{"id":185135,"date":"2011-10-03T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/10\/03\/not-enough-bullets-54\/"},"modified":"2011-10-03T16:30:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T21:30:00","slug":"not-enough-bullets-54","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/10\/03\/not-enough-bullets-54\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Enough Bullets\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The SEC has ruled that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/43471561\/Congressional_Trading_on_Advance_Info_Not_Illegal_SEC\">Congressmen, their staffers, and executive branch members are free to commit insider trading with impunity<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>When you buy and sell stocks based on secrets you learned at the office, it could be insider trading.<\/p>\n<p>But when a United States Senator does it, it&#8217;s probably perfectly legal.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s because the SEC has largely determined that trading stocks based on advance knowledge of action in Congress is not insider trading.<\/p>\n<p>If anything, it&#8217;s &#8220;outsider&#8221; trading \u2014 buying and selling shares based on knowledge of an outside force that&#8217;s about to hit a company&#8217;s share value.<\/p>\n<p>Think of it like a trader who sees a satellite image of a hurricane bearing down on an oil rig \u2014 and shorts the oil company\u2019s stock in expectation of the damage.<\/p>\n<p>Except in the case of Capitol Hill, the members of Congress can be both the trader and the hurricane \u2014 buying and selling shares in expectation of the effect that their own action has on the company\u2019s stock price.<\/p>\n<p>Some critics say that&#8217;s probably going on a lot on Capitol Hill \u2014 although they don&#8217;t have any direct proof.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s really quite outrageous,\u201d said Craig Holman, the legislative representative for Public Citizen. \u201cIf you just take a look at the statistics, members of Congress are either geniuses when it comes to stock trading or they are in fact trading off of some of this insider information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A pair of recent academic studies found that House members beat the market in their personal stock trading by about 6 percent, and Senators beat the market by about 10 percent. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Just when you thought that Washington could not get any more corrupt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The SEC has ruled that Congressmen, their staffers, and executive branch members are free to commit insider trading with impunity: When you buy and sell stocks based on secrets you learned at the office, it could be insider trading. But when a United States Senator does it, it&#8217;s probably perfectly legal. That&#8217;s because the SEC &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,970,969,1004,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-corruption","category-evil","category-finance","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185135"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}