Dems want insider trading probe after Trump jobs report tweet

[babylonsister]

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/391354-dem-senators-call-for-insider-trading-probe-into-trump-jobs-report-tweet

Dems want insider trading probe after Trump jobs report tweet
By Sylvan Lane - 06/08/18 11:09 AM EDT


Three Senate Democrats on Friday called for a broad probe into whether President Trump broke federal trading laws and executive branch protocol before the release of the May jobs report last week

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Michael Bennet (Colo.) sent letters to the chiefs of three federal agencies and the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) regarding Trump’s knowledge of the May jobs report released on June 1.

The senators also asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to investigate whether Trump or any White House staffer revealed information that led to insider trading.

"President Trump recklessly violated federal rules and years of precedent by telegraphing financial data that has the power to move our markets," said Warren, who is seen as a likely 2020 presidential candidate.

"The [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and the CEA should examine what went wrong here — and the SEC and CFTC should investigate to make sure that no one obtained and used non-public information to feather their own nest."

Trump last Friday touted the monthly federal jobs report roughly an hour before the data was released later that day, a breach with decades of protocol on how to handle market-moving information.

more...

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/391354-dem-senators-call-for-insider-trading-probe-into-trump-jobs-report-tweet

[unblock]

1. worth investigating, and certainly worth complaining about, but i see no joy here.

in the sense that, as far as we know, all he did was essentially reveal that the jobs report was good news an hour earlier.

if all that was communicated prematurely was the tweet, well, that's not non-public information.

it's sloppy procedure, and damaging to the markets, but not criminal.

it's only a problem if someone got more of a clarification as to exactly how good the news was, and then someone traded on that information.



we have no evidence of this, but insider trading is exactly the sort of thing donnie would not just do, but argue that he'd be crazy not to.

[FBaggins]

2. Nothing adding up to insider trading has been alleged

He certainly appears to have violated protocol, but it was a public tweet so it couldn’t be insider trading.