edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
They are elected officials that are supposed to be working in our best interests, or at least the interest of their supporters.
Are they making decisions in our best interests or what makes their pocket book fatter? Poisons the whole system.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to force the framing. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
If the market wants to incentivize pumping and dumping the American economy by releasing a stream of fake news from the US President, that's bad.
We should tilt the arbitrary rules away from the bad things and towards the good things.
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
Unless the helicopter is dropping a bomb on a school on the way there (or back) I am not sure that the comparison is fair.
I think this sums it up.
Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
Compare to the security on the O.G. MS-DOS PC, where every file was considered perfectly fine. Yeah, we had viruses and that meant untold bloat with anti-Virus shame-wear.
The UNIX way was always better, however, let's move along to ChromeOS. Here every file was considered harmful unless proven otherwise.
The US economy is getting gamified with prediction markets, where you can bet on anything, for example, how many out of Context Capital Letters that the orange Man uses in his social Media posts at 4 a.m.
My feeling is that, amongst this expansion in 'prediction markets', some people don't like it how mere citizens can play too. It is different if you are in Congress, you have got to make your money somehow, but having mere citizens playing the game? Get outta here!
The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going. We need a world at peace, where the 'monopoly board' isn't tossed into the air all the time. Then most of these problems would go away, albeit not all of them, as in the 'acts of god' such as earthquakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_of_Jeffrey_Epstein...
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-rothschild-dynasty-s...
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/epstein-files-show-...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/02/05/j...
That is not an example of insider trading
No they don't. They might have duties not to leak classified information, but not fiduciary duty.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
That's not "fiduciary duty". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Relationships
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
https://fortune.com/2024/01/03/members-of-congress-profit-fr...
"The 2 ETFs That Track Congressional Stock Trades"
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
The insider trading on oil futures is just on much bigger scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Supplying news as fast as possibles is also the business model of Thomson Reuters.
https://www.thetradenews.com/thomson-reuters-algo-news-feed-...
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
This kills the crab.
(investors are driven out of markets when it is obvious that they are being cheated)
> The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going.
This also kills the crab. (And most of us along the way: we're already in a limited kind of world war, the sort of thing that has a history of escalating)
Who else here is old enough to remember when Martha Stewart got jailed for insider trading?
Its a pre-requisite for the job
You missed "VC backed" in front of "founders". Most founders are good people.
I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
As if the people responsible actually feel the impact of their choices to that degree.
(Not to imply that many Democrat politicians aren't also owned by AIPAC and big business.)
“Buy when there is blood in the streets, even if it is your own.” — Baron Nathan Rothschild
https://medium.com/@douglasp.schwartz/buy-when-theres-blood-...
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
Good for them, I guess.
The losses of market participants and the gains from insiders is difficult for me to take seriously as a problem in commodities market
I read all of the cases in the article
charcircuit•1h ago
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
skinfaxi•13m ago