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Question:



Are Congressman Exempt From Insider Trading Regulation/Laws?

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Yes.  Flat out, they are exempt.
 

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Sort of. Nothing prevents them from acting on information gained as a result of congressional position. I think that if they did the same thing Martha Stewart did, they would be liable to the same charges.

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No they are not.

Most people in that position have a money manager, and their money  in a blind trust and don't even know what they own in the portfolio.

.........Representative Spencer Bachus, now chair of the House Financial Services Committee, for an obvious case of using inside knowledge on the stock market. Bachus was in a closed-door meeting in 2008 with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke—this is the infamous meeting where the duo told Congressional leaders there could be a second Great Depression.

The next day, September 19, Congressman Bachus bought contract options on Proshares Ultra-Short QQQ, an index fund that seeks results that are 200% of the inverse of the Nasdaq 100 index. In other words, he was shorting the market. It was an inexpensive way to bet that the market would fall. He bought options for $7,846 on a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at 8,604. A few days later, on September 23, after the market had indeed fallen, he sold the options for over $13,000 and nearly doubled his money.

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That is what they do to show a plausible deny-ability when they make $2M off of a stock because they bought it before anyone knew that company was going to get $600M in government loans.

Trust us. It happens and as noted earlier in this thread 60 Minutes recently exposed it.

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Does any one remember when Hilary Clinton made 100,000 from a 1000 investment in commodities when her shit wad husband was president?  True story.

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They are Congressmen and women, what do you think, that they would write laws that included THEM?

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Question:

Are Congressman Exempt From Insider Trading Regulation/Laws?

The Ethos of 'Getting Yours'

Americans know, in their bones, that something terrible is happening. Maybe you can't articulate it. Maybe you don't have the statistics to understand exactly what's going on. But my bet is, you think about it a lot.

For me, a poignant moment of recognition came this month.

Bloomberg news published an article based on confidential sources about how Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and the Republican U.S. Treasury secretary during the financial crisis, held a secret meeting with the top 20 hedge-fund managers in New York City in late July 2008. This was about two weeks after he testified to Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "well-capitalized."

I knew for a fact that what Paulson told Congress wasn't true. I wrote my entire June 2008 newsletter detailing exactly why Fannie and Freddie certainly had billions in losses that they had not yet revealed to investors – $500 billion in losses, at least. There was no question in my mind, both companies were insolvent – "zeros," as I explained.

And yet, in front of Congress, the U.S. Treasury secretary was saying exactly the opposite. Either I was a liar... or he was.

Then... only a few days later... what did Paulson tell those hedge-fund managers?

He told them the same thing I had written in my newsletter. He told them the opposite of what he'd said publicly to Congress. He told these billionaire investors that Fannie and Freddie were a disaster... They would require an enormous, multibillion-dollar bailout... The U.S. government would have to take them over... And their shareholders would be completely wiped out.

Here you had a high-government official, explicitly lying to Congress (and by extension, the general public), while giving the real facts to a group of people who represented the financial interests of the world's wealthiest folks. The story didn't come to the public's attention for two years.

This was the most outrageous example of graft and corruption I have ever seen. Certainly it involves more billions of dollars in misappropriated value than any other similar story I can recall. These managers had the risk-free ability to make tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions, by using derivatives to capitalize on what they knew was the imminent collapse of the world's largest mortgage bank. Who picked up the tab? You know perfectly well. It was you and me, the taxpayers.

(One of the investment managers present at this meeting was Steve Rattner, who by that point was already deeply involved in another bit of graft, his efforts to bribe New York state pension-fund managers for large investments into his hedge fund, from which he earned perhaps as much as $100 million. He later settled the charges for a mere $10 million shortly after Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York.)

The Bloomberg story... about a crooked Treasury secretary handing a room full of crooked billionaires inside information worth billions of dollars... hardly caused a ripple. As far as I know, no actions are being planned against Henry Paulson or any of the hedge-fund managers involved. No other major media outlet picked up the story. I saw nothing about it from the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What does that say about our country when even the most egregious kind of corruption – involving hundreds of billions of dollars – is simply ignored?