Check Out the Obama Team’s Financial Filings
Administration officials and high-ranking executive branch employees are required to disclose the intimate details of their financial lives. The disclosures made include stock holdings, previous salaries and even book deals, such as Assistant Treasury Secretary Alan Krueger’s advance of at least $180,000 (plus royalties) from MacMillan, the publisher of his textbook, “Explorations in Economics.” ProPublica is collecting these disclosures, and today, we’re sharing what we’ve got.
We’ve flipped through the disclosures of 179 officials, ranging from the White House social secretary to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the documents are rich with interesting details. Help us parse the disclosures and post your discoveries in the comments section below.
Here’s an example of what we’ve found so far: On paper, Susan Rice looks like she belongs at the Treasury, rather than the State Department. The new United Nations ambassador’s disclosure lists 10 individual stock holdings, largely in Canadian companies, that total at least $4.25 million.
The disclosures are a matter of public record. But the government insists on giving them out by request only. We’re cutting out the middleman: Dig into the documents yourself.
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3 comments
BarrySanders20
April 8, 2009, 5:25 p.m.
This could be interesting. It took me 5 minutes to find this on the first one I looked into.
For Steven Chu, he lists 225,000 stock options in Nvidia at a value of $250,000-500,000. The Note accompanying the disclosure, however, shows that he actually has 411,000 options, over 300,000 of which are vested and currently exercisable. The stock price ended today at $11.41 per share. That’s over $3,000,000 alone for this one entry (assuming he sold all at the closing market price).
With his other assets, the guy is probably worth over $10,000,000. No wonder Chu has no problem with artifically increasing the cost of all energy—with his money, energy costs are meaningless. It appears to be a fairly misleading financial disclosure, however, on the only item I looked into.
Shannon Marietta
April 8, 2009, 5:55 p.m.
jared bernstein - WH cheif economist was part of the CNBC financial journalism team that failed america
Danp
April 9, 2009, 12:05 p.m.
Re: Steven Chu - What he actually lists is $250-500,000 worth of actual stock, and 311,000 stock options. But the way options work is when you exercise them you get the difference between the current value and the award price. So for example on the first 225,000 shares, because they are vested, he can exercise them and receive 225,000 x (11.41-6.8233), which would be about a million dollars. The second listing shows an award price of 9.02, so he would get 75,000 shares x 2.39, and the third listing has an award price of 14.76. Here he would be have to pay, so it wouldn’t make sense to exercise those options until the price goes higher than 14.76.
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