From Newsweek:
One of the more dramatic episodes in the book recounts the trading activity of Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus, of Alabama, who, as the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, was privy to sensitive high-level meetings during the 2008 financial crisis and proceeded to make a series of profitable stock-option trades.
Bachus was known in the House as a guy who liked to play the market, and in fact he was pretty good at it; one year, he reported a capital gain in excess of $150,000 from his trading activities. More striking is that Bachus boldly carried forth his trading in the teeth of the impending financial collapse, the nightmarish dimensions of which he had learned about first-hand in confidential briefings from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. On Sept. 19, 2008, after attending two such briefings, Bachus bought options in an index fund (ProShares UltraShort QQQ) that effectively amounted to a bet that the market would fall. That is indeed what happened, and, on Sept. 23, Bachus sold his “short” options, purchased for $7,846, for more than $13,000–nearly doubling his investment in four days.
Around the time Congress and the Bush administration worked out a TARP bailout, Bachus made another options buy and again nearly doubled his money. The House turned down the TARP proposal, and Bachus’s own Financial Services Committee remained clued in to revisions of what became the final TARP package. In the earlier closed-door briefings, Bernanke had warned the congressional members that a “meltdown in the global financial system” was imminent and that it would spill over into the broader economy if something wasn’t done. With TARP completed, Bachus seemed confident in its effect, now buying options that effectively bet that the market would rise–to mixed results.
Bachus was hardly the only member of Congress trading as the government was coming to grips with the financial crisis. After the first briefing from Bernanke and Paulson, brokers for Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, of Virginia, and his wife sold their shares in 90 companies, dodging the losses that others who stayed in the market would soon face. Republican Rep. Shelley Capito, of West Virginia, sold between $100,000 and $250,000 of Citigroup stock the day after the first meeting, recording capital gains on Citigroup transactions in that rocky period.
When Schweizer began his project, he consulted a former securities regulator, who happened to have an office down the hall from his in Florida. The adviser told him that investigators always look for two things in insider-trading cases: whether individuals had access to material information and whether they engaged in unusual trading. There is probably no group of people on earth with greater access to inside information than members of Congress; K Street lobbying firms get rich fees from hedge funds for ferreting out intelligence (such as whether some pending legislation has the votes to pass) that any member of the Senate or House routinely obtains in the cloak room.
But there have been no insider-trading cases brought against members of Congress, nor will there likely be. This is partly because, though insider-trading law is not settled, case law usually requires that an offending insider bear fiduciary responsibility at the company involved. But Congress’s relative immunity also owes to the fact that, in this regard, as in many others, Congress lives by its own rules. Schweizer notes that the Senate’s ethics manual devotes an entire chapter to the proper use of the mail and of Senate stationery, but is silent on the subject of insider trading. Ditto the rules of the House, which state that a member’s recusal from a vote affecting his or her stock portfolio “might be denying a voice” in the process. Neither the executive nor judicial branches allow such laxity.
Read more here.
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