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 Location : Ether-Sphere
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Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Congress Refuses to Outlaw Insider Trading For Lawmakers -- That's right. Members of Congress are currently allowed to profit on insider trading!  Fri May 07, 2010 7:37 am | |
| Even a cynic can find Washington's hypocrisy shocking at times. The Wall Street Journal reports today a
House bill that would force lawmakers to make greater disclosures on
financial transactions and disallow them from trading on nonpublic
information is going nowhere fast.
That's right. Members of
Congress are currently allowed to profit on insider trading!
The
bill, which has been languishing in the House for four years, would
require elected officials "to make their financial transactions public
within 90 days of a purchase or sale" and "prohibit lawmakers from
trading in financial markets based on nonpublic information they learn
on the job," the WSJ reports.
It seems they're above the
transparency they've been calling for on Wall Street.
This comes a
day after the same newspaper reported several lawmakers profited by betting against
the housing and stock market in 2008. And some did it using
derivatives they've recently been railing against.
As our
colleague Henry Blodget wrote Tuesday, "If you're
going to complain about how awful short-selling is and how evil...
===============
Congressional Hypocrites Were Betting Against Stocks As
Country Collapsed
Provided by The Business
Inisder, May 4, 2010:Remember all that scorn in Congress
about evil shortsellers betting against America and bringing the country
down?
Well, it turns out Congress-people did it, too. And they used
derivatives to do it, which they now say they abhor.
(For the record, we have no problem with shortselling or
derivatives, and we find the routine scapegoating of both after market
crashes ludicrous. But if you're going to complain about how awful
shortselling is and how evil and venal people are for doing it, you
should probably abstain from the practice yourself.
And, yes, most of the folks here were just betting against stocks,
not actually selling stocks short. But it's the same idea. To use
their own tortured, populist logic, they were betting against the
country and their 401k-holding constituents!)
Jason
Zweig, Tom McGinty, and Brody Mullins in the WSJ:
Some members of Congress made risky bets
with their own money that U.S. stocks or bonds would fall during the
financial crisis, a Wall Street Journal analysis of congressional
disclosures shows.
Senators have criticized Goldman
Sachs Group
Inc. for profiting from the housing collapse. And Congress is
considering legislation to curb Wall Street risk-taking, including the
use of financial instruments known as derivatives and of leverage, or
methods that amplify returns.
According to The Journal's analysis of
congressional disclosures, investment accounts of 13 members of
Congress or their spouses show bearish bets made in 2008 via
exchange-traded funds—portfolios that trade like stocks and mirror an
index. These funds were leveraged; they used derivatives and other
techniques to magnify the daily moves of the index they track.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/congressional-hypocrites-were-betting-against-stocks-as-country-collapsed-477789.html?tickers=gs,xlf,spy,^dji,^gspc,^ixic,qqqq
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/congress-refuses-to-outlaw-insider-trading-for-lawmakers-478701.html?tickers=^dji,^gspc,^ixic,brk-a,brk-b,gs,xlf&sec=topStories&pos=9&asset=&ccode |
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