This Congress supports illegal insider trading for themselves. Is there no shame? It is one of those dirty little secrets that everyone knows but no one does anything about. Members of Congress have exempted themselves from insider trading laws even though their job of legislating and approving large expenditures is clearly insider information, allowing them to know in advance which stocks will fly tomorrow and take advantage of this info. Clearly, it is illegal except for their own rules that declare them outside of the law.
Recently, 60 Minutes did an exposé on this issue that stimulated much protest and outrage. Almost as a direct result, Congress fashioned a bill reeling in this illegal activity. However, this bill is about to get lost in committee, never to see the light of day, so Congress can continue to use their inside information to make millions of illegal dollars.
In a word, it’s disgusting. Our leaders must be replaced. They can no longer be trusted.
Central to S.1903 – STOCK bill (“STOCK Act”) http://goo.gl/Eh1p2 proposed by the Senate is a “duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence,” that would be owed by members of Congress to the people, and traders need to “disclose nearer to real time,” to substitute a philosophy of full disclosure for the current philosophy of caveat emptor.
The loophole in which members of congress and legislative staffers are immune from enforcement of insider-trading laws, is because the delayed reporting of securities transactions by congress, defeats, obstructs, and impairs its use as timely evidence. Insider-trading cases are hard to prove, because the trades must be tightly linked to the events or information on which they are allegedly based. This is why no Congress people were investigated under the current laws.