My wife works in the audit department of a bank. I'm heavily regulated by the SEC on what stocks, ETFs, mutual funds I can buy/sell. An internal group monitors my buying/selling and makes approval/denial before I can do so.
I have to hold an ETF for 1 month before I can sell it--not that I should be swing trading ETFs, but still. It's very frustrating at times, especially when I'm relegated to using just her bank's trading platform, too.
There are significant restrictions in a number of sectors--including ones that don't necessarily compensate terribly well--that I expect many people reading this would bridle at if they applied to themselves but which are in place (usually for understandable reasons) nonetheless.
Why would this solve the problem? They're still incentivized to make decisions on behalf of the nation in their own financial interests. The conflict of interest in the financial industry is with the companies they work with and for. For lawmakers it's with the whole country. They should absolutely not be allowed to benefit personally from legislating.
That basically devolves all the power to full-time congressional staffs because the representatives themselves would be even less educated on issues before them than they are today.
(Though this is already close to being the case in some states that only have part-time legislators who are paid next to nothing.)
> representatives themselves would be even less educated on issues before them than they are today.
i dare say politicians are far from even the smallest bit educated on any issue as it is not what gets them votes, and even an amateur in any field or profession is likely more aware and educated then them. how many times do we hear about laws the pass about technology that clearly have no idea how said technology works?
perhapses having expects, scientists, and data be how we make choices would result in better outcomes then simply who is best at winning a popularity contest.
i recall a study done with high school class leaders where instead of voting they did something else and it resulted in better, more capable leadership, but i can't find it at the moment
My spouse was an elected official in California, which came with reporting requirements for stock transactions and gifts for both of us[1] But then, in a community property state, we don't have separate stock transactions and gifts, valued economically, aren't usually seperable either (there's exceptions or at least higher gift limits from family gifts, which are likely sources for seperable gifts)
For us, it was easier to avoid making stock transactions that triggered reporting and avoid accepting gifts that would trigger reporting, than to fill out the reports. I had equity based compensation that had to be reported, but then everything else went into diversified mutual funds, which is a good idea anyway.
[1] See CA form 700. But note, this doesn't apply to federal elected officials from CA, only to state and local officials.
To less of a degree, when applying for law enforcement jobs, family members and sometimes friends have to surrender a lot of personal data. I had to hand over my SSN along with pretty much all my PII and do interviews on behalf family members when they applied to be cops. I tried to say no, but at the end of the day they're holding their jobs hostage until I comply. Hate it.
What, the cops are actually doing at least something to weed out the bad apples now?
Sarcasm aside: interesting how far they go for a simple copper on the street now. Here in Germany, that level of background checks (Sicherheitsüberprüfung Ü2/Ü3) is only done for higher level (i.e. leadership) cops and IT staff.
>> To less of a degree, when applying for law enforcement jobs, family members and sometimes friends have to surrender a lot of personal data. I had to [hand] over my SSN along with pretty much all my PII and do interviews on behalf family members when they applied to be cops. I tried to say no, but at the end of the day they're holding their jobs hostage until I comply. Hate it.
> What, the cops are actually doing at least something to weed out the bad apples now?
How is forcing a friend or family member to surrender their own PII have anything to do about "weed[ing] out the bad apples"?
My intuition is that those kinds of background checks have been going on for a long time, and have been focused on stuff like preventing infiltration by organized crime rather than specifically rooting out police brutality.
Sounds like they're trying to weed out some of the bad apples then, aren't they? Would you rather they not be doing this? It doesn't address all the ways in which a cop might be bad, but you shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Nothing they said even remotely suggests they're against this type of background check, just that checking up on your wife's credit and social circle says nothing about whether you are a "bad apple" yourself.
It's a confusing comment because in one paragraph they say the practice doesn't weed out bad apples, but then in the subsequent paragraph they concede that it probably does. The only way to square these is if cops affiliated with organized crime aren't classified as bad apples, but that makes zero sense.
> The only way to square these is if cops affiliated with organized crime aren't classified as bad apples, but that makes zero sense.
