As much as I enjoy your posts founded on the firm belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with your viewpoint must be wallowing in ignorance, I do want to respond out of concern for the poor goalposts. Did you at least seatbelt them in before you drove them to the other end of the pitch in a Ferrari? Are they doing well? Healthy? Reasonable apetite?
ShivaX
4455
Insider trading is still illegal if you get caught.
If she sold shares before the crash, she has already realized the gains. If she bought shares that have gone up and sells them — Citrix is trading +30 from when she bought it, Dupont is up +10 — she will realize gains.
So when you say
…you’re saying something that is not actually true. And if I assume that you’re saying something untrue out of, well, ignorance, rather than malice, I’m not at all sure why you’re complaining about that choice.
Er, you do realize that using insider information to minimize your losses is still using that information to your advantage, right?
So she should be donating her losses to charity?
Menzo
4459
She should go to jail. But like most rich white-collar criminals, she will likely simply forfeit some percentage of the money she illegal gained or avoided losing by selling before a drop.
She most definitely should go to jail if she was insider trading. Liquidating equities during the worst sell off since the great depression doesn’t require access to insider information. It just required access to about any news source at all.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, etc. Anyone selling stocks tied to China during late Jan/early Feb, or stocks of any sort post Mar 1, is probably just a person paying attention to the markets.
Menzo
4461
That’s fair. I’m pretty sure the SEC has ways to determine if you were just being smart or acting on information that others didn’t have. For example, if you sold shares even minutes or hours before lots of other people did, they’re probably going to want to understand why you’re so much smarter than everyone else.
That confidential congressional briefing might have helped.
Yes, exactly. When people with access to inside information beat everyone else to a market opportunity, you can certainly believe they’re just naturally smarter than everyone else, or you can wonder if there isn’t something about their access which was the difference. And by ‘wonder’ I mean investigate.
This is a funny but ultimately deliberately obtuse line. She bought shares in stocks that have appreciated since she bought them. She pledges to sell them to make up for it. Selling them would of course produce a gain. Kelly (above) quips that she ought to donate that gain to charity. You jump in to point out that there hasn’t been any gain. Of course, Kelly’s quip is about the anticipated gain, which anyone can see. When I point that out to you, point you to the specific purchases we were talking about, you ignore it, offer an insult instead, then go back to the same pointless objection.
Menzo
4464
And if I were at the SEC, I would also look at context. If a freshman congresswoman had never sold stocks before a broader sell-off, and then suddenly does several times, that would be evidence that maybe her new position is providing information she didn’t have access to previously.
Republicans demanding that China forgive US sovereign debt is not a story I thought I would see in my lifetime.
How do they justify that? They bought our government bonds and they should just toss them in a dumpster fire now? Hey, thanks for the money, chumps! Now would you like to buy some more bonds? We could use the money.
Menzo
4467
It’s the Coronavirus finger-pointing squad trying to figure out how to make China pay for what they’ve “done to us,” thus making sure Trump avoids any and all responsibility for…well, anything.
Of course it’s as dumb an idea as any other, because China is just going to say “nah.” We have zero leverage over them to extract any sort of retribution, as our ongoing futile trade war with them shows.
They’re arguing that China is responsible for the financial costs of this crisis and should voluntarily repudiate the debt they hold as compensation. Of course their suggestion comes with a lot of sabre-rattling. And it’s amazing they don’t seem to think this sort of thing would have any adverse impact on the desirability of US sovereign debt.
Edit: The other amazing thing is that the media treats Lindsey Graham as a serious, thoughtful person. My god.
Seems to me that if they did manage to get China to forgive some debt, the immediate impact would be we would have to offer higher yield rates on the bonds we sell. It’s like we would turn ourself into a junk bond country. It would also make me wonder how safe my federally insured deposits really are. Might be time to start burying my money in a can in the backyard!
There really is no end to the dumb. If they want endless American digital money in exchange for all the work that goes into goods and services they don’t get to take advantage of, good for you! At least you have some cake to keep your asses in the senate.
Menzo
4471
Certainly the idiots talking about this, like Tom Cotton, aren’t considering the long-term implications. They were told there would be no math.
But it does seem like the Dollar has weathered worse than that. It’s not like there are other, safer, places for countries to stash their cash, so we still benefit from everyone wanting our debt even given how crazy we sometimes are.
I imagine if the Mango Mussolini manages to get re-elected, a lot of people are going to start looking for other, safer, [saner,] places for countries to stash their cash.
Menzo
4473
Who knows, really? We’re in the worst recession in a century and 30-year t-bills are at something like 1.35%. Pretty soon governments are going to pay us to take their money.
