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The Right Coast
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Elon Musk, Other Leaders Sell Stock at Historic Levels as Market Soars, Tax Changes Loom – WSJ

By Thomas A. Smith

Company founders and leaders are unloading their stock at historic levels, with some selling shares in their businesses for the first time in years, amid soaring market valuations and ahead of possible changes in U.S. and some state tax laws.

So far this year, 48 top executives have collected more than $200 million each from stock sales, nearly four times the average number of insiders from 2016 through 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the research firm InsiderScore.

The wave has included super sellers such as cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who have sold shares for the first time in four years or more as the economic recovery fueled strong growth in sales and profit. Other high-profile insiders including the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart Inc. WMT +0.53% fortune, and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. FB -0.42% have accelerated sales and are on track to break recent records for the number of shares they have sold.

via www.wsj.com

It’s sure looking like the top of the bubble, so to speak. Rats jumping ships and all that. Still, we have the Fed on our side, ready to print trillions of dollars if the equity markets seem close to an outright crash, or even get seriously wobbly. At least that’s what they’re saying on YouTube. Of course, for the Fed not to do this would display a Volcker-like level of flinty responsibility and determination, and I don’t detect that spirit in our present circumstances.

The prediction in the Right Wing Nut-O’-Sphere is generally that the Fed will retreat from all the little mouth sounds of tapering it has been making lately, the market will run up again, and perhaps for the last time, before a great, big mega-crash that will make 2008 look like a swimming party. Various alternative scenarios exist before the mega-crash, of course, some pretty plausible, which postpone the crash considerably but lead to ultimately even worse outcomes. But that is another story. But! Watch what the Fed does. As I tell my students, we live in interesting times. Oh, and buy Bitcoin. I don’t know if it will work, but I haven’t heard any other ideas.