I see how it was confusing, but what I was thinking was the nature of what is considered a "bad apple" has changed over time. I think police forces have been trying to prevent things like organized crime infiltration and corruption for a long time, while things like excessive use of force and racial bias have only started to be considered serious problem by them much more recently. Acting surprised about background checks seems like it's exclusively referring to the latter, while the process itself (e.g. getting friends' SSNs) seems mostly target at the former.
> How is forcing a friend or family member to surrender their own PII have anything to do about "weed[ing] out the bad apples"?
Well, interviewing family and friends can definitely help weed out people with problematic far-right attitudes, a history of domestic violence or other issues.
A friend applied for a state police job. They wanted references and interviews not only from immediate family members, but also a number of friends, his adjacent neighbors, multiple current coworkers, his current supervisor, and all past supervisors he was able to get ahold of (with detailed explanations if he was unable to comply with the last).
And then, when they interviewed me, they asked me for further references for him.
Your spouse can definitely affect your ability to get a security clearance. Last I heard, cannabis use is still relevant to this, even if you live in a state where it's legal. Your spouse being a foreign national can also be significant, depending on which country and their connections there.
It's not really a legal obligation as such ("only" putting the job at risk), but it does cover rather a lot of jobs.
Thing is, in a legal state there is no leverage for a bad actor, unless the US federal government changes its policy - but that's very unlikely under a Democrat government given they're pro federal legalization, and even under a hardliner like Trump the Republicans didn't dare touch the issue because it would counteract their entire "states rights" agenda and piss off a sizable amount of their own voters.
Well, a closeted person in a conservative part of the country might still be vulnerable to extortion. Makes me wonder if being openly out actually helps with getting security clearance.
Correct, and I did say so. While "your spouse will lose his or her job if you do X, Y, or Z" is not technically a legal requirement, for most people it's a distinction without a difference.
Really? I work in the gambling industry and nobody in my household is allowed to gamble/bet online just because of that.
When I worked in finance, myself and my wife also had a lot of restrictions in regards to our investments.
Anyways, these are just a few examples, but there are a lot of domains of activity where restrictions extend not only to the direct employee but also to their spouse or direct family.
...though I am just some random employee in this behemoth.
I'm skeptical of "just some random employee", or a ban on immediate family trading AMZN. Because it's the first I've heard of this for an SDE that doesn't work in finance for Amazon, and I know plenty of folks that work at Amazon and trading AMZN has come up.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd sure double-check on that because it doesn't match my experience with other large companies (for instance, there was a time when my spouse worked in Microsoft finance, and I had to have my MSFT trades approved or something, but not banned from trading).
I am in finance. We are not allow to sell stock unless it is in very small windows after earnings releases have happened.
I am not sure how this proposed ban would handle cases where someone is a founder of a company that goes public? I agree the current setup is not good.
Look at how many members in Congress have made millions trading stock.
All that aside, I don't like the double standard on insider trading. I think the law should be applied equally to everyone.
Don't worry, to make it fairer Congress will make a law to ban trading for the rest of the citizenry. It won't affect the market too much though as they'll be the only guys trading and owning stocks.
Also at a bank. If I am authorized to trade it on behalf of the Bank - I am not allowed to trade it for myself, nor is anyone in my family.
Anything I am not authorized to trade it on behalf of the Bank, I have to seek approval and agree to minimum holding periods (for me and my family). Anything close to what I am authorized to trade it on behalf of the Bank would be instantly rejected for personal trading.
The wife may be privy to the banks customers activities, and the husband must be considered privy to all the same, simply by proximity regardless of her honesty or intent.
The wife may have knowledge about $bigco buying or selling $bigthing, and the husband may gain that same knowledge from her, even if she's honest and never intentionally disclosed it. (people aren't perfect and clues can slip, or he simply has access to her laptop or that scratch pad where she wrote down the essentials of a phone call etc.
I worked at a publicly traded company where everyone internal had knowledge of product releases with Apple. It was a trading frenzy with open discussion of trading decisions that predictably paid off. I remember it distinctly because it was right after company-wide training on insider trading with talks of prison time etc before our discounted stock grants. All it did was teach people how to conduct insider trading. The training was considered all that was needed for compliance. Zero enforcement, insider trading is the default. Humans cannot resist.
