Two GOP senators face questions over stock sales ahead of the market’s coronavirus slide

Loeffler recently disclosed a string of stock sales that began on Jan. 24, the same day Loeffler’s Senate committee hosted a private, senators-only briefing about the spread of the new coronavirus.

Over the next three weeks, Loeffler and her husband Jeffrey Sprecher sold shares worth between $1.25 million and $3.1 million, according to her disclosure records. Sprecher is chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and chairman and CEO of its holding company International Exchange.

Loeffler’s transactions were first reported Thursday by The Daily Beast. Burr’s trades were reported by ProPublica.

Reached for comment, Loeffler’s spokeswoman called the Daily Beast story “a ridiculous and baseless attack.” She said the senator “does not make investment decisions for her portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without her or her husband’s knowledge or involvement.”

But as millions of Americans are rendered jobless due to coronavirus restrictions on daily life, the question of how much public officials knew in advance about the pandemic’s potential spread is becoming an important one.

For Burr, the focus on his stock trades could hardly come at a worse time. On Thursday morning, NPR released a secret recording of Burr, in which he can be heard telling a room full of VIPs that the coronavirus is “much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history.” 

Burr made the remarks on Feb. 27 during a private lunch in Washington for North Carolina business leaders. He also said that the outbreak would result in school closures, a well-informed prediction, albeit one that few Americans were preparing for three weeks ago.

“There will be, I’m sure, times that communities, probably some in North Carolina, have a transmission rate where they say, ‘Let’s close schools for two weeks. Everybody stay home,'” Burr can be heard saying.

Burr’s private comments at the lunch were more specific and pessimistic than some of his public remarks about the outbreak. On Feb. 7, a week before he sold his stocks, Burr penned an op-ed in which he reassured readers that the Trump administration was well prepared to handle an outbreak. 

In a series of tweets Thursday night, Burr disputed some of the details in the NPR report, and called it “a tabloid-style hit piece.”

Loeffler, a freshman senator, is not as visible as Burr is. Still, she too projected an air of calm about the global pandemic until very recently.  

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/20/senators-face-questions-over-stock-sales-before-the-coronavirus-slide.html