Jeff Bezos, Other Corporate Executives Sold Off Their Own Company's Stock Just Before Chinese Flu Panic

Lucky duckies.

None of this is necessarily illegal or even unethical. They have a right to sell their own companies' shares, and they can have hunches about stock values like anyone else. It's only the use of nonpublic information for informing stock moves that's illegal.

Still, there might be come collusion here, and the American people must know the truth. I suggest three years of Congressional and Special Prosecutor investigations.

What does Jeff Bezos have to hide?

Top executives at U.S.-traded companies sold a total of roughly $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.

The selling saved the executives--including many in the financial industry--potential losses totaling $1.9 billion, according to the analysis, as the S&P 500 stock index plunged about 30% from its peak on Feb. 19 through the close of trading March 20.

...

By far the largest executive seller was Amazon. AMZN +0.16% com Inc. Chief Executive Jeffrey Bezos, who sold a total of $3.4 billion in Amazon AMZN 0.23% shares in the first week of February, shortly before the stock market peaked, allowing him to avoid paper losses of roughly $317 million if he had held the stock through March 20, according to the Journal analysis.

The sales represented roughly 3% of Mr. Bezos's Amazon holdings, according to the most recently available regulatory filings. He sold almost as much stock during the first week in February as he sold during the previous 12 months.

Amazon didn't immediately provide a comment on behalf of Mr. Bezos.

Meanwhile, the SEC has issued a warning about insider trading after four Senators were accused of selling stocks based on nonpublic information.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a sharp warning against trading on nonpublic information related to the coronavirus.

The caution came days after news of recent stock sales by the CEO of the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, Jeff Sprecher, and his wife, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., sparked widespread criticism and calls for investigations.

In addition to Loeffler's move, recently disclosed stock sales by three other senators, Richard Burr (R-NC), James Inhoffe (R-OK) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA) have come under scrutiny because they occurred after the coronavirus briefing.

Those trades came in the weeks before stock market indexes dramatically fell in value due to the coronavirus pandemic, and on the heels of a private, all-senators briefing on the virus outbreak from Trump administration officials that Loeffler attended on Jan. 24.

In related news: Doug Collins is running against the NeverTrump RINO Kelly Loeffler to be the elected Georgia Senator, and he hasn't sold any stocks based on nonpublic government information.

Here's Kelly Loeffler babbling gibberish to Tucker Carlson's questions.

More from the Daily Caller.

Corrected: I had earlier written "Doug Jones," the Democrat Senator in Alabama, instead of Doug Collins, the Republican representative running to be the Republican nominee for Senator in Georgia.

posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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