While I don't know the specifics, product releases tend to have a whole lot less to do with stock movement than the details of financial performance. And during much of the last couple of decades it has been pretty hard for investments in Apple not to pay off.
Product release from a ragged-arse of a company that had no prior dealings with Apple nor any public information about a coming product with Apple? Insider trading. It's a fine line that most can easily convince themselves to cross.
She has access to every and any database as she is the one who pulls the data for auditors, so is privileged to confidential and/or non-public knowledge. And like someone mentioned above, just by proximity, I (potentially) have access to that knowledge.
She would almost certainly have early knowledge of irregularities at her own company but potentially more broadly in the sector because people talk. Trading restrictions don't really cost an employer anything so they often figure that it's easier to get rid of even the possible appearance of impropriety even if it costs some employees/their spouses money.
At the most basic level, I worked for a company that wouldn't let you sell company stock, even as a non-executive, during a window around earnings being reported.
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 made off of material non-public information.
If a congressman is forced to ask someone else to trade for them, they might be careless and you might be able to find evidence via text messages or phone records.
One thing I've always wondered about this is how to handle circumstantial evidence. Let's say you have a relative who may have insider information on a stock. You talk sometimes but not regularly. They call you (as they occasionally do) the day before you trade a stock and it performs favorably within a short time period.
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.
According to one of my finance professors in university, it's somewhat tough to actually get convicted for insider trading, and there are certain circles where everyone does it.
The people who do get convicted are usually those who were being particularly egregious or who pissed someone off enough to rat them out. For example, Martha Stewart got convicted because her assistant (whom she regularly called a "little shit") decided to testify against her.
People respond to incentives. If you make something harder, people will do less of it.
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.
SEC regulations generally apply equally to family members you make financial decisions for. You can still probably get away with it but the SEC has ammo if you get brazen.
Kerry's wife, Theresa Heinz is estimated to have net worth of $750m or more. Is it really a stretch to think that she might be the one who owns the private jet?
Thats not the point at all lol. (Also, why should normal folks have to keep track of how much his wife has?)
The point is repeatedly emphasizing that "personally" he doesn't have a plane meanwhile repeatedly using his wife's plane while being the "Special Presidential Envoy for Climate".
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 unintended effects... Only the very wealthy can afford to be in Congress.
> Congress members don't get paid much and like money.
They're paid $174,000 per year. [1] That's 3–4x the median US salary. I know it's not, like, lucrative, but if they wanted a lucrative salary they should have gotten a different job!
> They are often old with healthcare issues. Their govt health plans are not great.
Fix the government health plan. Or better yet, make it a public health plan available to everyone!
> 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.
There are only 541 of these people (plus aides, etc). The government should have an official building for sitting Congresspeople to live in. Like a dorm, but for electeds!
> They're paid $174,000 per year. [1] That's 3–4x the median US salary. I know it's not, like, lucrative, but if they wanted a lucrative salary they should have gotten a different job!
They could also vote themselves a higher salary, but I guess they realize that would be very unpopular with the general public who, for the most part, get paid far less than politicians. The complaint essentially boils down to spoiled brats whining about wanting to be part of the economic elite. For most of the public, this complaint falls on deaf ears, particularly when it's coming from people who already have a great deal of power and are insulated from the realities of life experienced by most of the people they're ostensibly meant to be representing.
"Boo hoo, I already earn 3-4x more than most people in my state and belong to an elite class of policy makers but I'm so impoverished and oppressed because the billionaires have bigger houses than me :("
That seems like a good argument for raising their salaries. Increasing the candidate pool beyond the independently wealthy is good, but letting them do a little crime is a bad way of increasing the candidate pool.
"We should allow members of Congress to trade stocks using insider information so that poor people can afford to run for Congress" (which costs a million bucks, give or take) is certainly an interesting take.
> We find no evidence of superior investment performance whether we look in aggregate or at Senators specifically accused of informed trading. Over a six-month horizon, stocks bought by House Members underperform on average by 26 basis points, while stocks sold underperform by 11 basis points.
I think there is a delay on stock disclosures, like they only have to disclose purchase/sale once a quarter or something which makes it hard to profitably copy their trading.
> Second, we conduct the first analysis of members’ portfolio holdings, showing that between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund.
