Opinion | How to make serious money and misbehave in the US

As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We are a free market economy. Congress should be able to participate in that.” Hmm, not sure about the “free market” bit.

The former House speaker was ranked the fifth-best trader in Congress in the Unusual Whales analysis last year, but that doesn’t even factor in the trading of her husband Paul Pelosi, a professional moneyman, who has an uncanny ability to anticipate new laws and government policies.

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This time around, Nancy again does not disappoint. Let’s just pay tribute to her investment genius with a portfolio rise of 65.5 per cent in 2023.

Trading the options of Nvidia, the AI and chip giant, seems to have been a favourite pastime of the Pelosis.

As reported by Unusual Whales: “Nancy Pelosi began trading Nvidia [or NVDA, its stock trading symbol] options, AGAIN!!!! after divesting from semiconductors last year [2022] for possible conflict of interests …

“Before [US President Joe] Biden announces new US semiconductor focuses, her husband decides to buy 2 million dollars of deep in-the-money Nvidia calls [call options], the same company she divested from due to conflicts a year earlier. What’s worse [is that] on Dec 11th [2022] before she bought, in November US Commerce Secretary [Gina] Raimondo said that Nvidia could sell slower AI chips to China to comply with US export controls. And then, on Dec 28th, NVDA launched a modified version of an advanced chip precisely to get around US restrictions.

“Pelosi has always been quite good at trading before news but to come back to a company she divested from due to conflicts before excellent news is quite stunning.”

Husband Paul Pelosi literally made a brilliant “call” with his in-the-money call options, which allowed him to be bullish on the stock with less capital upfront while amplifying profits if prices moved in the right direction as they certainly did. Nvidia had not only benefited from the recent AI investment mania but also from Biden’s industrial policy on subsidies to reshore domestic semiconductor manufacturing, part of his tech war against China.

Even so, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t hold a candle to fellow Democrat House Representative Brian Higgins, who is the king of the crop, with a portfolio that more than tripled at 238.9 per cent. Move over, Warren Buffett.

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Republicans Mark Green (122.2 per cent), Garret Graves (107.6 per cent) and David Rouzer (105.6 per cent) weren’t too shabby either by more than doubling their investments. Twenty-eight representatives and senators handily beat the S&P – ranging between 80 and 25.3 per cent – while six other congressional members achieved double digit growth, even if they didn’t beat the stock benchmark.

Speaking of investment, Bill Ackman, the famous hedge fund billionaire, has got himself, or rather his wife, into a bit of a pickle.

One of countless rich people in the US who are fiercely pro-Israel, Ackman has spearheaded plagiarism charges against former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who has resigned, after her alleged failure to crack down on antisemitism – which was more like pro-Palestinian protests – on campus.

His wife, Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has since had to issue an apology on X, formerly Twitter, after her even more serious plagiarism was exposed.

Business Insider first identified four instances of inadequate attribution in her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation. Then later, the same publication found at least 15 other passages from the same dissertation that “were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries”.

It also identified instances of plagiarism in her other publications.

As part of his campaign against university presidents for allowing antisemitism on campus, Ackman said plagiarism was a “very serious” offence.

His wife’s MIT PhD plagiarism from Wikipedia seems especially ironic. When my two children, now young adults, were in Canadian secondary school, their teachers said students could consult Wikipedia but not use it for citation or source reference. I presume it’s the same standard for many schools across North America, let alone universities.

But here, we are talking about the most advanced academic degree from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher education.

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While his wife has been apologetic and promised to correct the records, the hedge fund supremo is anything but. Not only does he still want Gay to be sacked from Harvard’s faculty despite her resignation as president, he has promised to carry out “plagiarism reviews” against all current MIT faculty, board and committee members, and its president Sally Kornbluth, who is another one of her political targets, as well as the staff of Business Insider.

“This experience has inspired me to save all news organisations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” he tweeted on X.

But here is a New York Times headline: “Bill Ackman’s Campaign Against Harvard Followed Years of Resentment.”

It reported: “Behind his anger are personal grievances that predate the uproar that has engulfed campuses since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Mr Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, resents that officials at his alma mater, to which he’s donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, have not heeded his advice on a variety of topics.”

Hell hath no fury like a hedge fund billionaire scorned. In America, it’s probably much easier to “donate” your way into influence in the US Congress than at Harvard. But given what happened to Gay and others, Ackman has put American institutions of higher learning on notice that they need to show more deference to mega-donors, if they haven’t already.

The moral of the day: money doesn’t just talk in the United States, it dictates.