Posted on 02/11/2022 5:46:18 AM PST by Kaslin
It's hard to find a national issue with bipartisan 75% support (and only 5% opposition). Those are the numbers of Americans who want to restrict congressional members from trading stock. It's not surprising that Congress still hasn't acted; a lot of members want to keep making money stock trading while in office. A competent congressional leadership would push this issue, but it's not clear we have that today.
There is a growing sentiment in America that those in power are playing by a different set of rules. Politicians flouting their own COVID-19 restrictions have exacerbated this long-running trend.
The Pew Research Center has been measuring trust in government for 70 years. During that period, trust peaked at 77% in 1964 under President Lyndon Johnson. Besides a couple blips during the first Iraq War and right after 9/11, trust in government has been on a continual decline ever since. Today? Only 24% trust the federal government.
Try to think of something more corrosive to a country than its people losing faith in the inherent fairness of the system. Once trust is gone, people stop believing anything from official sources. People are liable to adopt all sorts of wild conspiracy theories. Sound familiar?
So why are those in power doing so little to build back trust? Nothing points out the complete breakdown in American politics more than the utter lack of any effort from politicians to restore lost trust. In Washington, there's a lot of bemoaning the state of play in America today, yet there's been no real effort to fix the key trust issue. Partly as a result, according to Gallup, only 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. The president's ratings are not much higher.
A majority of Americans feel that those they send to Washington are in it for themselves, a conclusion that is not without factual grounding. The days of citizen legislators serving their community and then returning home are long gone. Of the retiring members of Congress going to the private sector, nearly two-thirds now go to work for lobbying firms, consulting firms, trade groups or business groups that influence federal government activities. Corporate influence is now a full-blown business sector. Congress is just a steppingstone to the top of this multimillion-dollar business line. People are onto it.
The revolving door in Congress is just part of the problem. In recent years, there have been an accelerating number of reports of national leaders enriching themselves with potential insider stock trading. Members of the Federal Reserve have the ability to move the financial markets more than perhaps any other government officials. The vice chair of the Fed recently resigned over a stock trading scandal. Many other Fed officials are embroiled in the same. An investigation by The Wall Street Journal identified 131 federal judges who traded in stocks of companies before them in the courtroom. Finally, Business Insider recently completed an investigation that found 55 members of Congress violating a federal law designed to stop insider stock trading in Congress. Members on both sides of the aisle are currently embroiled in stock trading controversies.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose husband makes millions trading stocks, is on record that members of Congress should be able to trade individual stocks. She defends her position based on the proposition that "we are a free market economy" and members of Congress should be able to participate in that.
Yes, you got that right. Pelosi is in favor of government regulation of virtually every aspect of American life. Yet she and her husband have made millions on trades while she has been in a position of leadership. So when it comes to trading stocks, she's suddenly some sort of libertarian. She thinks people will buy this. I disagree.
Due to the Democrats' mishandling of the pandemic, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and resident Joe Biden's inability to rebut the radicals in his own party, Republicans have the opportunity to take back both the House and the Senate in 2022. Engaging the American people on the crucial issue of public trust could put them over the top. To date, Republicans have chosen not to take this easy win.
The win is easy because, unlike many national issues, the solution is easy. The American people have a right to expect those in positions of public trust and responsibility to live up to a high standard. Members of Congress have a lot of power. They have enough power to move financial markets and to affect the prospects of individual companies. It is not too much to ask them to refrain from profiting from this power. We do this already with executive branch officials who must comply with a federal criminal conflicts of interest law (passed by Congress ironically). Senior members of government must place their investments in a blind trust or hold diversified mutual funds. It's that simple. If they don't, they face potential criminal liability for participating in any debate that could affect their investment holdings.
There are numerous bills supported by members of both parties that would place similar restrictions on stock holdings by members of Congress. There is a legitimate argument that we do not want to place restrictions that are so strict they would disincentivize competent people from serving. Lord knows we need all the competent people we can get in Washington. But requiring investments to be placed in a blind trust or in a diversified mutual fund is not overly restrictive. Members could still benefit from gains in the U.S. economy, but their constituents would know that their decisions are not designed to pad personal stock portfolios.
For some reason, the Republican leaders have not yet leveraged this issue as a key way to distinguish themselves for the coming election cycle. Fighting to rebuild trust is the right thing to do, and it's a huge win politically. Pelosi has given them a gift. Republicans should take it
What actually eliminate democratic corruption?
Day trading is the reason politicians get up in the morning.
Those f*ckers are brazen. What Pelosi said is what they are all thinking. Heck, that is what many of them went to Congress for.
P
What’s a crooked lawyer to do to earn a decent living?
You might as well ask them to stop taking bribes, or renting apartments for their girlfriends.
Solution is to force Congresscritters to sell all stock interests (active or blind trusts) upon election to office, and prevent them from engaging in the stock market in any way while in office.
Since almost anyone associated with the investment industry has to get pre-clearance from their company’s compliance officer before making personal trades, it doesn’t seem to be much of a burden to ask elected representatives and even career regulatory employees to do the same.
Puh-leaase.
Rich people don’t day trade. They call their broker and tell them to make moves.
I’m not even rich yet and that’s what I do. I have a guy who owns an Edward Jones office and I just email or call him and tell him what I want done.
Day trading is when you personally perform the buys and sells and you sit in front of your computer all day long, watching what the market is doing, listening to the news, reading financial reports. None of those people on the hill have anything near the discipline to do that. What they do have is inside information on what is going on that they can leverage into big gains by calling their brokers and executing trades and purchases.
If you want a behavior to be curbed, you need to call it the right thing. Suddenly we’re going to have laws to limit day trading when that’s not what the issue is at all.
This is all done in "the free market." It isn't rocket science, the technology is there, the monitoring capability isn't hard, and this is considered best practice.
And then they wonder why we don't "trust the science" when it comes from their filthy mouths.
Hell theyre not trading anything. They’re cashing in off bribes in the form of insider trading. Something that would put any of us in prison. But laws are only for the chumps (us), not them.
If you stop them, they’ll just have to rely more on bribes from lobbyists and the Chinese.
Unfortunately, we elect stupid, corrupt, disloyal people to Congress.
What’s the point in asking?
You know what the answer will be - a giant “FU, peasant!”
Yes, they have different rules for themselves, and THEY MAKE those rules, hypocrites that they are!
Ask how congresspersons become rich.
There needs to be a mechanism to introduce noise into the timing of market orders. I am thinking of a “magic box” that delays each order by a random amount of time in the range of a few seconds. This would screw up all the high speed trading that goes on. There is something wrong when traders co-locate their servers with the exchange because the speed of light screws up their trading algorithm.
Congressional day trading is akin to having a copy of tomorrows newspaper today.
They don’t day trade. They’re inside traders.
If Congress is stopped from trading stocks they will all become artists like Hunter Biden and sell their works for ridiculously inflated prices.
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