I thought that there were actual ethics for members of the House and Senate regarding insider trading given their access to information that the average investor could never obtain. How wrong I was. Senators Richard Burr (R) of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler (R) Arizona earned somewhere between several hundred thousand dollars and several million dollars after selling off stock they owned in several companies that were about to take a financial hit from the coronavirus outbreak. Both Senators did this following a briefing they received on the potential threat of the coronavirus to the U.S. economy. Any ordinary citizen doing the same thing would have been investigated and charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And if found guilty at trial would have served a prison sentence. The rules are different for the ruling class and they are confused as to why head lice is found to be more popular in polling than the U.S. Senate.
ProPublica first reported Thursday that Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, offloaded between $628,000 and $1.72 million worth of holdings in 33 transactions on Feb. 13, shortly after he publicly assured Americans the government was prepared to deal with the novel coronavirus that has since been declared a pandemic. A week after the sales, the stock market began to precipitously fall, erasing about 30% of its value.
Just hours later, the Daily Beast first reported that Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) began selling stocks jointly owned with her husband on Jan. 24, the day the Senate Health Committee held a private, all-chamber briefing from top American officials about COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. In a series of 29 transactions ending in mid-February, documented in Senate financial disclosures, Loeffler and her husband sold between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000 in stock.
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