CNBC host and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed a top government regulator on whether it would enforce laws against insider trading—and questioned whether Donald Trump’s officials may have engaged in it themselves.
Sorkin asked Mark Uyeda, the acting chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, on Monday’s Squawk Box whether the commission would act on laws regarding insider trading after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on much of the world last week.
And, Sorkin wanted to know, whether those laws would apply to any government official found to have sold their stocks ahead of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement.
“Given what the government’s been doing and this administration’s been doing, it would not shock me, and I hate to speculate, if we were to find out that a whole bunch of people who work in Washington as our elected leaders one way or the other, ultimately sold stocks last week, or potentially worse than that, shorted the market,” Sorkin said. “My question to you is: What you think the responsibility of the SEC is in those contexts?”
The line of questioning came as the stock market faced its worst performance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, plunging the top exchanges closer to a bear market. Top banks have increased their projections of a U.S. recession, even as multiple government officials have tried to rule one out.
Uyeda, who Trump elevated to commission chairman in January, said the agency would enforce the law regardless of whether the offender was in or out of government.
“We have a very clearly established body of law for those who engage in acts that are prohibited by the insider trading rules,” the official said.
Sorkin asked if those same rules would apply to someone in the government with advance access to the levies. “If somebody had access to the list of—the tariff plan the day before the plan and decided to sell out of equities, or to short the market, or to do something else that I haven’t thought about, right? Would that be considered inside information to you?” he asked.
“It potentially could,” Uyeda said. “There are two basic duties, what we call the classic insider trading theory law, as well as the misappropriation theory of law. There are various elements of that. If those elements are satisfied, they can be subject to insider trading liability.”
