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Shop NowPaul Pelosi seems to have a magic crystal ball when it comes to stock investments. Once again, he made a highly profitable bold move at exactly the right time. Inside information has nothing to do with it, the Pelosis insist. Nancy isn’t talking about the chunk of Visa stock worth at least half a million, maybe twice that, which Paul unloaded. The timing is an interesting coincidence. He dumped their Visa shares mere weeks before a federal antitrust suit was announced.
Pelosi drops Visa stash
Paul Pelosi, husband of the former House Speaker, is a wizard at predicting stock moves. Even after a serious brain injury caused by an unlicensed and unregulated assault hammer.
In his latest bold and perfectly timed move, he dumped “more than $500,000 worth of Visa stock” about 12 weeks before federal antitrust charges were filed.
It seems that Visa holds a monopoly on debit cards. Nobody noticed before now, especially investors. The only ones who knew were the feds. And, apparently, Paul Pelosi.
The announcement made Tuesday, September 24, was “the culmination of a years-long review conducted by the Justice Department’s antitrust unit.”
Nancy Pelosi, who still haunts the halls of Congress, swears up and down that she had no idea Visa may have “used its dominant market position to penalize customers and merchants who use competing payment processors.” When Paul sold “shares of Visa in early July,” nobody, not even him, knew the DOJ was “set to file an antitrust lawsuit against the company.”
He simply no longer liked the smell of their stock certificates and decided to freshen the family portfolio. All totally harmless. He’s sure Merrick Garland will agree.
Inherent conflict of interest
There is such an “inherent conflict of interest” that a bipartisan group of lawmakers has been calling for years to “ban legislators and their spouses from trading stock.” Every step of the way, Nancy Pelosi resisted their efforts.
The fact that the San Francisco Democrat “has a nine-figure net worth on account of her and her husband’s extensive stock and investment portfolio” has nothing to do with her work. She’s also smart enough to know how to keep things looking legal. Her spin doctors already wrote a prescription to deal with press pain.
Ron Geffner, a former enforcement attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission, explained to reporters there are lots of valid reasons Paul may have had to unload the stock. They have to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Before public opinion judges Pelosi unfairly, it is important to determine who engaged in the transaction on her behalf as well as whether it was part of a broader change of her portfolio.”
She has no dealings with the stocks. That’s Paul’s department. Nancy doesn’t even know which ones they’re holding. That way, she doesn’t have to worry about what she babbles about over dinner. Paul, on the other hand, does know what she’s holding and he pays close attention to how her day at work went. All perfectly legal.
It’s really no big deal, Geffner assures. “At various critical inflection points in history, members of our government have engaged in trading at a time which their conflicts are called into question.” They always manage to get away with it.
The social media “Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker” shows Paul “sold 2,000 shares of Visa worth between $500,000 and $1 million” on July 3. When the news broke Tuesday, “shares of Visa were off 5%” in late trading. San Francisco based Visa says “we believe Visa’s US debit practices are in compliance with applicable laws.” So does Paul Pelosi.
