Insider dealing: how could it not happen?

Financial Times, March 30 2026

Before I get to this story, a few remarks.

• The US is not a democracy in any meaningful sense, but a corporate oligarchy posing with diminishing plausibility as one. Said Chris Hedges in 2022:

US politics ¹ is a tawdry carnival where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that decides who gets elected and who does not. It’s impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, ² no matter which party is in office.

• Since the Clinton nineties if not earlier, and more notably after 9/11, both the red and blue parties of America’s duopoly have swung markedly rightward. The attendant erosion of even the pretence of democratic oversight gives ample cover to corruption.
• The crime of insider dealing seldom leaves smoking guns lying around. Prosecutions tend to stand or fall on circumstantial evidence. That, I recall a learned judge observing, is not lesser evidence. It just has to be interrogated with great care before eliminating, beyond reasonable doubt, alternative explanations.
• Given all of the above, when a Paul Pelosi – and Nancy, his Democrat House Leader wife – make stock trades that net consistently higher than average returns, we are entitled to ask two questions. One, are the Pelosis protected by status and power? Two, are they the visible tip – there’s even a Pelosi Tracker app to follow their trades for the benefit of wannabes lacking their, ahem, access ³ – of a much bigger iceberg?

Meanwhile, here’s an enlightening seventeen minutes on that FT scoop on the insider scandal enveloping the incumbent and born-again US Secretary of War. As usual with such YouTube offerings we must disregard the now mandatory sensationalist captioning. The story and its implications have no need of it.

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In line with my fatwah, announced two posts ago, on throwing baby out with bathwater, I’m delighted to promote a timely piece by a man I don’t always see eye to eye with. Tax specialist and MMT pundit Richard Murphy is completely wrong on Ukraine and only half right on Iran. At the same time he’s a much needed thorn in the side of UK gross economic ineptitude guided by the false premise that governments issuing a sovereign currency take in taxes (or borrow from The Markets) in order to spend ⁴ – with its corollary that if it can’t or won’t tax and/or ‘borrow’ its own money then “belts must tighten”. Yesterday this man, who rightly refuses to separate economics from human wellbeing, skewered the craven stupidity of the Starmer regime over its one foot in/one foot out response to US-Israeli war crimes on Iran and, ultimately, the whole wide world. Crimes which, morality aside – and Richard is a Quaker – may well have decidedly unpleasant practical consequences for our own sceptred isle.

It’s a short enough piece to replicate in full, though I recommend, notwithstanding his stubborn naivety in mercifully rare forays into geopolitics, that Brits add Richard to their list of sources. As for this specimen, I could take issue over a few things – most importantly its attribution of too much agency to Trump ⁵ – but on his central point, that Team Starmer’s hedging on this criminal war is as ill advised as it is immoral, the prof is bang on the nail.

This war is a long way from over as yet, especially for the UK

In another surreal overnight twist to the war in the Middle East, Trump has declared that he thinks it might be over in 2 to 3 weeks, whether or not the USA gets a deal.

The evidence that Trump is getting bored with the conflict that he started and is looking for a way out is very strong. As was always expected, he will chicken out in the end. That said, the possibility that everything will then return to normal is remote in the extreme.

In another twist in the last 24 hours, Trump berated the UK at the same time as he announced his delight at the planned trip of King Charles to the USA later this month. The dichotomy will not have gone unnoticed in the world, particularly in the Middle East.

Whilst France is pouring scorn on what Trump is doing, and the far-right government in Italy is refusing the US the right to refuel aircraft destined for the Middle East at American airbases in the country, not only is the UK providing a base for B-52 bombers, it is also providing its implicit diplomatic support for the regime in the USA by arranging a state visit in the midst of an illegal war.

The messaging is clear.  As ever with a Labour government, an attempt is being made to triangulate the situation so that all sides can be kept happy, with the consequence that none is. The pretence that the special relationship with the USA is continuing is maintained, even though that relationship should be severed. The claim that this war has nothing to do with the UK is simultaneously shot to pieces by the permission granted for UK airbases to be used to support the illegal assaults on Iran. And no one in the UK is left in any doubt about the fact that the UK government is creeping, as ever, to the occupant of the White House, however obnoxious they might be.

