The Margin Machine

• Key findings
• Only 13 of 489 members with a parsed disclosure report securities-backed borrowing — margin loans, brokerage collateral loans, or a lender's named securities-based credit line — totalling $104.2M at bracket midpoints.
• Pelosi's household is $78.0M of that $104.2M — 75 percent. The next-largest disclosure is $15.0M; the third is $3.0M.
• A second margin account, Charles Schwab & Company at $25,000,001–$50,000,000, appears for the first time on the annual covering calendar year 2025. Her disclosed debt floor rose from $36.0M to $61.25M — up 70 percent — after four years unchanged.
• Margin is only 13.6% of all congressional debt by value. The other 86 percent is mortgages and lines of credit — ordinary, and spread across 357 members.
• The form never asks what secures a loan. Four more members disclose $53.3M of brokerage credit lines with the collateral unstated — including a $37.5M Goldman Sachs line that would rank second here if securities backed it. The census is a floor.
• The composition is the story, not the total. Published net-worth figures already subtract liabilities; none disclose their type.

1. The number everyone quotes, and the schedule nobody reads

Search any member of Congress and a net-worth figure comes back. The method behind it is standard and reasonable: a disclosure form reports assets and liabilities in ranges, so you take the midpoint of the assets, subtract the midpoint of the liabilities, and publish the difference. GovGreed's own member pages do exactly this.

That arithmetic is fine. It is also where everyone stops. The subtraction collapses the entire liability schedule into one figure, and the schedule is the interesting part — because a mortgage on a house and a loan against a stock portfolio are not the same object, and the form distinguishes them by name.

So we read the schedule. Across 4,430 annual disclosures from 489 members between 2018 and 2025, 357 members disclose debt of some kind. Almost all of it is what you would expect: mortgages, home equity lines, the occasional student loan. Ordinary balance sheets, at unusual sizes.

Then there is a second category, and it is nearly empty. Thirteen members disclose borrowing against their own securities — a margin loan, or a loan collateralised by a brokerage account. It is 13.6 percent of all congressional debt by value, and it behaves nothing like a mortgage. The collateral is not a building. It is the portfolio the member reports in the asset column.

2. Data and methodology

Every figure here traces to a public federal record. Members file an annual Personal Financial Disclosure listing assets, income, positions and liabilities, each within a bracketed range. We parsed those filings into structured rows and classified every liability by the type the filer declared — Mortgage, Margin, Brokerage Collateral Loan, Equity Line of Credit, and so on. A liability counts as securities-backed under either of two tests: the declared type, creditor or description names a margin or brokerage arrangement; or it names a lender's securities-based credit product by its brand name.

The second test was added in v1.1, and it is worth explaining rather than burying, because its absence cost this paper three members. Two wirehouse products carry names that describe the collateral only if you already know the product: Morgan Stanley's Liquidity Access Line and its Portfolio Loan are both, by the lender's own published definition, lines of credit secured by the client's brokerage account. A word-match on “margin” and “brokerage” does not see either. Josh Gottheimer ($3.00M), Jonathan Jackson ($0.38M) and Sheldon Whitehouse ($0.18M) all disclose one, and v1.0 of this paper missed all three. They are in Table 1 now.

Dollar figures are bracket midpoints, the same convention every tracker uses. This matters more than usual here: the top liability bracket is $25,000,001–$50,000,000, so a $37.5M midpoint stands for a range $25M wide. Both of Pelosi's margin accounts sit in that top bracket. $78.0M is a midpoint, not a number she filed. The number she filed is a floor of $50,000,002 and a ceiling of $100,000,000, plus the collateral loan.

Each member is counted once, on their latest parsed filing. Filing years differ per member, so the year is printed beside every row in Table 1 — two of the thirteen are several years stale, and we say which.

One validation worth stating. Our parse of Pelosi's annual covering calendar 2024 returns a liability range of $36,000,009 to $102,000,000 — matching, to the dollar, the range reported in contemporaneous press coverage of that filing. The parser reproduces the published record exactly, including its odd nine-dollar tail.

3. The receipts: thirteen members, and one of them is 75 percent

Table 1 is the entire category as the filings describe it — not a top ten, the whole list. Every member of Congress whose most recent parsed annual discloses borrowing against securities. What it is not, and cannot be, is every member who does so: see section 6, where four more disclose brokerage credit lines the form never asks them to explain.

Latest parsed annual per member; filing year shown because it differs. Dollar figures are bracket midpoints. A liability counts here when the declared type, creditor or description names a margin or brokerage arrangement, or names a lender's securities-based credit product (Liquidity Access Line, Portfolio Loan). Verified July 15, 2026. Source: congressional Personal Financial Disclosures.

The distribution is not a leaderboard so much as a cliff. Eight of the thirteen disclose less than $1 million — the kind of margin balance an ordinary brokerage customer runs. Cisneros' $15.0M is real but comes from a 2019 filing, six years stale. Everything above that is one household.

4. What Pelosi's schedule actually says

Eleven liabilities appear on the annual covering calendar year 2025. Six are mortgages on named properties — a Zinfandel Lane address in Napa County, 3030 K Street in Washington, Belden and Point Lobos in San Francisco. Two are equity lines of credit. One is a revolving line at Heritage Bank. Ordinary, if large.