> For all trades reported electronically and on paper, the buys and sells have the same pattern; they underperform slightly for the first few months and then outperform the market after 150 days by less than 1 percent, which is not statistically significant. Otherwise, the returns of the buys and sells appear to be relatively random.
> The results show that neither Democrat nor Republican senators are especially skilled at picking stocks to buy.
Honestly a 100% savings rate isn't terribly hard when all your campaign costs are covered, your travel is covered, your office expenses are covered, and lobbyists or donors pick up the tab on a lot of miscellaneous things. Even assuming zero fraud/abuse/illegality, given that you typically already need to be at least moderately successful financially to run for federal office it's not crazy to think that most members of Congress probably already have paid off cars, paid off or close to paid off homes, etc. Not to mention spouses that probably also have very good paying jobs given the connections you're likely to already have by the time you're running.
Pretty small out-of-sample window, but we built a trading strategy on top of congressional trading data and it's done well since we launched it last year.
You can see the backtest performance here, but the holdings and advanced metrics are behind a paywall (apologies in advance): https://www.quiverquant.com/strategies/
As others have pointed out, there is a delay between when the trades are made and when they are disclosed and our strategy is able to act on them.
However, this is somewhat countered by the fact that politicians tend to hold stocks for long periods of time.
There are definitely some examples of politicians trading a stock right before a massive market moving event, but I think they are generally looking at a longer time horizon when they are investing.
Here's where you can search for the source disclosures - only seeing two trades on her periodic transaction reports: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/
The rules on Congressman trading should be coming from their districts and states that they represent. it could possibly hurt the quality of congressmen and senators that run for election if this rule is implemented at a federal level.
How so? One, there are no district-specific rules for members of Congress. But even assuming states are legally able to restrict federal officials' trading, why is it better to have some states regulate it and some states not compared to a consistent federal rule one way or the other? "Good people won't run for Senate if we don't let them trade stocks on the information they get" doesn't really make that much sense to me.
Apparently there was a state rule for the NJ senator that he could not run for president while in senate. They changed it for Cory Booker. So apparently it is possible to add rules for senators and congressman.
On a federal level, There are safeguards we can add and perplexity to trading stock for congressmen. One such rule is the disclosure rule. This makes it a slight pain to invest. A second rule I propose is committee conflict rule, declare stocks that are in conflict with a committee hearing, and offer recusal to the chair each time on a hearing with a potential conflict. A third rule is prohibition on potential stock trades after a committee hearing for 90 days or until hearing is published. And do not disclose details of the hearing with anyone until it is published.
These rules add pains and discouragement to stock trades. But outright bans are not there.
For me, I'm not sure why there is a "Ms. Nancy Pelosi," and a "Nancy Pelosi," that both have trade activity.
(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...)
Wow, Nancy Pelosi is interesting. She entered Congress 36 years ago. If she put $3MM in the S&P index when she joined Congress, and never touched it, it would be worth $108.66MM today. If anything, that's a clear argument she isn't insider trading. I always assumed she was a huge inside trader making a ton of money.
Meanwhile, her husband is a VC, and probably makes a good deal of money for them as well.
I have no idea if she touched it. Her husband makes a lot of money and she makes a good amount as well.
Also, that's the lower bound by what people estimated she had when she entered congress and close to the upper bound of what she would be worth today.
But it's entirely possible that someone in the SF area with a SV husband beat the S&P without resorting to insider trading on public markets. Heck, the house she bought has probably beaten the S&P.
To reiterate, I always assumed she was insider trading. These numbers are making me question that.
My point is rather, if she had invested all her money back then and if she never used any of it she would have a similar amount of money now without insider trading.
Most people don't lump sum in the market like that, it probably ignores the taxes she would have to pay if she took the money out now, and most people use some of the money in the meantime.
I'm just saying if you lived a good lifestyle, the money is already mostly taxed, and you didn't invest everything all-at-once, and you still have the amount of money you would get with lump-sum and never touch S&P, you're doing far far better than the market.
I wish there was a tool that allowed me to follow Congress as if it was an index. Automatically buying and selling what they buy and sell. Right from my Fidelity or something.
