On several occasions, Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has claimed that he has never owned stocks or bonds. On at least one occasion, he also said that he also never had a savings account.
Elected to Congress in 1972 at the age of 29, Biden served most of his professional life as a public servant, and he often referred to his working-class roots and relatively modest means compared to those who entered politics after having made money in the private sector. .
In a 2014 speech at the North American International Auto Show, Biden told the crowd that he made a pledge in 1972 – the year of his first candidacy for the United States Senate – to never own any stocks or shares. obligations as a public servant, and that he had kept this promise:
Later that year, in a speech at the White House Working Families Summit, Biden repeated the demand for stocks and bonds and further stated that he did not have an account of saving.
“Don’t blame me for not owning a single stock or bond,” Biden said in his remarks. “I don’t have a savings account, but I have a great pension and a good salary.”
To respond to these allegations, Snopes reviewed Biden’s financial disclosure following his selection as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, financial disclosure forms filed in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 then. that he was vice president, and financial disclosure forms and tax documents posted on his campaign website for the years 2019 and 2020.
In terms of stocks or bonds, Biden doesn’t appear to have ever directly owned either. Following the Obama campaign’s 2008 publication of a decade of Biden tax returns, the New York Times reported that Biden, at the time, had “virtually no outside or outside income. investment, and was paying a substantial amount of interest on his mortgage. Likewise, we have not found any direct ownership of shares or bonds in any publicly available financial information document from 2009 to 2020.
But it is not true that the finances of the Biden household are entirely independent of the stock market, or of interest-generating investments. For example, Biden is invested in retirement funds which are ultimately invested in the stock market. Joe Biden’s wife Jill Biden is invested in the stock market through a type of retirement fund known as a tax-sheltered annuity, among others. Through this investment, Jill Biden – who is indicated as owner with an “S” for spouse on financial disclosure forms for the 2009-2015 era – is indirectly invested in multiple stocks through multiple mutual funds.
Speaking to Politifact in 2014, George Pennacchi, professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that “even though the investments are not in the vice president’s name, they are part of the wealth of his family, and he stands to benefit from their success.
It’s generally true that Biden doesn’t earn much, if any, interest on money held in savings accounts, but it’s technically incorrect to state that he never had a savings account. savings or that his household is currently without. In all of the documents we looked at from 2009 to 2015, Biden (either as an individual in 2009, or jointly with his wife until at least 2015) listed a United States Senate savings account with an asset between zero and 15,000 dollars. In each deposit, this account generated between zero and $ 201 in interest payments. Jill Biden also held several savings accounts in her name during this time, some of which generated interest payments.
Because Biden – at least going back to the late 1990s – has never directly owned a stock or bond, but because he and his household have kept savings accounts and are indirectly invested in the stock market through retirement funds, we classify this statement as “Blend.”
