Is Pelosi Committing Insider Trading?

Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, recently dumped half a million dollar’s worth of Visa stock. Two weeks later, Visa was hit with a DOJ lawsuit claiming it was acting as a monopoly.

Pelosi is notorious for beating the market, even inspiring a website to track her stock moves and an index fund that mirrors her purchases. Allegations of insider trading against her are rife. The NY Post says:

Nancy Pelosi’s husband unloaded more than $500,000 worth of Visa stock — less than three months before the credit card giant was slapped with federal antitrust charges, public documents show.

Visa was hit with a lawsuit on Tuesday that alleged the company has illegally monopolized the debit card market — the culmination of a years-long review conducted by the Justice Department’s antitrust unit.

Allegations against Visa say that the company has cornered the market for debit cards by threatening to cut merchants off who use other processors like Mastercard. The NY Times continues:

For more than a decade, the government claims in its complaint, Visa has entered into de facto exclusive agreements with merchants and banks, encouraging them to route the bulk of their transactions through Visa’s payment network. The company has maintained a monopoly in large part by imposing or threatening to impose higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks to process debit transactions, according to the Justice Department.

The lawsuit stems from a sweeping investigation dating back years. It is part of a series of efforts made by enforcers under the Biden administration to target corporate middlemen, which it says needlessly increase fees, and take aim at power wielded by companies spanning technology to agriculture. President Biden in 2021 rolled out an executive order that made aggressive antitrust enforcement a pillar of his economic policy.

If true, Visa’s monopoly would be bad for merchants and ultimately consumers. However, Pelosi’s own insider trading and corrupt bargains make political corruption and graft an even more serious issue.

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