NANC and KRUZ ETFs track democrats and republican holdings respectively. A word of caution: there are articles online that have looked at individual senators and most of them unperformed compared to the SP500
On the surface this seems pretty decent game theory wise, particularly if you implement annual or bi-annual trading windows with a delay in trade execution (I.e. a trade must be publicly declared 120 days before it is executed) and if those restrictions stay in place long after their tenure in office to discourage prioritizing short term returns over long term stability.
AFAICT, forcing lawmakers to invest in total market index funds (with only buy/sell and maybe stop-loss; where total market is defined as an index fund tracking every publicly traded stock in proportion to its value) where it is difficult to make short term trades with insider knowledge of major market moving events would align their incentives with both our retirement accounts and improving a major slice of the economy.
One might say law makers would circumvent this regulation by having friends and family make the trades on their behalf, an outcome Id welcome; it’s easier to catch them making illegal trades when they have to coordinate to make it happen.
I think it would also mean a significant portion of your compensation as a lawmaker is a direct result of developing the markets. In some ways, regulation like this looks like performance based compensation.
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.
Fixed asset allocation aligned with ordinary American, and no moving back and forth from cash. (Just cash for modest bill-paying, emergency fund, home, big child-raising expenses like college tuition.)
They're generally incentived to keep all 3 indexes up.
Moving huge sums between index funds and cash can constitute trading on insider information, and/or on conditions that a lawmaker is able to manipulate.
This isn't a reason to not support the current effort. Democracy is an iterative process, not a magic wand that you wave to instantly teleport to a flawless system.
This bill is step one. When (not if) it gets circumvented, that's when the next law addressing that problem can be passed.
> ...iterative process... ...When (not if it gets circumvented), that's when...
If the politicians manage the process correctly, they can forever be passing "reform bills" which sound good...but have enough loopholes so that nothing resembling actual reform ever happens.
Rule of Thumb: If somebody claims they want to build a transportation system, then starts with a square wheel and talks about improving it as the next step - then either [1] they're teaching, and it's only a pedagogical exercise, or [2] they are lying about wanting to build a transportation system.
Inefficient action being taken is still better than absolutely zero action being taken in addressing a problem.
Think, for instance, about how many more people might become aware of / interested in the problem, who were previously unaware or uninterested in insider stock trading by members of congress, should a historic bill be passed to initialize the process of stopping the problem.
This sounds good in principal but is not always true. You have limited resources, including time, public goodwill and attention. If you waste it all on inefficient action you've got nothing left for working on actual solutions.
>> should a historic bill be passed
Passed? They've never brought even a flawed bill like this to a vote, let alone passed one.
Inefficient action is not necessarily better than absolutely no action. Inefficient action is a way for politicians to kick the can down the road so they can still use the issue to buy votes.
That's how you get 40+ years of abortion being legal on a technicality, rather than being properly codified into law. It's how you get "student loan forgiveness" instead of any attempt at fixing the student loan racket. It's how you get a NASA where the overall budget is constantly decreasing with the exception of the super expensive rocket no one wants.
Sure, in the moment, these were nice decisions and helped while they lasted, but overall they're simply suppressing actual solutions to focus on feelgood promises.
People will be more frustrated with no action. That is why politicians (like so many others) do the bare minimum to kick the can down the road some more.
For actions which are not free (and getting any bill through Congress sure as h*ell isn't), one can write a very simple "break even" formula - relating the cost of action A, the efficiency of action A, and the value of the benefits that a 100%-efficient action would provide.
For actions falling short of break-even, it's generally considered wiser to spend the resources on something else.
You can spend money re-roofing your house with cotton candy - because shingles were too expensive, or unavailable, or whatever. Yeah, that does scratch the itchy need to "do something!". But longer-term...
"Raising awareness" is for slacktivists, not legislators. They should propose good well thought-out laws or sit the hell down. Presenting half-baked nonsense to "raise awareness" only shows that they aren't good at their job, or worse, have an ulterior motive.
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?
No one is really counting but graft is probably the highest it's been in 75 years.
The reform laws (like this one) are written to make it's incredibly easy for politicians to personally profit from "campaign contributions" --- among other things.
