global financial crisis that happened during that time with George W. Bush in the White House, so it seems pretty implausible still? Anyway, I found a much more compelling article that doesn't end with the sentence, "The list of financial "greed" and sleaze on the left is long. What a bunch of hypocrites."
Then he joined MF Global Holdings and bagged a $14 million compensation package — including $2 million in guaranteed bonuses, regardless of performance.
Jeez man, I can't even get a 1% raise, despite being a good worker in my team. 2M guaranteed, regardless of performance? What a sweet deal...
