Meetings involving Obama administration officials and investors are raising new concerns about the channels of communication between Washington and Wall Street, according to the Washington Post.
The Post reported that "political-intelligence firms" arranged meetings between top Obama health-policy adviser Elizabeth Fowler and investors in 2011 and 2012. The firms also set up a conference call for investment fund managers with an official from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:
There is no evidence that the private discussions with the two administration officials about health care decisions provided investors with confidential agency information or that the investors made trades based on what they learned.
But this sort of intelligence gathering has been drawing attention from lawmakers and federal investigators who are looking at whether some traders are gaining access to information that is not available to investors in general or the wider public.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department are probing a spike in health-insurance stock trading this year that occurred after a Washington brokerage issued a bulletin predicting the outcome of a decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to increase funding for the Medicare Advantage program, which is administered by private insurers.
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) have proposed legislation that would "require political-intelligence firms to disclose some of their activities."