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White House spokesman Kush Desai said government ethics guidelines bar federal employees from profiting off nonpublic information
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Well-timed trades preceding significant policy announcements by U.S. President Donald Trump may have generated millions for unidentified investors, prompting calls from legal experts for an investigation into potential information leaks and market integrity.
A Reuters analysis of market activity before key Trump administration decisions concerning tariffs, Venezuela, and Iran – policies that triggered substantial market shifts – identified at least four occasions where experts believe investors seemingly possessed foreknowledge. These transactions spanned various markets and asset classes, including options, commodities futures, and prediction markets.
The experts, among them a former enforcement director for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and three academics specialising in insider trading, contend that the timing and scale of these trades necessitate thorough examination to determine if they were predicated on privileged government information. Such scrutiny is vital to protect fair markets and ascertain whether sensitive government intelligence was improperly accessed.
"It looks deeply suspicious," said Andrew Verstein, an expert in insider trading at UCLA School of Law, adding that while the examples are limited in number, they show patterns you "would expect to see if there were informed trading by government officials and their friends."
Aitan Goelman, a former CFTC enforcement director and former federal prosecutor, said such trading would normally draw scrutiny, although he added that insider trading law for commodities markets is complex and still relatively uncharted.
The exchanges, CFTC and DOJ would typically find such trades "anomalous and interesting," Goelman said.