Insider Trading

[Jolie Rouge]

Congress Quietly Repeals Congressional Insider Trading Ban
By Sakib Ahmed on April 15th, 2013

While Congress might be stuck in a deadlock on just about every issue imaginable, there’s one piece of legislation that both Democrats and Republicans hate unanimously: the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a law passed last year designed to prevent insider trading among lawmakers and government officials by requiring them to post disclosures of their financial transactions online.


Both parties and both houses of Congress hated the disclosure portion of the law so much that it was repealed on Friday without debate—the measure was sent to the president by unanimous consent. The ordeal took about 10 seconds in the Senate and 14 seconds in the House, according to official records.
The STOCK Act would have required members of Congress, their aides, and other federal employees making more than $119,554 a year to disclose their financial dealings in an online database. It was supposed to prevent government officials from using insider knowledge about policy-making to profit from stock trades and other investments.

Upon the signing of the bill into law last year (pictured above), President Barack Obama said, “The idea that everybody plays by the same rules is one of our most cherished American values. It’s the notion that the powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else, and if we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and to our most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials—especially at a time when there is a deficit of trust between this city and the rest of the country.” The White House has not said whether the president will sign the repeal.

Despite the repeal, government officials will still have to file disclosures of securities trades over $1,000 within 45 days, but they no longer have to file them in a searchable database that was to be easily accessible to the public.

Congress and the President had delayed the online posting portion of the act from going into effect 3 times already, but the ultimate repeal came after the National Academy of Public Administration, a nonprofit group, found that publishing the information would create an “unwarranted risk to national security and law enforcement, as well as threaten agency missions, individual safety and privacy,” in a report delivered last month. The group suggested that the online posting requirements should be suspended indefinitely.

Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group advocating for government transparency, said that the repeal “sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.”

Rosenberg raises an interesting point: Since these financial disclosures are still considered public information, how does not posting them on the Internet mitigate their potential risks to national security? How does obfuscating information about the financial activities of government officials help anyone, other than those officials? Does the potential danger come from foreign terrorists knowing this information or from those citizens who just to know if their government officials are behaving responsibly?

UPDATE: White House spokesperson Jay Carney announced that Obama has signed the repeal of the internet disclosure portion of the STOCK Act.

http://nyulocal.com/national/2013/04...#ixzz2QgjkabIl

comments

Haven’t other people GONE TO JAIL FOR THIS?????? You want to know why people DESPISE this Congress and have completely lost faith in their government? This is one reason why. There are, of course, MANY others. But let’s just start with this one… Congress should make no laws… that EXEMPT them.

Let every other “inside traders” out of jail immediately and let them run for Congress, where is obviously where they made their big mistake.

...

Our Congress has let itself become corrupted to the point where they should just be thrown out and let the people elect all new members. The corruption is viral, thus making retention of all but a few impossible. Somehow someone needs top bring some laws into this sphere, with enforceability of jail sentences and monetary fines to a degree which would make it highly undesirable to be associated with any lobby groups of any kind.

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These are the official documents that list all the parts of the STOCK bill that were modified by Congress last week:

from the Senate: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-20...t1-PgS2583.pdf

from the House: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-20...-PgH1979-3.pdf


•To clarify: The repeal of the disclosure portion of the STOCK Act exempts 28,000 government aides and federal employees (all of whom already earn more than $119,554(!) per year I might add, look here: http://www.ethics.senate.gov/public/...7-a48bdfe65dc7) from posting their financial transactions worth more than $1,000 on the internet.

The STOCK Act would not have required disclosure from employees who make less than that amount (See slide 5 from here: http://www.ethics.senate.gov/public/...1-bd8fe8221b3d)

Also worth checking out is this NPR article published today on how it this all happened and how most members of Congress weren’t really aware of the legislation: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolit...er-trading-law

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[Jolie Rouge]

When should trading on inside info stay hidden?
Posted by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism) at 1:28 pm - April 15, 2013.


Answer: When you’re a federal employee: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...r-trading-law/

The U.S. House on Friday eliminated a key requirement of the insider trading law for most federal employees [ed: the 2012 STOCK Act], passing legislation exempting these workers, including congressional staff, from a rule scheduled to take effect next week that mandated online posting of financial transactions…

One advocacy group pushing for greater government transparency blasted the move, saying it “guts” the law…

To be precise: Federal employees would still have to report trades. But mainly to Big Brother. Not in a form that would let the proverbial Army of Davids ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Army_of_Davids online citizen-journalists) catch inside trades.

But hey, at least we know now what the ‘gun control’ drama is about:

The House vote followed similar action by the Senate Thursday. The votes were done with little notice and came at a time when most people were paying attention to the Senate’s work on high profile issues like guns and immigration.

Hat tip, Zero Hedge. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...ng-requirement

UPDATE: The IRS is now watching your transactions; even your eBay auctions and Facebook updates. http://money.msn.com/credit-rating/i...ital-footprint

Here’s the thing. As America has devolved into a social-fascist state these last several decades, we have increasingly developed a presumption that government employers can spy on monitor the taxpayers. But, taxpayers monitoring the government employees? Perish the thought! Repeal it by a unanimous vote of Congress http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/1...-for-congress/ with Obama signing the repeal swiftly! That’s the opposite of what the American Revolution was fought for.

http://www.gaypatriot.net/2013/04/15...g-stay-hidden/