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And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.
Elect only people with no living relatives, and execute them after term's end.
I vaguely remember some fantasy novel I've read many decades ago with this premise... The Goblin tower?
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.
>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?
Great! Pretty sure this is not controversial among the voting public. However, the lawmakers will never vote on a law to ban trading on non-public knowledge because this kind of insider trading is frequently the reason they’re in politics in the first place . We have long since passed the time where community service drove public officials to run; it’s all about getting rich. Even the few true believers like Bernie S…
It would not be unreasonable to allocate 0.1% of your budget to compensating the people who control the budget, in exchange for them abandoning their conflict-of-interest positions.
Honestly, pay them more. In every major country, if they're running orgs that have multi-hundred-billion-dollar budgets per year, and you have a few hundred of these people, you can pay them well-enough that sneaking around isn't really profitable. It would not be unreasonable to allocate 0.1% of your budget to compensating the people who control the budget, in exchange for them abandoning their conflict-of-interest…
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...
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...
And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.
> This problem looks unsolvable to me. Elect only people with no living relatives, and execute them after term's end. I vaguely remember some fantasy novel I've read many decades ago with this premise... The Goblin tower?
And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.
Maybe with that attitude :) Part of solving the problem is legislation, part of it is cultural. If you don't have both, then sure, it's too hard.
Is anyone at the SEC really going to use resources to piss off a congressperson by investigating whether their nephew's father-in-law used insider information when they made a certain trade?
Not if they have other cases they can spend their resources on which won't potentially hinder their own careers.
And their partners, parents, children, friends? This problem looks unsolvable to me.