Former Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher told CNBC's "Squawk Box" Thursday that it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul have engaged in insider stock trading.
"Paul Pelosi is getting a lot of attention," Fisher said, when asked about a report from Punchbowl News that House Democrats plan to announce a proposal next month that would ban lawmakers, their spouses and senior staff from trading stocks.
"Clearly people have taken advantage of inside information forever," the CNBC contributor said. "I'm not against them tapping that down.
"I'm sorry to see that Paul Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi and others appear — it's all appearance right now, we don't know the facts — to have taken advantage of inside information. Something needs to be done."
The House speaker's husband recently bought up to $5 million in stock options on semiconductor company Nvidia ahead of a vote on sweeping legislation that would deliver billions of dollars in subsidies to support the domestic chip-manufacturing industry, new financial disclosures show.
The Daily Caller reported that Paul Pelosi purchased 20,000 shares of Nvidia on June 17, which were valued between $1 million and $5 million.
"It certainly raises the specter that Paul Pelosi could have access to some insider legislative information," Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the think tank Public Citizen, told the Caller. "This is the reason why there is a stock trading app that exclusively monitors Paul's trading activity and then its followers do likewise."
According to Reuters, the House plans to pass a semiconductor bill Thursday, to give the U.S. chip industry an edge against China, by providing approximately $52 billion in grants, as well as an investment tax credit for chip plants estimated to be worth $24 billion.
A Convention of States Action-Trafalgar poll released in January found that more than 75% of Americans believe that members of Congress and their spouses have an unfair advantage when it comes to stock trading and should not be allowed to trade while serving in Congress.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.