Rich Welsh| Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was criticized by Joe Rogan on his Podcast because of her lackadaisical demeanor over members of Congress who allegedly get involved in certain stock market activity that isn’t legal for the rest of us.
According to a recent report by Business Insider, fifty-two members of Congress have broken the 2012 law known as the Stock Act that was written to block members of Congress and government employees from doing insider trading or using information that is not yet public for their own personal gains in the stock market.
Here’s what allegedly happens. The US House Committee on Financial Services has oversight on Securities and Exchanges, and, among other things, it gets information on a stock before it runs an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The members of the committee get all the information concerning the new stock. Some of that information can be used to determine if the stock will rise right after the IPO and helps to make a very educated guess as to how much it will rise in a short period of time.
Congress has been plagued for a long time with members abusing the privilege of reading the IPO information and they have shared the info with others who would purchase the stock once it was available on a market only to make a killing in returns on the stock. If you or I did that, we would be in prison for insider trading. This is one of the ways that a member of Congress goes to Washington not a wealthy person and after ten years has a vast fortune even though the salary of a member of Congress is above what most Americans earn, it doesn’t account for how they obtained their wealth while in Congress.
A reporter asked Pelosi about the allegations made in the Business Insider report. The Speaker dismissed the idea that members of Congress and their spouses should no longer be allowed to trade individual stocks.
Pelosi responded saying, “We have a free-market economy, they should be able to participate in that.”
“We have a free-market economy, they should be able to participate in that.”
— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defends members of Congress being allowed to trade stocks pic.twitter.com/QjFC26etXd
— The Recount (@therecount) December 15, 2021
But it’s not a free-market economy when members of Congress do not play by the rules that the rest of us have to play by when they rig the game by using information about a stock that goes through their committee.
So, Pelosi believes that a law that was passed by Congress (including a Democrat-controlled Senate with Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader) and signed into law by Democrat President Barack Obama, should be ignored because it’s a free market economy, so there. Does Pelosi believe members of Congress should be able to rob banks because it’s a free market economy? How about cheating on their taxes? The point is, it’s against the law and Pelosi dismissed it as if members of Congress should be allowed to break the law.
On an episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that was posted last week, Rogan commented on Pelosi’s response to the question and noted that the Speaker appeared very nervous.
“Have you ever seen a person look more nervous?” Rogan asked.
“She’s giving this like very simplistic, almost vague answer,” he said. “Because should you be allowed to participate in the stock market when you’re influencing the direction of the stock, or when you know which direction something’s going to go in? Or when you’re going to pass a law that’s going to benefit these businesses, that’s going to force the stock to go up, and you know that, so you invest a s**t-ton of money before it happens? That seems like it’s a problem. That seems like it’s a problem.”
“Now why is that not a problem? Because we’re f***ing co-opted,” Rogan said.
WATCH:
Rogan earlier referred to members of Congress making money with the stock market by using the process of committees as a “genius con game.”
