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Right... Government is the epitome of "ethical"....


Insider Trading Rules Don't Apply To Congress


[O]ne thing you can do as a member is study pending legislation and regulatory changes, call up your broker and instruct him to trade on that nonpublic information. Do this as often as you want; you will suffer no penalty. There is no limit to how much money you can earn on insider trading in the House or Senate. Lawmakers and their staffers are specifically exempted.

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Last week a study of some 16,000 stock transactions carried out by House members was published in the journal Business and Politics. This detailed analysis showed that the investment portfolios of House members beat the market by about six points a year. (Democrats did especially well, outperforming by some nine points a year, while Republicans topped the average investor by only two percent annually.) Senators apparently do even better: “their portfolios show some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time, significantly outperforming even hedge fund managers,” noted the journal, citing a previously published study.

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Doesn’t that give you a cozy feeling, knowing that nonpublic securities info is helping make your friendly local politician more secure as he daydreams new ways to prevent, limit, or appropriate for his own reelection purposes – sorry, the needs of the Republic!– your financial success?


It’s not an accident that Congressionalites are expressly exempt from insider-trading laws. The reasoning is that, were the situation otherwise, “it might tend to “insulate a legislator from the personal and economic interests that his/her constituency, or society in general, has in governmental decisions and policy,” says the House ethics manual.

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In what must be treated as more of a practical joke than a serious effort at legislation, every so often a group of lawmakers typically numbering in the high single digits proposes that Congress be subjected to the same insider-trading laws as you or me. Said proposal is always swiftly ignored — it has yet to reach the House floor and hasn’t even been bandied in the Senate. Then everyone goes out to their Spartan lunches of baloney and Cheez Curls, comfortable in the knowledge that they have improved on the Golden Rule: He who makes the rules pockets the gold.


I recommend reading the entire Forbes article, those are just the highlights.


It's a good thing all those uber-ethical politicians are keeping us safe from those evil corporations! :rolleyes:


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