Insider trade from the White House?

There was a time when this would have been a HUUUGE scandal.

Now it is I gather just the sort of thing that happens.

Still: I will note it here. There is reason to believe that White House officials have leaked highly material information, to which they had privileged access, to Wall Street firms: that is, that they assisted insider trading. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have long opposed the criminalization of insider trading. I have taken a sympathetic view of defendants on related charges from Michael Milken to Martha Stewart. Still, if we are going to have such laws on the book, there is no good case for giving an immunity to White House officials or the President himself.

Heck, there isn't even the BAD reason that the Supreme Court cooked up recently in another context for giving the President immunity. Their reason may not apply here on its face. But just to avoid a digression, let us focus on the staff involvement that seems to have been involved.

Consider the following two points: first, there are a lot of companies traded on US exchanges whose stock price predictably rises and falls depending on the continued openness of trade between the US and the Republic of India; second, the President has unconstitutionally made himself the grand poobah of the openness (or otherwise) of trade between the US and any other country, including for our purposes the Republic of India.

As an example of the first point, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer operates three manufacturing plants in India. Should all the current back-and-forth lead to draconian tariffs on Indian imports to the US, Pfizer would lose the ability to ship the products of those plants from the former country to the latter. It would develop work-arounds depending I suppose on which third countries end up being nicest to Trump, but the very prospect creates uncertainty, putting a damper on the stock price.

Now add to those two points a third. On April 24, reporter Charles Gasparino (a conservative fellow, author of a book called GO WOKE GO BROKE) working these days for Fox Business news, tweeted that according to sources of his "people inside the Trump White House are alerting Wall Street execs they are nearing an agreement in principle on trade with India."

Do tell us more Charlie. Which Wall Street execs are they informing? What are the Wall Street execs in question doing with that information? Should one of them somehow (ooooh I don't know how this might happen -- by buying Pfizer stock???) make a tidy profit, will he kick back part of the proceeds to those buddies in the "Trump White House" or is this just a favor they have done a friend out of the goodness of their hearts, God bless them all.

Last time I checked, Gasparino's tweet to this effect has elicited 493 replies and had received 1.6 million views.

No wonder there is a lot of interest! Consider Pfizer again. Here is a link to a chart of its stock price. At that URL you can very clearly see the decline in value that coincided with Trump's announcement of the "liberation" of the United States economy from common sense, reality and international contacts.

https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/pfizer-stock-price-in-2025

You can also see, at the right hand edge of that chart a small, perhaps tentative, move back upward from the slough. If Gasparino is right (I have no independent confirmation to offer) that small move could itself be the effect of insiders tipping off ... whomever ... and of buying by those whomevers.

Just a thought.

Back to The Donald/The President. When a reporter asked him if he could commit to the fact that none of his White House appointees have tipped off Wall Street execs, he responded, “I can commit to myself. That’s all I can commit, you know, I have thousands of people that work for me. But I can’t imagine anybody doing that. I have very honorable people, that I can say. So I can’t even imagine it.”

That sounds a bit evasive. Is he saying that things he can't imagine can't happen? Or that SINCE he can't imagine such a thing, he can't be blamed if such an unimaginable-to-him event does happen?

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog