Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 229 posts

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#101

Post by nearbuy »

flatiron wrote: post #50
themanmaran wrote: post #15

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.

They should be allowed to go in something like an S&P 500 index fund. But personally I have blackout dates trading my own company stock why don’t they have any restrictions?

Investing in an index fund might even incentivize them to ensure the economy as a whole does well.

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#103

Post by tooltalk »

bastardoperator wrote: post #27
camjohnson26 wrote: post #11

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...

Not sure why Rand Paul is in your list, or how it demonstrates your point that repubs are doing it more. IIRC Paul's problem was that the disclosure filing was late, not that he, or his wife, abused his position to make that one ~$10K trade for Gilead, the maker of Remdesivir, the only stock trade during his 10-years in the Senate.

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#104

Post by andrewla »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #82
andrewla wrote: post #77

Regulation is a poor substitute for criminal prosecution. Law enforcement at the Federal level needs to investigate and prosecute cases where members of Congress have even apparently abused their position for personal profit. Banning stock trading will just push things into more indirect methods; giving law enforcement the power to enforce the law means that the very fact that they attempted to use indirect methods a…

You can only prosecute after it has been made illegal, though.

It is illegal [1]. The phrasing is very broad:

> (a)Except as permitted by subsection (b) hereof, whoever ... participates personally and substantially as a Government officer or employee ... in a judicial or other proceeding ... in which, to his knowledge, he ... has a financial interest— Shall be subject to the penalties set forth in section 216 of this title.

All that is lacking is the willingness of law enforcement (and the executive branch) to take action.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/208

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#105

Post by ckardat123 »

ramblenode wrote: post #88

Before the STOCK Act passed, Congress outperformed the market by 20%, with some senior Republican leaders doing as well as 35% [0,1]. Before the pandemic began in the US, 4 US Senators were picking up medical stocks after closed-door briefings. Investigations were opened by the DOJ, but they were all dropped. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/congress-i... [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1…

If anyone is interested, I've been building dashboards that display trades made by U.S. congressmen and estimate their returns over time from their trading while in office.

https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/senatetrading

https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/housetrading

One weakness of the performance visualization is that some of the most extreme results are from people who have only made one or two trades while in office, as their returns are more volatile off of those few transactions.

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#106

Post by Causality1 »

Holding any elected position should come with a lifetime ban against holding stock in any publicly traded company, full stop. Congressman, president, sheriff, county commissioner, I don't care. Either you're a public servant or you aren't. My position in the government wasn't even an elected one and I still believe the oath I took is fundamentally incompatible with holding stock.

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#108

Post by neom »

ramblenode wrote: post #88

Before the STOCK Act passed, Congress outperformed the market by 20%, with some senior Republican leaders doing as well as 35% [0,1]. Before the pandemic began in the US, 4 US Senators were picking up medical stocks after closed-door briefings. Investigations were opened by the DOJ, but they were all dropped. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/congress-i... [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1…

Is there a Congress ETF?

Re: Many believe it's time to do away with lawmakers making stock trades

#110

Post by pmcollins »

giantg2 wrote: post #35

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.

it’s orders of magnitude worse than mere profiting from inside knowledge. these people make policy for the entire country and they have conflicts of interest.
Post reply on HN