Story here. I don’t remotely understand stock, shares, technology and have limited understanding of international relations. Can anyone explain it simply?
Conflict of interest where it incentivizes him to use his presidential powers to help them out and/or meddle in their affairs.
Fpbp
To elaborate a bit, the POTUS has the power to influence policies that can (and did) greatly benefit NVIDIA, even at the harm of national security.
He buys stock. Does something he knows will make stock go up. Profit.
Or he does something, stocks go down. He buys low, then either lets it come up after a lull or does something to “fix” things and stock rebounds. Profit.
It’s like insider trading, only instead of just acting on news before everyone else knows to make money on the effect, he’s actually creating the effect to make a profit potential.
Correction: it is insider trading. Doesn’t matter if he or someone else created the effect, a trade based on non-public/inside knowledge is insider trading.
The lesser corrupt countries force their leaders and people of influence to divest the holdings so they are never tempted to make decisions of state that could be for their own benefit, and not that of their constituents.
The most common example is for leaders to put their investments in a Blind Trust. This means they maintain ownership of what they had before entering office, but turn over all decision making over buying and selling to a professional adviser and the blind bit means there is no communications about potential trades between the politician and their trusts manager.
So if a leader has to vote on a decision that will impact the price of a stock he owns, like sanctions, he has no way to communicate a buy or sell to his fund managers, and he can’t do it himself because he doesn’t have access to his accounts, the trust manager does.
Trump has no such thing and he is nakedly schlepping crypto, coins, shoes, hats pardons, votes, exectutive orders and sending his advisors and accepting bribes. I am not aware of anyone who could be considered more corrupt than him.
Even Nazis who were murdering jews and stealing their wealth would look at this as an impressive feat.
Isn’t it illegal for him to do this? I understand he won’t be prosecuted though. And why aren’t there more restrictions in place to stop presidents doing this?
Isn’t it illegal for him to do this?
According to the unambiguous plain language of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, yes.
According to the corrupt, traitorous SCOTUS, no.
That scotus problem is massive. We can disband agencies, remove people from positions, and prosecute criminal behavior to get to be running on a more legal standing and given enough time we could be a decently run democracy again, but the disengenous scotus rulings are going to take some crazy large actions.
I’m really hoping the next president has the guts to arrest the con scotus justices. They basically declared the president has king powers, and they need to be forced by a king to rescind that ruling.
that would just doom the rule of law. being impeached is within the system. running by the illegal manner they put forth just gets us deeper.
Ha! In a nutshell
“Illegal” doesn’t mean anything when your political faction controlled the White House, Senate and the Supreme Court.
Soon we will see what having only 2 out of 3 will do, but as I understand the system, the Senate only gains power if they have a supermajority of 2/3, which didn’t happen.
We are in new territory. No one can rightly say with any certainty. I can say that by normal democratic standards worldwide, the answer is yes, very very illegal. In an autocracy its usually only illegal when rival factions do it and threaten the powerful.
Edit: The SEC has a lot of the protections in place from past administrations, but those have been severely erroded since Clinton. E.g. Repeal of the Glass-Steagall act. It has basically abdicated its role of arbiter of free and fair markets. Kind of lile the Trump FBI and DOJ.
As an analogy to understand the root of the problem in the simplest possible terms, America put a bunch of pedophiles in charge of the nations daycares. Everyone is getting diddled.
Also i think he has made the government itself buy stock, which is against the principles of capitalism.
It’s bad because he used his power to personally enrich himself instead of acting in the nation’s best interest. Computer chip manufacturing market is one of the only comparative advantages that the United States has. A comparative advantage means that you can do something better than other nations, so you can get a better trade. For a simple example, Spain’s climate allows it to grow sweeter grapes than England’s, so Spain is able to produce higher quality wine. Because the wine is better in Spain, they can charge more money for it than the English can. Therefore, Spain has a comparative advantage in wine, and England is better off making something else and using the money to buy Spain’s wine. China doesn’t know how to make chips as good as the ones we make, yet, so we have a comparative advantage in computer chips. They’re trying though, and when they develop the technology they will seriously undercut the American chip market, if not cut us out altogether. It will seriously damage our economy, which is already struggling in most sectors.
He can (and has) influence how well they do with his powers. Being invested in the company means that he is incentivized to use those powers to make money. These things usually come at the cost of national security or just other American companies that aren’t seeing corrupt policies help them
Classic him
Nvidia stock dropped tremendously in value, but the company remains as valuable as before. Investors got scared by all the rumors and they may have made 50%, 100%, 200% over the last few years, so they used this bad signal to get rid of the stock. But since the company continues to have a bright future, this is may be a good time point to buy the stock. Clever investors buy when a stock drops, and sell when it is high.
Trump knew about the affair for a year. No doubt he shorted NVDA and waited for the news to leak, as it always does. Now, he’s buying the dip and will ride it back up. I’m sure he stands to clear hundreds of millions off this.
