Out of all the representatives in Congress, Nancy Pelosi always had some of the most interesting filings. I hadn’t looked at them in years so I pulled her disclosures on a whim again today. Most people have a few stocks here and there, but Nancy Pelosi is like a walking, talking private bank. Her investments appear lucrative, nuanced, and complex. She has multi-million dollar vineyards in California that generate profits from selling grapes, limited partnership interests in investment firms specializing in Asian holdings, stakes in real estate partnerships and properties that generate millions upon millions of dollars in annual rents, restaurants, broadband, football leagues, Dow Chemical, J. Crew, and Apple, preferred stock, bonds … the list is really fascinating.
John Kerry, worth $200 million to $300 million, has disclosure filings that look like a mid-size mutual fund. He basically owns the S&P 500, a wide range of bonds, and private businesses that are in businesses as varied as telecommunications to oil extraction. He looks like an East Coast elite investment fund, collecting dividends from stocks, interest from bonds, and distributions from limited partnerships.
The richest man in Congress is Darrell Issa from California with a $700 million net worth. He seems to have a strong preference for investments funds and doing business through limited partnerships. That would be the way to do it, I suppose, if you were in public office. It’s actually weird how clean his report is. It would be like selling everything you own and splitting it between a few dozen index funds and partnerships. The cynic in me can’t help but think this is deliberate. If you were to do a second-tier analysis, it is entirely possible he could hold something like $100 million worth of a single stock and have deep financial ties to it without it being listed on the disclosure document or coming up in the asset-specific search results. It’s … impressive.
The only one who outdoes Darrell Issa in that front is Jared Polis. His disclosure filing looks like a yellow page listing of limited liability companies and limited partnerships.
The richest man on the Supreme Court is Justice Stephen Breyer, who has around $8 million. He holds stock in Johnson Controls, Sysco (the food distributor), Cisco Systems, BHP Billiton, IBM, H.J. Heinz, Nestle, and several other great companies.
General Electric is the most popular stock in the United States Congress. It makes sense. It is huge, diversified, pays a rich dividend, and is the quintessential American enterprise, having been founded by Thomas Edison after the invention of the light bulb. It makes everything from locomotives to jet engines. I am almost always a net buyer of GE when the price is attractive.
The most popular investment in all of Congress right now is General Electric. That is followed by the usual list of suspects: Procter & Gamble, Cisco, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bank of America, AT&T, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon, Exxon Mobil, Apple, Coca-Cola, JP Morgan Chase, PepsiCo, IBM, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, Walt Disney, and Home Depot.
President Obama’s disclosure filings are interesting, too. He still banks with Northern Trust in Chicago, one of the greatest banks in world history. He invests almost exclusively in the Vanguard 500 index fund, and generates most of his money from book royalties. He is definitely a multi-millionaire, but given his relatively young age, doesn’t have anywhere near the net worth of his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Madam Secretary is sitting on at least $5,000,000 to $25,000,000 in cold, liquid cash.
And Joe Biden? He really is just a regular working guy who went into politics to build a better life for his family. He has a maximum net worth of $750,000. That still puts him significantly above the typical American citizen but makes him a relative pauper among the other people wandering the halls of the Executive Building and White House.
The most popular investment by far in all of Congress is real estate. Congress loves itself some real estate.