The remaining three are the story. Charles Schwab & Company — Margin — $25,000,001 to $50,000,000. City National Securities, Ongoing Brokerage Margin Account — $25,000,001 to $50,000,000. City National Bank, Brokerage Collateral Loan — $1,000,001 to $5,000,000. All three are marked spouse on the form. At midpoints, $78.0 million borrowed against securities, set against $228.6 million of disclosed assets.

Annual disclosures are filed the following May: the CY2024 annual was filed 2025-05-15, the CY2025 annual 2026-05-15. Nine liability rows became eleven. Everything except the two highlighted lines is identical. The CY2024 range matches contemporaneous press reporting to the dollar. Verified July 15, 2026.

The floor moved from $36.0M to $61.25M — up 70 percent — after sitting unchanged for four consecutive filings. One new line explains almost all of it.

5. Discussion: leverage on leverage

GovGreed's companion paper, The Pelosi Options Machine, documents a strategy: deep-in-the-money, long-dated call options, bought a year out and exercised into stock rather than sold. On January 14, 2025 the household bought fifty contracts each on five companies spanning the AI trade, and exercised all five into 25,000 shares a year later. A deep-in-the-money call is itself a leveraged instrument — that is the entire point of the structure.

This paper adds the layer underneath. In the same calendar year, a second margin account in the $25,000,001–$50,000,000 bracket appears on the disclosure for the first time. Leverage inside the position; borrowed money around it.

The form does not connect the two, and neither do we. A financial disclosure lists assets and liabilities on separate schedules; it never links a specific loan to a specific purchase, and no public record says the margin funded the calls. What the record shows is narrower and still worth stating plainly: both grew, in the same year, in the same household, and each is disclosed in a place almost nobody reads next to the other.

6. Limitations and caveats

Midpoints are not measurements. Both margin accounts sit in the top bracket, which is $25 million wide. The true total is somewhere between $51.0M and $105.0M. We report $78.0M because that is the convention; we flag it because at this bracket the convention is doing a lot of work.

The form never asks what secures a loan — and this is the binding limit. It asks for the creditor, the type, the interest rate and the bracket. Nothing on it requires a filer to say whether securities are the collateral. Table 1 therefore counts only liabilities whose own wording gives it away. Four members disclose credit lines drawn from brokerages and investment banks where the filing is silent, totalling $53.3M:

Liabilities on the member's latest parsed annual, drawn from a brokerage or investment-bank counterparty, where neither the declared type nor the description states the collateral. These are not counted in Table 1 and are not asserted to be securities-backed. Verified July 15, 2026. Source: congressional Personal Financial Disclosures.

Any of these may be secured by securities. Any may not be. Goldman's line, at a $37.5M midpoint, is larger than every entry in Table 1 except Pelosi's — if securities back it, it is the second-biggest in Congress and this paper's distribution changes shape. We do not count it, because the record does not say, and a census built on inference is not a census. The honest statement is the uncomfortable one: the true size of this category is unknowable from the disclosure regime that exists, and the fix is one column on a form.

The filings are not synchronised. Table 1 uses each member's latest parsed annual, and two of the thirteen are years old. Cisneros' $15.0M is from 2019 and may no longer exist. The table is a census of what is on the record, not a snapshot of a single day.

Coverage is partial. Of 4,430 filings, 3,995 parsed cleanly and 435 are scanned images we could not read into rows. A member whose filings fall in that second group would not appear in Table 1 even if they carried margin debt. The category is a floor, not a ceiling.

Net worth is not the finding here, and a naive subtraction produces nonsense. Personal residences are excluded from the asset schedule while their mortgages are disclosed as liabilities, and a member holding property through a partnership reports a percentage share of a mortgage against an asset line bracketed separately. Both effects can drive a computed net worth below zero for members who are not remotely insolvent. We report margin precisely because it is unambiguous: the collateral is securities, and those securities are in the asset column.

7. Conclusion

The debate about congressional wealth runs on a single number, and the number is not wrong. It is just thin. Subtracting liabilities from assets answers “how much,” and then quietly discards the answer to “of what.”

Read the schedule instead and a category appears that almost no one occupies: thirteen members, borrowing against the portfolios they report to the public, and one household holding three quarters of it. That fact required no leak, no source, and no model. It required reading page nine of a form that has been public since May, and asking what the debt was for.

And then the form stops answering. It will tell you that a member owes Goldman Sachs somewhere between $25 and $50 million, and it will not tell you what he pledged to get it. That is not an oversight in our parse; it is the design of the disclosure. The category we can measure is concentrated in one household. The category we cannot measure is the one nobody has asked Congress to disclose.

Frequently asked

References & data sources

1. Congressional Personal Financial Disclosures — annual filings (House Clerk; Senate Office of Public Records). 4,430 filings from 489 members, 2018–2025; 3,995 parsed, 435 scanned-only.
2. STOCK Act Periodic Transaction Reports — the January 2025 options batch and its January 2026 exercise, documented in GGR-WP-2026-14.
3. Filing dates — annual disclosures are filed the following May; the CY2024 annual was filed 2025-05-15 (doc 10066169) and the CY2025 annual 2026-05-15 (doc 10075701).
4. External validation — contemporaneous press reporting of the CY2024 filing gives a liability range of $36,000,009–$102,000,000, matching this parse to the dollar.
5. Image credit — Wall Street, New York City — Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Not financial advice. All data from public federal disclosures.