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Outright banning trades will only obscure congressional trading (shell corps, friends/family, etc.) I would prefer a public registry listing all congressional trades. I know this is legally available data, but very difficult to access.
And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.
Alternatively a few achievable steps could make a large improvement:
- Force them to put everything into a trust that they don't have direct control over for the duration of their term vs. allowing them to make trades and disclosing it eventually.
- Have enforced laws on sharing information, and actually send people to jail a few times a year.
Skew the risk / reward. Let people think on if they want to go to prison.
And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.
There are so many loop holes. I mean then they just make a company that does stock trades for them and tell that company what to trade. Or their spouse does the trades instead of them.
Other non-marital transactions can be controlled - that's the basis of half the tax system in every country. The moment money leaves a household or arrives in a household, there are laws about the transaction. But within a household? All bets are off.
And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.
If only we had some sort of technology to monitor social networks and large amounts of data...
Why else are there thousands of companies based in the Cayman Islands? It is to obscure the identity of the traders.
It's the most blatant example of insider trading. Company insiders might have inside access to a single company. Lawmakers have access to inside information that can affect the entire industry or market. It's a perfect example of how we do have class stratification in society and that rule of law and equality are laughably distant ideas in a sea of hypocrisy.
Of course the problem is the power they have to resist or meddle in any prosecution efforts… that’s always the problem with holding the powerful to account, I guess.
Particularly bad violations have been the Fed presidents making multimillion dollar trades with personal accounts, and Nancy Pelosi’s husband apparently directly trading on privileged information. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/16/fed-chief-powell-orders-ethi... https://fortune.com/2021/07/08/house-speaker-nancy-pelosi-hu...
It's widespread, republicans seem to be doing it more though https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/us/politics/david-perdue-... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/doj-will-not-charge-sen-rich... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/11/rand-paul... https://tulsaworld.com/news/u-s-sen-jim-inhofe-responds-afte...
Maybe that seems like not a lot to the SV types, but it’s far, far more than what most people I know have to show for a lifetime of actually hard work.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-bernie-sanders-210000864...
Outright banning trades will only obscure congressional trading (shell corps, friends/family, etc.) I would prefer a public registry listing all congressional trades. I know this is legally available data, but very difficult to access.
> Outright banning trades will only obscure congressional trading (shell corps, friends/family, etc.) >I would prefer a public registry listing all congressional trades Wouldn't your proposal obscure congressional trading as well, because they want to preserve their alpha by not publishing their trades?
Of course then you have problems where people with private information are incentivized to leak that information, which is bad for national security and other areas where secrecy is needed, but we already have laws protecting that information without adding insider trading to them.
It would need to be studied and to my knowledge no one has done that work yet, but I haven’t seen anyone establish why insider trading is a net bad for society, other than intuitive reasoning.
Outright banning trades will only obscure congressional trading (shell corps, friends/family, etc.) I would prefer a public registry listing all congressional trades. I know this is legally available data, but very difficult to access.