The Chicago Sun-Times has an interesting piece today on Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and how he cashed out $116,000 in stock during the financial collapse last fall. There’s no reason to conclude Durbin did something inappropriate–sure, he cashed out just after his closed-door meeting with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, but it was also after the huge Sept. 15 drop in the stock market that followed Lehman’s collapse.
But the part of this story that piqued my interest was that Durbin shifted this money to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The Sun-Times reports: “Altogether, Durbin sold investments worth $116,000 in September. By Oct. 2, he had invested $98,046 in Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway, the form shows.”
This caught my eye because of something Buffett said and did at the same time Durbin was investing in Buffett and pushing the bailout. From my column last September:
Warren Buffett this past week invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson’s old firm. Buffett said on CNBC, “If I didn’t think the government was going to act, I would not be doing anything this week.”
Goldman Sachs, of course, was the No. 2 source of funds for Barack Obama in the 2008 election.
