Mr. Clean

It’s true what they say about Tim Walz: His relatability is off the charts. If the ticket wins in November, he’ll pass the vice-presidential beer-test with marks not seen since the last Minnesotan to hold the office. Following Walter “Fritz” Mondale, the good-humored lawyer from Faribault County, the two-spot has been occupied by animatronic scions, career pols, a self-identifying Darth Vader and now Kamala Harris, who is as relatable as a bulldog prosecutor and Brentwood millionaire can be.

But Walz. He feels immediately familiar because he represents a beloved archetype. The 90% of Americans who attended public high school can recall a version of “Coach Walz.” He’s the cool teacher who drives a beater and has time for his students. The role is weighted by an authenticity that is the envy of every senator’s son or millennial ambition psycho who ever tried to squeeze into a pair of Payless casuals. You can deploy to Kabul for a year as a résumé builder, but good luck scripting a state football championship. 

Most important, Walz is in possession of that most elusive of everyman qualities: a financial statement as clean as the driven snows of the north country.  

As of 2019, the date of his last financial disclosure, Walz owns no stocks, no securities, no investment instruments of any kind. He owns no second or summer homes. At age 60, he does not even own a primary residence. The only things that could make him more financially relatable are six figures of student debt and a maxed-out Capital One card with 29% APR. 

The one thing of value he does possess is a public pension. Whether this is a 401(k)-type program or an old-fashioned fixed-reward plan — the Minnesota teacher’s union offers both — doesn’t change the picture. Despite claims of a “democratized” stock market, the rise of the 401(k) has only created a new source of anxiety for working people and worsened inequality. The richest 10% of Americans own more than 90% of the country’s $46 trillion stock wealth. The bottom 150 million divvy up around 1% of what remains. Having a 401(k) doesn’t make the average person an “investor” any more than their lunch break makes them Anthony Bourdain. 

That Walz’s financial situation feels so refreshingly plebeian testifies to how rare it’s become in national politics. So rare, in fact, that in some quarters the idea of a vice presidential candidate owning nothing requires an effort to comprehend. When a reporter explained on Forbes Talks that Walz’s pension is his total net worth, the host pressed him, “Does he currently have any assets?” 

The fact that he doesn’t have any assets as traditionally understood by Forbes reporters obviously helps balance the ticket. Harris wasn’t the richest member of the Senate, but neither was she the poorest; her asset portfolio includes a $4 million home and stakes in investment funds worth up to $6 million. By owning nothing, Walz provides a relatable counterpoint. It also sets him up to help the party harvest some of Washington’s lowest-hanging, most overripe populist fruit. Polls show support for a congressional stock trading ban approaching 90%, a left-right supermajority rivaling the one that has been screaming for decades to kneecap Big Pharma. As it happens, some of the highest numbers favoring a stock ban are found in the swing states of Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. 

Twenty years ago, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis published a study showing that stock trades by U.S. senators beat the market by 12%. That was twice the rate achieved by corporate insiders and strongly suggested that the oversight of conflicts-of-interest — which hadn’t changed much since establishment of the first Congressional Ethics Committee in the mid-1960s — was woefully inadequate. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that lawmakers were exploiting their privileged position for pecuniary gain.  

But like so much else, the debate sparked by the report was overtaken by the Iraq War. It did not roar back to life until 2011, following a “60 Minutes” investigation revealing that members of Congress had profited handsomely from trading stocks in the hours and days after receiving closed-door briefings by the Treasury Department during a key moment of the 2009 financial crisis. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. As with other elements of the administration’s response to the financial crisis, it was far milder than the enraged public was ready to support. Aside from banning public officials from participating in closed IPOs, it mostly restated old guidelines and expanded disclosure requirements for elected officials. 

Congressional trading not only continued, it grew by leaps and bounds. Sunlight, it turns out, isn’t always a disinfectant, nor shame a reliable deterrent. Instead of changing corrupt behavior, the legislation just made the corruption transparent. This resulted in an unexpected, but in hindsight predictable, development. Retail investors and data firms realized the expanded window on financial corruption — now on view in something close to real-time — presented an opportunity for mimicry. Why shouldn’t voters also profit from the privileged information that guided the trading decisions of their elected representatives? A number of online platforms arose to track congressional trading trends by sector. One of these, Unusual Whales, provides the research behind two exchange-traded funds modeled on favored Democratic and Republican investments. Both promise the advantage of what their sponsor, Subversive Capital, calls the “congressional information filter.” 

In recent years, the bipartisan scandal of congressional trading has only worsened as a brazen and venal violation of public trust. Since 2021, members of Congress from both parties have conducted a combined 37,000 stock trades totaling more than $2 billion. Its biggest players include prominent names from both parties, from MAGA firebreather Marjorie Taylor Greene to Ro Khanna, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. During his time in office, Khanna has executed more than 16,000 trades with a volume of nearly $300 million. His most recent disclosure, dated Aug. 8, reports more than a dozen trades including Amazon, Home Depot, Allstate and Berkshire Hathaway. The largest is a Barclays buy of between $100,000 and $250,000. 

Trading is an especially unbecoming pastime for Khanna, who is positioning to inherit the mantle of Bernie Sanders (zero trades), but the shade of an official’s politics is beside the point. A strict ban of the practice should have been implemented a long time ago. Baseball’s all-time hit leader, Pete Rose, has been exiled from the sport for betting on games while coaching the Cincinnati Reds. And yet we allow the people serving as coaches and umps in the game of regulating the economy to bet on its players. The impact on the country is more fundamental than just skewing votes in the adoption of policies, the enforcement of regulations and the approval of mergers. It warps and stunts the wider political vision of the people making the rules. Their financial stakes undermine the ability and muddy the obligation to prioritize the interests of the vast majority of people outside the investing class, to say nothing of the planet as a whole. They are literally invested in a status quo whose critical faults require boldness and imagination to solve.

As with the corruption around the financial crisis, revelations of pandemic-era congressional trading served to energize calls for a ban. In the past two years, several bills have emerged that reflect the public’s appetite for a trading prohibition, and the momentum for action is building. Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Kirsten Gillibrand have sponsored trading bans, while two other proposals go further, barring officials from even holding stocks or securities while in office. Missouri Republican Josh Hawley’s PELOSI Act would require officials to place stocks in a blind trust during their term. Stronger still is the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which forbids office holders from owning individual stocks, full stop. (Mutual fund investments are permitted.) This stricture recognizes that the possession of single stocks, even if held in a trust, is just a form of slow-motion or suspended trading, and leaves intact incentives to protect or enhance the future value of the asset. The law — co-sponsored by Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Pramila Jayapal, and Republicans Steve Daines, Matt Rosendale and Marsha Blackburn — would give members of Congress and their spouses six months to fully divest their “stocks, bonds, commodities, futures, or any other form of security.”

Anger over inside dealing is so broad and so deep, there’s no reason not to push for a ban on ownership as well as trading. It also shouldn’t be much of a lift to rally voters behind a longer list of offices impacted by the new rules. The Nevada Independent reports that nearly three-quarters of residents support a trading ban that covers Supreme Court justices, the president and the vice president.

Which brings us back to Coach Walz. Any day now, the campaign should be releasing the governor’s first financial disclosure in five years. We should expect it to be clean. If he returns to Washington in January, he won’t have to look too hard for a signature issue, because this one will be staring him square in the face. You couldn’t ask central casting for a better champion of clean government than The Man Who Owns Nothing.