Example: Trump personally buys copyrighted MAGA hats in bulk from China for $3 each and sells them to his campaign for $35 each. Instant personal profit --- from your "contributions". His campaign sells some, gives some away and trashes any remainder. They don't care, it's your money, not theirs.
If the restrictions are similar to restrictions by the SEC or financial institutions, having more than 10% ownership over a company or control over a trust would also violate those restrictions.
I don't know who said it first, and there are plenty of cartoons of it, but they should have to deck themselves out with the logos of campaign contributors and entities in which they hold shares, like NASCAR cars/drivers.
There are plenty of jobs with rules about this; some of them are quite extensive and can cover spouses. There are rules about it for certain US government employees, for instance. Don't want to be subject to it? Don't take the job; no-one's forcing these people to run for election.
Josh Hawley has a JD from Yale - this isn't proof that he's smart or sane, but an indication that Yale thinks so. Maybe he is incredibly bad, there might be some data points for that.
Interesting, as JH would probably not agree with most of the personal politics of Yale's campus community, but the Law School may have a different culture. I don't know.
imo, even more egregious than this is Josh Hawley's incessant needling, pestering, leading, talking over, and ultimately ignoring every single person he has ever questioned as part of a congressional hearing.
He asks people leading questions, then when they start to give a legit answer he just talks over them in an attempt to make them look like they couldn't answer the question.
Conservatives eat that dumb shit up. drives me insane.
Yeah it's terrible isn't it? Don't fall for the base accusation that it's "them from that side that do it." Did you see Matt Taibbi testifying. Plaskett & Wasserman Schultz showing us what they are?
The point is this is the kind of BS (and you're 100% right, it is awful) that you have to put in the "less important" basket if you want to get anything reformed ever.
Look how easily this was derailed from a wildly popular reform bill that you probably want to people hating on Hawley. You do have to admire Pelosi, she and the hundreds like her in power really do have us and get our support despite what we /know/ they are very deftly. How is Feinstein doing nowadays?
I think a complete ban on owning individual stocks would be a bit overkill. Perhaps, controversially, I believe members of the government should own some stock - I want them personally invested in the economic wellbeing of the country. I also don't want to limit the candidate pool artificially to just professional politicians.
But the fix here seems pretty easy. If you are an executive at a publicly traded corporation, you have to disclose any changes in your position of that stock months in advance. Just make politicians follow the same process for the entire stock market.
The other option is complete real-time transparency. Eliminate the alpha on congressional trades. A de-anonymized book view of all congressional orders and trades.
I think it would make sense to only allow congresspersons to own "total market" index funds like VTSAX; wouldn't that more or less align their interest with the general American public?
No way. If they remove normal ways for people in Congress to make money, then normal people won't run for Congress. More MTGs will get in, but smart people who could make >10x more will say no.
IMHO this ban will never pass. The only law all these people are always sure to vote for is the one increasing their salary and benefits.
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.
As soon as it is implemented, there goes any shred of sanity in our real estate laws. Something has to be done, but no matter what, it is going to be a bumpy ride.
This seems super overbroad? "Executive branch employees" is basically everyone who works for the federal government, which is 2.1 million civilians and another 1.3 million active-duty military. Most of these people are, like, border patrol agents or Social Security clerks or nurses at Veterans Affairs hospitals or prison guards, and are just middle-class workers who won't have access to insider information anyway.
New Proposal Bans Plumbers from Houses of Congress.
Read: Under new proposal Mario Bros must trade in plungers for portfolios. Minority Leader Bowser had this to say: "It's important for the koopas of our nation to know their leaders are working for them, and not taking all the mushrooms and star powers for themselves."
Have you seen how much wealth a lot of congress have gained over their careers. There is no way someone can look at those numbers and come to the conclusion that they did become multi millionaires without inside information.
It should be banned out right or every position they take is public knowledge within 1 trading day or less.
"Representative Nancy Pelosi has made up to $12.5M off of Microsoft stock so far this year. This is almost 100 times her salary as a member of Congress. "
> every position they _plan_ to take is public knowledge 24 hours in advance.
If you know in advance what position someone is going to take, then, logically they have already taken the position (otherwise, how would you know with certainty what position they're going to take?.
