151–160 of 238 posts
This seems completely reasonable; it's arguably surprising it hasn't been done before. The devil will be in the details; in particular it would likely have to extend to spouses.
I would love for all lawmakers to be limited to market index investing. Say, asset allocation (other than their home and a Washington pied a terre) of 50% US stocks index, 20% non-US stocks index, 30% US bonds index. No stock-picking. No sector-picking. No real estate other than through the indexes. No private company ownership. No trusts. No circumvention. Alignment with ordinary people's retirement funds seems grea…
This is a good suggestion. Outright banning ownership of stock might limit the number of people who choose to run for office. This is a fair compromise.
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Does a "Congress tracker fund" make money? What with all the rumoured insider trading ...
AOC claimed the insider trading is an open secret in Congress because: * Congress members don't get paid much and like money. * They are often old with healthcare issues. Their govt health plans are not great. * They maintain two residences, one in DC and one in their home state. AOC rents an apartment in NYC that she never lives in and one in DC. This is a huge expense. Closing this privilege might have other uninte…
I started building out tools to track congressional stock trading in 2020. Since then, I believe there have been 9 other proposals similar to this one. None of them have been even called to a vote. It seem like Congress is pretty unwilling to regulate its own trading. Until they are, feel free to track the trading here: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/
TBH will the regulation change much? If congressmen won't be allow to own stock, they will use proxy (wife, siblings, parents, in-laws).
New barriers include: the actual work of moving money around to and from friends and family and directing trades, counterparty risks in doing so (e.g. sibling dies and leaves money to someone else or takes the money and runs), tax complications, or reputational risk if found to be violating "spirit of the law" that might harm election odds. There are surely more frictions and barriers like these that I'm not capturing.
But beyond that, even if it passes, I expect so many violations that it'd be as if it didn't pass.
If we've learned anything in the last 6-7 years is that if there's no shame, law becomes less relevant. It's enough to look at some of of the current crop (and I'm doing my absolute best to prevent myself George from dropping Santos actual names here) to understand that the believe they're above any law.
I started building out tools to track congressional stock trading in 2020. Since then, I believe there have been 9 other proposals similar to this one. None of them have been even called to a vote. It seem like Congress is pretty unwilling to regulate its own trading. Until they are, feel free to track the trading here: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/
(Nancy Pelosi is interesting. She entered Congress worth about ~3-4 million. Now she is worth $100 million, give or take $20 million depending on the estimate. Interesting. I'm not saying it's Insider Trading, but the probability...)
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TBH will the regulation change much? If congressmen won't be allow to own stock, they will use proxy (wife, siblings, parents, in-laws).
I think that if there were a law in place that made it illegal for congressmen to trade, it would be easier to catch insider trading because they would be forced to trade by proxy like you mentioned. It's really hard to prove someone traded off of insider information if they make a decision to buy/sell for themselves. If they don't tell anyone else why they made the trade, you don't really have any proof that it was…
Are you now in a position where you have to prove a negative? Are there people in prison right now because of exactly this type of occurrence, or is it so circumstantial that it's not even pursued unless there is additional evidence, e.g. you always buy $500-1k in stock but after this call you buy $10k in options or something.
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This bill is step one. No, it's not. It's just the latest in a long line of campaign finance reform --- most of which is ineffective because it was purposely designed from the get-go to be easily circumvented. The open secret here is that you're counting on an organization (Congress) to police itself. This makes no more sense than an counting on Congress to avoid raising it's own pay. How has that worked out?
> This makes no more sense than an counting on Congress to avoid raising it's own pay Congress hasn't had a raise since 2009. Their current effective pay is the lowest its been in 75 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_members_of_the_Uni...