U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul Pelosi arrive on the red carpet for the Time 100 Gala at Lincoln Center in New York on April 23, 2019.
Angela Weiss | AFP | beautiful pictures
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, an entrepreneur and investor, can become big after parent company Google AlphabetShares rose on Wednesday.
Paul Pelosi in December bought multimillion-dollar call options tied to the equity performance of Alphabet, chipmaker Micron and media giant Walt Disney Co., after the speaker said that she objected prohibits members of Congress from owning individual shares. There are also increasing push by some senators and representatives to limit stock ownership by legislators and their spouses.
Members of Congress and their spouses are not prohibited from buying or selling stocks, bonds, and other securities. But they and their spouses must report such transactions within 45 days under the federal STOCK Act. Paul Pelosi’s options purchases were clearly revealed within the legal timeframe in late December.
While Alphabet, Micron and Disney took a beating in January amid a broader sell-off for tech names, a brilliant earnings report from Alphabet on Tuesday sent its shares up more than 7% in Wednesday’s trading. That spike sent Alphabet’s Grade C stock up about 2.3% over the past month, outpacing the S&P 500’s 3.7% loss.
On December 17, according to disclosure documents, Paul Pelosi purchased 10 Alphabet call options for an actual price of $2,000 with an expiration date set for mid-September 2022. The purchase was made with that money. is essentially a bet that Alphabet’s stock price will remain above its actual price by mid-September.
Whether he ultimately makes a profit depends on how much he pays the premium to buy the options contracts. In the past, he has had a lot of success with Alphabet options last summer.
Speaker Pelosi caused a backlash on December 15, when she said she opposes a new attempt to suppress on securities trading by members of Congress and their spouses.
“No,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters at a press conference in December when asked if she would support such a ban. “We are a free market economy,” she said. “They should be able to participate in that.”
The speaker then said that she would allow such ownership limits to rise in the House if members of her caucus supported them.
A representative for Speaker Pelosi’s office did not respond to a question from CNBC about whether Paul Pelosi still owns those call options in Alphabet.
A growing group of bipartisan lawmakers say lawmakers’ trading activity before and during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that some public officials are profiting off information. before it is made public.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, Wall Street’s top regulator, is investigating whether stock sale by GOP Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina shortly before the 2020 shutdowns led to insider trading. The Justice Department dropped its own probes into transactions conducted by Burr, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Senator Jim Inhofe of the Oklahoma Republican Party.
Jon Ossoff, a freshman Democratic senator from Georgia, has emerged as a champion of stricter trading rules for Capitol Hill. Earlier this year, he enacted legislation requiring members of Congress, along with their spouses and dependents, to place their assets in a blind trust.
“I am an advocate of banning stock trading by members of Congress, policymakers, people who have access to economic information and forecasts,” Ossoff said last month.
Progressive Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have also voiced support for stricter regulation of legislators and their spouses.
“It is ludicrous that members of Congress can hold and trade individual stocks while in office,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on Dec. 7. December 7th. . It would not be legal for us to trade individual stocks with the information we have. “
But Democrats are not alone in yearning for more rules.
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives discussed in caucuses how they could campaigning on the issue of restricting stock trading on Capitol Hill. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and other top GOP members of the House spoke on the topic with top GOP donors last month in Miami, everyone. spoke briefly about the matter to CNBC.
As bipartisan efforts to rein in congressional stock dealings, opposition spanned both parties.
“We could continue to come up with a lot of reasons for people not to engage in public office. I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told CNBC on Thursday. Wednesday morning. “We have a very extensive disclosure regime. Every transaction must be reported, all assets must be reported. People can see what members of Congress are doing and they can report it. draw your own conclusions.”
Late in the morning, Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat of California, said that recent transactions worth millions of dollars and filed in his name were in fact made by his wife. .
“I don’t trade at all and I forbid trading. It’s my wife’s money, which I have no real legal right to. It was money before we got married and I didn’t tell her she was. can do with his money before he gets married,” he said. “I really want to ban stock trading and I have never traded stocks and support a ban on members of Congress and from trading in stocks. I don’t think that should apply to spouses’ assets. before getting married. I think that wouldn’t be fair.”
The Twitter profile managed by congresstrading.com was one of the first to feature Pelosi trading and potential for success.