This isn't mere wordplay; the practical consequence is that even if you knew in advance how they would vote on a particular decision (maybe you're definition of "position they plan to take"), you should assume they have also already made other steps to take advantage of that public knowledge. If my reasoning is correct, then I don't know that your proposal would make too much of a dent in the (safe to assume) "insider trading" that's happening.
So I think a better policy would be to be ban trading altogether for these folks, because that would also disincentivize people from pursuing these careers for extreme profit.
The above comments are talking about positions in stocks, not positions on issues.
In finance a position is having ownership of something. For example right now I do not own any Apple stock so it might be said I do not have a position in Apple. If I were to buy Apple stock that would be taking a position.
What then is being suggested above is that Congress members and Executive members have to make public trades they are going to do 24 hours before making those trades.
Really if they simply became subject to the same rules as everyone else that has sensitive insider information, the problem would be solved. Those who work in the investment industry are subject to strict rules.
I'm certainly not advocating for our ruling class but also consider that the cost to run and win a senate seat is something like $15M and a house seat over $2M (and that was data from a few years ago and only took averages, not the top races which were dramatically higher).
And they are full time jobs that require an enormous amount of personal ambition (which is usually tied to wealth) so one can argue even being in congress prices out anyone NOT a "multi-millionaire".
No, not really. As far as "it would be nice" for politics to be free market of ideas, having to deal with scale is simply an inherent part of the world we live in.
Like What system would You propose where campaigning funds don't matter? What, public fund where every candidate gets a fair share and they are prohibited to, for example, printing flyers on their own?
In the land of free, nonetheless?
Ofcourse it costs a lot to campaign for high positions in country as big as the US.
Actually, in any country.
Well the problem is a) size of congress hasn't kept up with growth of country, and b) there are a lot more wealthy people.
So basic supply and demand means more competitive seats, more expensive races, more pricing out anyone attached to the reality of living an average citizens life in this country.
I don't have an alternative proposal at the moment but step 1 is identifying the issue.
There's definitely alternatives. Just as an example - Require every campaign to fund all expenses and advertising from a single campaign account, and limit funding sources to individual people with a personal contribution limit per candidate. Heck, limit the actual campaign period to the 3-4 months before the election while we're at it.
No more super bowl campaign ads? That sounds like a great system to me.
But that can by bypassed super easily.
Sure, you might not get adds of type "vote X" anymore. But then I will just sponsor a "documentary" about all the ways that Y screwed the country over.
Or even more directly, why X KS a great politician.
As for single account, again: will your forbid other "individuals" to make any political contributions that might or might not influence standings of a given candidate? Verry quickly you start playing cat and mouse game, and at the same time, heavily infringing on freedom of expression
Inside trading is legal for them so isn't really a bad word. I see no reason why they can't trade stocks as long as they are required to publicly disclose their trades a week before the purchase is made, not after.
In practice, how would this work? A requirement that they only use index funds? But then wouldn't that bias them to support the companies that are the major movers in that index? Indexes are often heavily weighted to a small subset after all.
TBH, it seems like an idea that sounds good on the surface but has practical issues in implementation that would make it irrelevant
This is a ridiculous take. Imperfect is better than bad. Right now you have the Speaker of the House's husband buying $5million worth of Alphabet call options. That's not a good system.
You can put $X into the trust, but you never know which companies that money is invested in. When you ask for $Y to be paid out, the manager of the fund sells what they see fit to fulfill the request without the client's involvement/input
That's probably the most appropriate solution in at least some cases. Once you get to a certain level of government you may have at least some influence on interest rate changes or otherwise have early knowledge of events that can move the market as a whole.
The fact is that there are a lot of jobs that, at a minimum, place a lot of restrictions on the purchases and sale of stock of individual companies. (Many journalists and analysts for example.)
Does this also work for interests in privately held companies, including the ones that said congress person may have had before being elected? Or that they may start while in office?
Or are we saying that a person in congress is not allowed to start a business?
More reasonable would be a ban on trading, if not ownership. But then again, lawmakers would just advocate positions in favour of their static portfolio.
It does seem better than the status quo of ‘extremely lucky’ returns though.
