“My problem is that during the crisis both Paulson and Geithner were soliciting advice from Buffet directly. Unless he stopped making ANY trades or acquisitions during that time how could the specter of insider trading NOT come up?”
Such as the $5 billion loan to Goldman Sachs during the crisis that he made $3.7 million on in 3 years? Nice return.
Also, certainly no conflict of interest for a major stakeholder in Wells Fargo (Buffet) being an insider with the Secretary of the Treasury during a banking crisis. However, if an employee of a publicly traded company and tells his neighbor orders are down and the neighbor sells the stock based on that information, the employee can be found guilty of insider trading and sent to prison.
And we thought we eliminated royalty in 1776.