Reported by Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins the Live show to discuss whether concerns around insider trading are warranted after Paul Pelosi sold stock ahead of the DOJ’s antitrust suit against Google parent company Alphabet.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: All right, well, in the wake of the US Justice Department antitrust suits against Google, Paul Pelosi’s Alphabet trades are coming into focus. The millionaire husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sold his Alphabet shares prior to the DOJ announcement. Now, the Pelosis have previously denied any misconduct, but other lawmakers are taking aim at the congressional couple’s stock trading.

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman has the details. And Rick, we know that this has a lot of– it’s a political football that they like to toss around.

RICK NEWMAN: Oh yeah. So on the surface, you could I guess infer that perhaps Nancy Pelosi got word of the Justice Department lawsuit against Google, the antitrust suit, and told her husband, who’s a wealthy investor. And he said, oh, I’m going to take advantage of this insider information and sell my shares before this news becomes public. And therefore, either make money or avoid a loss.

That is not what exactly happened, however. If you look at the timing of everything in question here, Paul Pelosi sold his Alphabet shares– that’s the parent company of Google– at a couple of points at the end of December. And Google shares have actually gone up since then. They’re up by about 8%, even though they did fall back a bit on the news of the antitrust lawsuit.

So if Paul Pelosi is using insider information to make money, he’s actually a very bad insider trader because Google’s price has actually gone up, not down since he sold his shares. You know, this is a big thing on Fox Business and Fox News. They’re saying, oh look, here’s evidence that the Pelosis are– you know, the game is rigged in favor of the Pelosis. But all you have to do is look at a stock chart for Alphabet and say, wow, it doesn’t really add up that way.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: So then, Rick, given that then, what is the outlook for congressional stock trading? And is there even an appetite for a ban? I know some Reddit users have compared it to a bear voting to ban salmon. Is this something that they actually want right now?

RICK NEWMAN: Well, this is going to go nowhere anytime soon. I mean, there are periodic calls for a ban on congressional stock trading. And it gets complicated because then you have to say, well, you can ban the members themselves– that’s 535 members of both houses of Congress. You can ban them from trading individual stocks.

But what about family members? Would that have to extend to spouses? What about children? What about in-laws? And you get into this whole can of worms where OK, you could ban trading by the members, but what about family members? And how far do you go?

So if members really did have inside information that they could make money on, there’d still be a way to do that. Because somewhere down the chain, somebody– they could pass the information on and somebody could trade it. So this comes up every now and then. It’s one of those things that sounds good in principle, but it’s hard to execute.

Read or watch full report: https://news.yahoo.com/paul-pelosi-alphabet-trades-scrutinized-163933783.html