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Some Amazon Employees Bought NYC Condos Before News of HQ2 Location Emerged, Says WSJ Report (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: At least two Amazon employees reportedly purchased condos in a New York City neighborhood before news emerged that the area had been picked to host the company's second headquarters. The employees decided to buy units in a new 11-story condo building in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens just before the first reports of Amazon's HQ2 location were released this month, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. While employees of companies are barred from buying or selling stocks based on information that has not yet been made public, lawyers told the Journal that they were unaware of any such ban affecting real estate transactions. There are no exact numbers on how many units have gone into contract in the Long Island City area since the announcement, but the Journal reports that one brokerage firm sold nearly 150 units just last week, 15 times its normal volume. Earlier this month, Amazon announced plans to split its second headquarters evenly between New York's Long Island City and Arlington County's Crystal City neighborhoods.
Oh how I agree with you. I used to come here for some knowledge and discussion, but now it's all APK, trumpeters and people with lower IQ than a banana.
I use up all my MOD points on off-topic and troll posts.
First off, the only people that would be upset are people that wanted to buy into the nearby neighbourhood and are now looking at higher prices. What did they expect? Of course this is going to happen. Let's face it, the whole exercise in NY's bid was to have Amazon move in. And guess what, a ton of people are going to be moving in with them. Whether they move in a week before the bell or after, prices are gong up and things are gonna change. "Insider" knowledge is not the issue here, but jealousy, that may play a part...
Yeah, I don't get that complaint, either. This isn't at all like buying stock based on knowledge of what a company is about to do.
if a company announces that it is going to do something amazing in two years, that company's stock will rise immediately on expectation of that future profit, thanks to rampant speculation and broad global demand. The information, when it becomes public knowledge, has an immediate and significant effect on the market.
By contrast, Amazon's new headquarters will increase housing prices, but not immediately. If they broke ground today, the new headquarters probably wouldn't open until at least a couple of years from now, and demand for housing won't increase much until shortly before that, because most employees won't know that they are going to be transferring until they do (unless they really want to move to NYC and are relatively certain that they'll still be at Amazon in two years and know that a position will be available at that location in a product area that interests them).
Thus, knowing the decision a couple of weeks early almost certainly did not financially benefit those employees in any meaningful way (except, perhaps, by avoiding extortion by unscrupulous sellers trying to take advantage of their knowledge of a few Amazon facilities staffers' need to move in quickly).
In short, they almost certainly did nothing wrong.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I love how people can non-ironically call for echo chambers. You people really do spend all your energy on removing thought you disagree with, don't you? It must be a nasty surprise to come in to a website where you encounter dissident views. It's telling that your natural response is, instead of engaging with such views, is to remove them from view.
They tried that, you know...it didn't work. Without accurate information (dissidents telling you where you're going wrong) your whole society goes off the rails. George Orwell goes into this in "1984" - but in his society, people like you successfully suppressed all dissent.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!