Legislators are already under the imperative to backstop public equity markets (and hence all the biggest companies) because the most active voters also have a significant amount of their wealth in the public equity markets.
And also all the state and local governments are heavily depending on equities to deliver major gains to fulfill their deferred compensation for government employees (otherwise they have to increase taxes to make up for lack of any performance), so the more state and local tax you pay or are able to pay, the more invested you are in backstopping the markets also.
Honestly, congress salaries (not considering insider trading!!!) are really low. They're lower than many software dev salaries, and they generally have to have two homes (someplace to sleep in DC at least + their home in their district).
I think if we raised salaries your sentiment could work, but good luck with that.
This is a problem in a countries like Canada, where the old "we need to attract the BEST talent for [government|not-for-profit|etc]" argument makes politics the best way to get an incredibly lucrative job when you don't have the skills to do it any other way. Compared to the US where the formula is typically 1. get rich 2. buy power
How about a public service that DOESN'T attract people who's primary directive is get ridiculously wealthy?
What amount of money do you think you'd have to pay them in order for them to say "Yeah, that's enough. I'm not going to use my position to my advantage."?
But if they're making say ~2M/yr then there's very little reason to go lenient on a company so that they'll give you a retirement job there afterwards. It also means that if somebody wants to bribe you then the bribe has to be rather large as you're both risking that salary and you also certainly don't need that bribe.
(Although I do also think the government should stop footing the bill for a lot of the stuff the congress critters do and if you want to spend 1/2 your presidency golfing that comes at your own expense).
The salaries of government people has filter down affects though as federal employees cannot make more than the vice president (~261,400).
Well, I dunno, but we should expect them to make executive-level pay, IMO. "The average Chief Financial Officer salary in the United States is $429,392 as of June 26, 2023" seems fair.
For the record this is basically the system for finance employees. You can only freely trade open-ended index funds. You can buy individual securities but only after a compliance review and with restrictions against short-term/swing trading.
If we believe this to be effective for individuals on Wall Street I'm sure it's a good start for Congress.
It is when it comes at the expense of small business and new competitors, which are less likely to be in those indexes.
Want to compete with legacy auto? Want to compete with Google? Hmm, lets think of all the new regulations that you might have to meet. There are perverse incentives even in that system.
Right.. They make $174k/year (except the few leadership roles) which was last increased in 2009 -- so roughly $130k equivalent based on the BLS inflation calculator..
To receive a congressional pension, you need 5 years of service (to be elected to 3 terms), the pension can't exceed 80% of your salary, and is based on the number of years of service.. There are ~280 prior members of congress collecting FERS pensions and the average collected was $41k/year in 2016.
I say let them trade. But they should have to report all their trades 5 business days in advance. So they can trade however they want, but any member of the public can front run them.
The thing is, even with insider trading, lawmakers underperform the market. The few that trade well either have a background in finance or a spouse who is in finance, like most other people who outperform the market. The value of this insider trading must be very overstated. DOD stocks like LMT make poor investments compared to just buying the index anyhow.
I couldn't get around this paywall, but the coverage on Fox describes what was in the WSJ report:
> Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., are set to introduce the legislation in the Senate. It would prohibit those affected from owning stocks in individual companies, even through a blind trust, the Wall. Street Journal reported Wednesday.
"No individual stocks, period" seems like a fairly reasonable restriction.
The problem with this is that now you will have their spouses or children own the stock and not have similar reporting requirements. I don’t believe this ban will accomplish much.
I just don't understand how in my lifetime it went from Jimmy Carter having to sell his family's farm, to it being okay for Donald Trump to charge the Secret Service for room and board.
Have you considered that the meme about Pelosi being "the best trader in history" might be just a complete lie? I don't even disagree with the proposals to restrict trading in congress but it's kind of wild how credulously everyone is repeating these things..
I feel like there is very likely some precedents for this (or at least some close examples) that other countries have implemented similar to this, I wonder if any of these folks have looked into it. Wish US elected officials would look at how ideas fared in other places more often. "Pull their heads out of their asses" would be the less cordial phrasing there.
I have to hold an ETF for 1 month before I can sell it--not that I should be swing trading ETFs, but still. It's very frustrating at times, especially when I'm relegated to using just her bank's trading platform, too.