Senators sold stocks before coronavirus sank the markets
Senators are facing backlash for selling in some cases millions of dollars in personal stocks shortly before the coronavirus pandemic sent markets into a freefall earlier this month.
Based on publicly available financial transaction disclosures, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., all appear to have sold stock earlier this year. The question is whether the senators were aware, based on briefings, that the coronavirus scare was evolving into a worse situation than the public was aware.
The financial disclosures indicate that they, or their spouses, sold large chunks of stock around the time senators were receiving behind-the-scenes briefings about the severity of the virus, which in a period of weeks has infected more than 10,000 people and killed more than 200 in the United States while devastating the economy. [Continue reading…]
Several readers have asked about the other senators who sold stock during the same period, including Dianne Feinstein (a California Democrat), James Inhofe (an Oklahoma Republican) and Ron Johnson (a Wisconsin Republican). But none of their trades look particularly suspicious.
Feinstein has said that she did not attend the Jan. 24 briefing; her stock was in a blind trust, which means she didn’t make the decision to sell; and the transaction lost her money, because the trust was selling shares of a biotechnology stock, the value of which has since risen. Inhofe’s transactions were part of a systematic selling of stocks that he started after he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Johnson sold stock in his family’s plastic business, as part of a process that has been occurring for months; his sale also occurred well after stock market began falling.
Jeff Blehar of National Review has a helpful summary on Twitter, in which he argues Burr’s transactions are the worst. Loeffler, who is extremely wealthy and married to the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, frequently sells stock and has said “multiple third-party advisors” — not her or her husband — made the decision to sell shares in January and in February. The notion that Feinstein or Johnson did something unethical, Belhar wrote, is “flat wrong.” Don Moynihan of Georgetown University agrees. [Continue reading…]