Comment by perl4ever
5 years ago
I'm not certain that is true. Wouldn't the most effective way to profit from the presidency be to cultivate your persona as a twitter troll, and tip someone off when you are about to make a market moving tweet so they can place a leveraged bet?
I don't think insider trading law would apply, but in any case we seem to have established that he's above the law and can't be impeached. He, or friends beholden to him, could be trillionaires by the time they leave office.
It would certainly explain why he continually makes inflammatory statements about China and everything else, without seeming to consistently pursue anything.
1) Reading Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" has made me expect that the SEC is pretty good at detecting such things.
2) Also, that seems like something which would make more money for someone else, which does not fit with my model of Trump's behavior.
Matt Levine regularly says that US insider trading law is a mishmash of precedent and that it does not require an "equal playing field" but rather that's a misconception. He's also more than once mentioned that you can trade on your own intentions legally, and that illegal trading is generally based on misusing information that belongs to someone else. Finally, I essentially got the idea of people front-running the tweets from one of his columns, so I know it's occurred to him, but he wasn't quite so blunt about it.
The SEC is irrelevant if there's no specific law against it, never mind that there's no evidence anyone can prosecute for anything even if it was a crime.
As far as making money for someone else, doing a "friend" a favor is not the same thing as charity, nor is laundering money through a proxy. If you hypothetically give away a trillion dollars without receiving anything in return formally that doesn't mean you haven't bought something. Ownership is only the convention that other people think you own something, backed up by some sort of written records somewhere.
Yes, but recall we are talking about my expectation that he will prefer cashing in to trying to be President for life (which in my estimation would be thwarted by every other part of government anyway). He may well be doing such things now, but he can't really cash in on favors owed until he leaves office.