I think we indicted and convicted a member of Congress for sharing inside information with his son so his son could make trades on his behalf. We’ve got that part covered. It’s the part where the member of Congress can just do it himself directly that is the problem.
Alstein
5463
That said Richard Burr got totally away with it back in 2020.
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Aceris
5464
Yep! I’ve got to say that while I’m ideologically opposed to this kind of measure it’s clear the suggestion is well thought through - it’s not overly onerous and there are studies that strongly suggest there is an issue here. I know I’m mean to the left on this forum a lot but I gotta say, I don’t like this idea but it really does make sense.
I mean, that’s just as illegal. I suspect the “shared info with son” case was particularly obvious and egregious.
Not at all. This isn’t a “perfect is the enemy of the good” situation. I’m saying the entire concept behind the law is pointless and misguided. It’s a war-on-drugs type fantasy idea where we want to somehow magically legislate people into not wanting what they fundamentally want, namely accumulation of wealth, and it’s thus never going to work. Even if it was perfectly enforceable and workable as written it wouldn’t lead to any positive outcomes. It would just increase the dependence that elected representatives already have on outside parties that can provide cash quietly in exchange for legislative considerations.
Apologies, I was just trying to focus in on the specific part of the discussion I wanted to comment on. I wasn’t attempting to distort your message at all, so my bad if it seemed that way!
But we magically legislate people into not robbing banks, don’t we? Despite the fact that they really really want to accumulate wealth and banks are where the money is? And it seems to mostly work?
CraigM
5468
Yes because there are no laws that place limits on the methods and means of acquiring wealth. Definitely no fraud laws, contract laws, laws about scams, etc. Bernie Madoff definitely didn’t go to jail.
I just straight up find this wrong. Like this just ignores the corruptive power of insider trading.
No worries and no big deal.
Sorry if I missed earlier mention of this, but if folks don’t know, there’s a cadre of online day-traders who follow the trades made by Pelosi’s husband and regularly beat the market.
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Has anybody ever tried to put together a Congressional Mutual Fund? A Corruption ETF?
I work for a financial company and we can’t trade stocks without approval. You can’t even buy and sell mutual funds or ETFs too rapidly (timing the market). And neither can our close family members. And we need to report any relationships with anybody that has a board position or otherwise controlling interest in any publicly traded company.
This is not hard. The financial industry does this all the time. There are literally thousands and thousands of Americans covered by the same policies. In fact they’ve come up with systems to automatically share employee transaction data between each other so they could get away from the manual paper based way. Last week I checked a box on Fidelity’s website that will allow them to send all my data to my company so I no longer need to go type it in every quarter.
Despite these grievous hardships, we employ many many people who are very very rich and we have no problem attracting talent.
I’ve worked here 15 years and I think I’ve heard of about 3 people getting fired for fucking around with trades that they shouldn’t have. I think the only person I’ve ever known that quit because he wanted to trade was a Tesla bro that worked in desktop support.
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Seriously. I too work for a company with fiduciary duty to customers. Insider trading training is a thing, and not rocket surgery.
Menzo
5474
I’ve been assured that preventing you from acting on your craven desire to accumulate wealth is impossible. You must be lying.
Insider trading is already illegal, and I have no objections to insider trading laws. Those are good things. Senators and representatives already are prohibited from doing that stuff.
Making extra laws like “can’t own individual equities” doesn’t accomplish anything extra to achieve the goal of curtailing insider trading. It’s already a felony. It doesn’t really accomplish anything except making things harder on the elected officials who don’t want to cheat. Well and it gives people a feel good moment that something is being done. It’s regulatory theater.
Look at the scandals we’ve already had. Loeffler, who had an ethics complaint against her in 2020, used the defense of (paraphrased) “I didn’t make those stock sale decisions, that’s all up to my advisors and husband.” That’s what everyone will do if we pass a silly law like banning individual equity ownership for Congress. They’ll put everything in a trust or a nonprofit or other vehicle run a close friend or relation and carry on with a little extra paperwork and the need to be a bit more stealthy.
Unless it’s illegal to put it in a trust or nonprofit and then let a close friend or relation run it.
You’re basically arguing that it is not possible to regulate how and when members of Congress trade, in order to suppress corruption, when people have already posted ways to do it in this very thread, in response to you.
Like this:
Not possible or desirable. But yes, that’s a decent overview. We can and should stop insider trading, but prohibitions beyond that are both unreasonable and ineffective. Ineffective in that they would be easily circumvented by parties willing to break the law and uneasonable in that they will push non-insider-trading representatives into the uncomfortable choice of being either less legal or more beholden to external parties.
Just to clarify, I’m not a fan of the “respond to every single response” style of forum discussion. I have read all the responses to my post. Please don’t interpret my lack of response as agreement or not reading the thread. Several folks have posted various theories about how a ban on owning individual equities would be both effective and could reasonably be implemented. I don’t agree with any of them.
Much like bank robbery.
Sure, that’s fine. But if you’re not going to bother to respond to counter-arguments, you’re not arguing. You’re just pontificating. Which is your right, of course!
After a January 2020 Coronavirus briefing Diane Feinstein got away with stock dumping because she said her husband made all the trades without her input. You and I have more to fear from the SEC investigating tipping a spouse than a sitting Senator. It’s completely reasonable to subject them to extra restrictions because of their inherent ability to get around existing laws.
If you have this much power you need more scrutiny than the average person. These guys already have restrictions on receiving gifts and need to report any they accept so they can prove that they weren’t bribes. Do you feel anti bribery laws are unreasonable and ineffective?
ShivaX
5480
“They’d break the law if you made a law.”
I mean… then they could be arrested and stuff. That’s kind of how it works.
As for it being untenable, a shitload of people live with similar laws and they can’t even pass legislation and never get top secret briefings.
is there a Yang thread already?