This has consequences. As Donald Trump said yesterday, Europe “can go and get its own oil” from the Gulf states in the future. He did, of course, ignore the fact that we, and everyone else, were doing just that until he intervened. The problem that we now have is entirely of his creation, and the creation of Benjamin Netanyahu, but we would be unwise to ignore the fact that whilst those states who have firmly stood up against the USA might be permitted by Iran to use the Strait of Hormuz again, if there is oil and gas to collect after the USA and Israel have finished their campaign, countries like the UK might still be blocked from access because of their implicit, tacit, or practical support for the USA during its campaign against Iran.

My suggestion is that Iran might seek to use the weapon of sanctions in a fashion akin to that previously used against it, meaning that not only will it block the passage of ships serving the UK  from passing through the Strait of Hormuz when the immediate conflict is over, but might also sanction otherwise apparently friendly states that acted as an intermediary in that case, seeking to export oil from the Gulf for onward delivery to the UK via an intermediate port. The Strait of Hormuz is, in other words, going to remain a weapon for a long time to come, and to presume that the UK will be able to access oil and gas from anywhere in the Gulf when it has been an accomplice in acts of destruction in the Middle East is naive in the extreme. There is no reason why Iran should forgive and forget, and I do not think it will do so.

What is the consequence of all this? It is that Starmer is likely to have pulled off the UK’s biggest foreign policy failure since the Suez Crisis in the 1950s. He will have simultaneously alienated the USA, Iran, and the British public. As an exercise in triangulation, that is some achievement, and we will all bear the cost of it.

Meanwhile, as I noted in yesterday’s video, there is no indication that the UK is preparing any sensible plans for the consequences of this war, even if it were to finish within 2 to 3 weeks, as Donald Trump is now suggesting, and those plans will be needed. To believe that all will return to normal after disruption on this scale would be an act of supreme folly. The economic consequences of this war are going to last for some time, not least because there is no indication that Israel will give up just because Donald Trump has, and if the USA continues to fund its activities, hostilities will outlast any supposed end to US involvement.

As the saying goes, the fat lady is a long way from singing as yet.

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1. Chris Hedges’ remarks on US ‘democracy’ apply to the West at large. Not for nothing did Marx, in the 18th Brumaire, deride as ‘parliamentary cretins’ those who look to bourgeois democracy for lasting cures to capitalism’s inherent life negation. Now, with the postwar boom I grew up in well and truly over, that characterisation seems less gratuitous with each passing day.
2. Raytheon is now rebranded as RTX. Further evidence, if any were needed, that America’s revolving door works both sides of its plutocrat duopoly is given by Hegseth’s Democrat predecessor having so many fingers in that particular pie he earned himself the moniker, Lloyd ‘Raytheon’ Austin. Conflict of interests? There’s an open invite to insider trading in that fact alone.
3. Before you rush to download the Pelosi Tracker, note that Nancy and Paul have ninety days to report their stock market bets. Any especially lucrative ship will have sailed long before the likes of me ‘n thee get wind of it.
4. A government with a sovereign and fiat currency can choose to create the money it needs to marshal the true resources of a nation’s economy – labour, technology, natural assets and all the foundational stuff like education, transport infrastructure and welfare support to maximise realisation of their potential. Counterintuitive as it may seem – and if truth was always intuitive there’d be no need for science, would there? – they do not tax then spend. They ‘print’ money – strings of noughts on computer screens – and ‘spend it’ – by online transfers of said strings – then use taxation to rein in, should they choose, any inflationary consequences once an economy is running at full capacity. (Other uses being social engineering.) This has seismic implications I’ve for months wanted to explore in dedicated posts. But as former PM Harold Macmillen said over sixty years ago, “events, dear boy” – and as I say now, ruling class devilry – keep getting in the way.
5. Re the thorny subject of just how much agency a POTUS has, see my BTL exchange with Bryan three posts ago.