According to a Wall Street Journal report, many people who regulate Facebook, Google, and Amazon own stock in the company.
A third of senior officials at the Federal Trade Commission, the top Watchdog, own stock in the companies they regulate. What are the chances they will regulate anything that isn’t in their own interests?
The WSJ reports:
Many of the investments overlapped with the FTC’s work.
A third of its 90 senior officials owned or traded stock in companies that were undergoing an FTC merger review or investigation based on actions the agency has made public.
FTC officials owned stock in 22 of the roughly 60 large companies the FTC brought cases against in the period reviewed.
The officials were most heavily invested in technology, an industry that has come under increasing scrutiny by the agency. Nearly one in four top FTC officials owned or traded individual stocks of tech companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp,. and Oracle Corp.
At the same time, our congresspeople are allowed to own stock in companies they oversee. They can engage in insider trading as long as they pretend they don’t know what their fund invests in. Maybe that’s how so many leave congress a lot richer than before they were elected.
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